From fear to joy

Post - diagnose 2

I was wondering what to change yet. I have moved here, I went through my freedom fights, my divorce and my distance from the community. I have been doing my courses, planning my website, preparing myself for being able to support myself. And in the meantime I have written a book and a half. What is there yet to change, in order for those cells not to appear again? What are they trying to remind me of?

The fear. Yes, I got ourselves settled here for the third time, arranged a house, schools, living. I did all the Hajering and Maryaming, but I did it afraid. I managed to remember from time to time the Grace and Sustenance of God, but deep in my body fear has not left. And I’m not blaming myself. That was my default way ever since I remember.

All my life I had been afraid. When I was a child, I didn’t know any other ways to live. The world around me didn’t seem to be a safe place. People were not there to give you reassurance, they were a constant source of discomfort. My parents in the 80’s were young intellectuals from the capital living in a council block in a country town. There were other young families around with similar interests, but somehow my parents always felt themselves as outsiders (well, both have all the reasons to feel that, stemming from their ancestries), and sooner or later we were left out of that community first by moving to the town centre, then to the capital. There I met my lifetime friends (ok, some decades were missing - while I was missing myself), but the fear of not belonging, of not being accepted remained.

Then when I became young, the primary fear became not being liked, staying alone. I completely lost myself trying to be beautiful, I felt (and we all did, I guess) that the more beautiful I will be, the more popular, and consequently the more happy I’ll be and that will raise my self esteem. I had no idea it works the other way round. In the meantime my parents’ divorce and my father’s leaving to the US shook the ground from under my feet. I lost the feeling of financial stability and the certainty that another person, a man, actually cares about how I stay alive, and my mother’s untreated nervous breakdown deprived me of emotional stability. Deep inside, unbeknown, I constantly feared how we stay alive and I couldn’t share this thought with anyone. In fact, it wasn’t even a thought. Just a deep fear, growing into my cells.

My conversion to Islam seemed to be the perfect answer to more than one of these fears. I lost my shielded family - I got a new one, where my rights were finally articulated and pronounced. I also felt (and was told) that by dressing modestly and not using make-up (something very much propagated, while at the time of Prophet Muhammad PBUH none of our present days articles were present, while the only one that was, kohl is actually in the “recommended” category of islamic jurisdiction) I would avoid being judged by men based on my appearance, that I felt derogatory. I thought this way I could “stop them” from looking at my body and “force” them to focus on my intellect and my soul. Little did I know that young girls in their teenage and 20s are equally beautiful with and without make-up, actually more without according to some, and men who are used to seeing women in black from head to toe can easily tell the size of your underwear even if you are wearing a butterfly abaya. Hijab does not stop lust-hungry men from looking at younger women’s bodies, it only gives them an extra special taste. And the beautiful safe family that stood by you existed only before they had to stand up for you, but that’s a later story. In the meantime, even though my trust and love for God has been unshaken and some of the barriers were indeed removed (e.g. the myth of original sin and sinfulness of the women, according to Islam Adam and Eve both ate from the forbidden fruit that by the way wasn’t from the tree of knowledge, it was simply forbidden. Adam stood up for them responsibly and didn’t blame Eve. Eventually, God forgave them, and the fact that they left Paradise was not the consequence of their misdeed for which we all need to suffer, but the original plan of God, who created humans as a governor or procurator for the earth who the angels are bound to bow down to.), in everyday communication people could never be sure whether or not their deeds are accepted or even right, and women were moreover made to be in constant fear not only from God but from their husbands, too. Part of this misinterpretation stems from wrong translations from the beginning, as books were never translated by professional translators or proofread by people with PhD in Hungarian literature or grammar. And another big part of how the religion of peace of mind and soul and unconditional love of the Creator became a tool of suppression of everyone in general and (yes, unfortunately it’s true) of women in particular, was that people living in oppression only know that. Their religious leaders have been trained for centuries to interpret the religious texts according to the needs of their societies and the specifics of that cultural background. On the other hand, - again something I have seen later and understood even much later - in the Yemeni upper middle class for example, this trend they were trying to spread in Hungary is considered extremist. None of the better families from the capital send their children to the university where our sheikhs studied. Only children of uneducated families from the remote mountain villages study there, and actually those were the families whose smart children got scholarships and came to study medicine or engineering. They simply wanted to continue their way of life and there’s nothing wrong with it. Just please don’t say that’s Islam, that people need to live in constant fear of whether God accepts their honest endeavours and women dressed up properly need to hide under the table if a man enters (actually happened, not a poetic exaggeration). And here, people suppressed by a different kind of dictatorship understood it right away, according to their own built-in patterns of oppressive authority, fear of not being accepted and servility that’s ready for anything for a few crumbs.

Fears upon fears upon fears. And then came my biggest fear, that of death. I was diagnosed with a tumour of more than 23 cm (no mistake) and I was even afraid of praying for healing. That’s where my life turned. It now depended on finding my real connection with a Loving, Forgiving, Merciful God. 

And I did. I healed and made my life to a new level. But all these fears don’t just disappear. I need to rewire my brain and every one of my cells in my body in order to be able to live without fear and experience real joy, something that has been missing from my life. And the road to joy is love.

Unconditional love, which is simply love itself. The most powerful force of nature. Nature itself. The created world. The way God looks at us. These all are the expressions of love.

When I feel love towards God, towards myself, towards my life and everyone in it, I feel powerful. Fear makes me feel small, love makes me feel big and strong. 

It’s not the love you give silently hoping to get it back, so in order to feel loved you are ready to lose yourself. No. That doesn’t contain love for yourself nor for God, because loving God means trusting Him, and if you trust Him, you don’t accept disrespect. You know your worth. 

I’m not thinking about possibilities or risks or percentages. Everything is possible with this condition. But I believe it is my loving reminder. Like a fire alarm that has this annoying sound but it’s there to save your life, not to let the unperceivable smoke, especially by you post covid nose, slowly but surely kill you. My alarm system, built in by my Loving Creator, is activated when I’m operating from fear and not from love, making it impossible for me to live that way. I consider myself very lucky for this, it must be hard to turn your life around without that strong motivation, even though living in fear is deadly for everyone, if for your body it might not be immediately, but for your soul it definitely is very damaging. We simply were not created for that.

We are created to live from love. To perceive God’s love and to radiate it all around us. It has also been mistranslated and misinterpreted, putting the focus on servitude which is just one block from suppression. We need to use our heart and soul to understand it correctly. We need to be in the right place for it. Going through all that makes you understand where even a grain of fear leads you. (And how many times they say “fear God”, so the problem with translation is not only specific to Hungary.) 

No. Love is the opposite of fear. It’s freeing one’s soul from being imprisoned by fear. It’s letting ourselves run free and experience joy. And the way you behave with others, enabling them to do the same. And the trust that they will not use their freedom to transgress. And the inner strength we have, the love for ourselves that helps us enforce boundaries in case someone does. And the trust in God that our life is not falling apart by losing someone. And the way we raise our kids, acknowledging their feelings, reassuring them and helping them towards independence, respecting their own paces. And the way we honour our ancestors, too, pronouncing their pain finally. 

Love is the guiding light that keeps us avoiding the traps of fear. And this is the road where we can experience joy. Pure joy. That is what I call life.