My Soft Rebellion

Episode Transcript:

If I could go back and tell my 23-year-old self anything right before she moved out, I would tell her this:

It is going to get significantly harder before it gets better.

When I was 23 and finally got to move out of my very abusive childhood home, I thought, Sweet. My life is about to upgrade.

I thought I was going to level up. I thought I was finally going to become the poet, the creator, the author I always wanted to be.

For so long, I believed the thing inhibiting me from achieving my dreams was living at home with parents who did not understand me. I had to live a double life. I had to pretend to be Muslim. I had to do all these things I did not want to do.

It was mentally exhausting. It took up so much of my brain space.

Half of my mind was spent being cautious, hypervigilant, anxious, and trying to hide my entire identity from my parents. The other half was spent being delusional in the way you have to be when you are living in a situation you desperately need to get out of.

You have to be a little batshit delusional. Your manifestation game has to be intense.

And I understand that manifestation is a whole other tangent, but safety is required to manifest anything. So if you are in an unsafe situation, visualizing your best future can feel insane. But I did it anyway. I did a lot of meditations. I held on to the belief that somehow, some way, I was going to get out.

Maybe I will make a separate video on manifesting while living at home with crazy people, but my point is: you cannot give up.

Please do not lose hope. You will get out of there. Some way, somehow, you are going to get out of there.

That was what my brain was split into: getting out, being delusional, and trying to hide my life from my parents.

I did not have a lot of time to think about all the other things I wanted. The places I wanted to travel. The people I wanted in my life. The social situations I wanted to be in. I was just excited. I thought, Great. Now that I will not have this load of escaping and hiding from my parents, I can finally live my best life.

And lo and behold, I moved out and ended up completely fucked up.

Because the thing is, just because I moved out did not mean I changed. It did not mean everything suddenly changed.

My routines did not change. I still did not have a social circle. There was still no one in my life who was really checking in on me or caring for me. I was a one-man move-out team, moving into a place where I was completely isolated.

At that point, all of my social interaction and human connection was coming from work. And work itself was a very shitty, anxiety-inducing thing.

I moved out thinking, Finally, safety, and then I ended up in a very discriminatory, racist work environment. It felt like God just did not want to give me a break.

That impeded how much I could heal and feel better, because I had just left a place where I felt like I was on fire all the time, only to be put back into a place where I was on fire from 9 to 5.

What was I supposed to do in that situation?

But even outside of work, I ended up decaying.

I ended up in bed most of the time, feeling like I had the flu. I would go to work, come home, and smoke so much pot because I did not know what was happening to my body. I did not know what this lethargy was. I did not know what these waves of extreme anxiety were.

It was really sad because I distinctly remember when I first moved out, I spent so many days with all of my curtains closed, lying in bed, nervous.

I did not even know what I was doing.

But when I look back on it now, it feels like my body was getting rid of all the old mechanisms I had developed to survive. Closing my blinds, closing my bedroom door, curling up on my bed, consoling myself, bracing for something bad to happen — that had been my life.

I would wake up on a weekend and immediately feel this impending doom. The next thing I knew, I was isolating in my place. I had not eaten. I had not gone outside. I did not want to be around people. I was scared of everyone and everything.

And I was not like that before I moved out.

It was like my body did not know I was safe. Safety was so foreign to me that my nervous system kept giving me threats to conquer and threats to work through because that was what I was used to.

I was living in this weird matrix I had built for myself, where I was giving myself pain, anxiety, and suffering.

And it did not help that I worked in an environment that was so inflammatory. Some of my fear was honestly very valid. It was valid that I was scared and paranoid.

But I kept wondering, What do I do with all of this pain inside of me? Where does it go? Where do I put it?

I really wished I could just get rid of it.

It felt like there was sewage inside of me. It felt like I was literally carrying my past around with me, and it was controlling me.

It took me a lot of time.

As much as I believed in meditating, dancing, eating healthy, and doing all the right things, it still took time. It took me a lot of time to finally feel safe. It took me a lot of time to finally drop my shoulders.

And I was really upset about that.

I grieved it for a long time because I could not believe my trauma and childhood had stolen even more of my life.

I thought, What the fuck? It already took 23 years of my life, and now I am sitting here, still messed up from it?

I thought I was finally free. I thought I was going to become this amazing person. But I was still looking in the mirror and seeing a broken 15-year-old girl.

I was a grown woman, but I did not feel like one.

It was frustrating.

It has been three years now since I moved out, and I am a lot happier and healthier. I will say, getting into a secure and safe relationship has done wonders for me too. That has been really nice.

But I think we put so many expectations on ourselves. We are so hard on ourselves.

Even when I lived at home, I was putting insane expectations on myself to be a certain type of person and achieve a certain amount of things, when in reality, I just needed to chill. I needed to take care of myself. I needed to find the bare minimum income to move out.

That was the priority.

It was not becoming famous on social media. I am sure social media can provide economic opportunities, but you can move out without doing that.

My point is, if you are leaving a horrendous situation — a home, a relationship, a person, a job — there is going to be a period where your body needs to sweat out the trauma, the misery, and the fuckery you consumed and suppressed in order to survive.

You are going to have a recalibration phase.

And the recalibration phase fucking sucks.

Have you watched Avatar: The Last Airbender? It is like when Zuko decides to become a good person, and then he gets super sick and thinks he is dying. That is what it feels like.

The version of you that was surviving, the version of you that was in so much pain, is leaving you. That old identity is not a part of your reality anymore.

You are in a new reality now. A reality where you are safe.

That old identity was keeping you safe, but dare I say, it was also keeping you very small, very isolated, and very vulnerable.

That version of you has to go.

It has to go because in your new safe reality, there is safety. There is security. There is beauty.

You do not need to be hypervigilant anymore. You do not need to assume everyone is out to get you. You do not need to think the world is ending every two seconds, because the world is not ending.

That is not your reality anymore.

You are now in a reality that is welcoming you with open arms.

But learning how to act as if the world is safe, when you have had a lifetime of trauma, can feel basically impossible.

Of course the transition process is messy. Of course it is ugly. Of course you feel sick.

You wonder, Why is my body so heavy?

Your body is heavy because you are finally becoming aware of everything that was stored inside of you. And once you are aware of what has been stored inside of you, you can start to let it go.

That letting go process is intense. It is transformative. And it is one of the most beautiful recalibrations that will ever occur.

For me, it has been three years since I moved out, and I am still recalibrating.

My body is still learning safety. I am still learning how to be the woman I was always meant to be. I am learning that every day.

Every day, I wake up and my shoulders are still tense because some part of me still feels like someone is going to come attack me. Some part of me still feels unsafe.

That is why my body is not operating in the way it should be.

So what can I do?

I can relax myself.

My favorite motto has become: How relaxed can I live life?

Because the more I relax myself, and the more I sink into my current, present, safe moment, the more I teach my body that I do not have anything to worry about.

At the end of the day, I am going to be okay.

There used to be a time when I did not feel that way, but now I do.

That is my future.

The rest of my life is being okay. And I have to learn how to act that way too.

I love all of you very much. And I am sorry.

I am so sorry if you are living at home with people who cannot see you, cannot understand you, are hurting you, yelling at you, physically hurting you, emotionally hurting you, or God forbid, hurting you in other ways too.

You do not deserve it.

As much as I have worked hard in my life, God has also provided me with a lot of blessings. I would not say my life is only the result of my hard work. A large portion of it has been luck and God’s grace.

And I know sometimes it feels like not everyone has the same cards.

To that, I do not really know what to say other than I really, really hope you are able to get out of the situation you are in.

And when you do, I hope you are very soft with yourself.

Because you just survived something insane.

And now your body needs more care than ever before.

However long it takes, it takes.

That is okay.

There is no rush.

We are just here to experience life anyway.