On Self Acceptance as a Path to Societal Healing
Published on Medium, Aug 21, 2023
In being me I have seen how much self assuredness triggers others. In how tenderness feels impossible for so many to receive because of its sheer unfamiliarity. In how often kindness gets misperceived for ulterior motive. It’s deep in the suspicious judgement around how “uncool” goodness, wholesomeness, and kindness can be greeted with. How uncomfortable love from [non]significant others makes most.
My mom recently told me that when I was little and people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say “kind.” Not “happy,” not “successful,” not “an astronaut,” just “kind.” So if astrology isn’t real why is that the most Libra Rising/Libra Venus answer on the planet? And if Islam is as malicious as Western media portrays it to be, then why is my devotion to compassion the most Muslim thing about me?
I’ve always cared about harmony. I’ve always cared about making space for people who are hurt because I know how isolating pain feels and how difficult it is to ask for support. I’ve worked hard to create judgement free spaces to meet people where they are in one-on-one conversations, through the art I create, through the feedback I give, and as a leader at work.
I use my own past experiences and trauma as examples that I hope not only I can learn from, but others can learn from too. Just as I hope people will one day see themselves in the characters I create, I hope they see themselves in every interaction they have with me. I hope they feel held. Because societal healing comes from a shared sense of vulnerability, to which I will always willingly be the strike of a match that lights that much needed flame.
I care a lot about the world I want to build today, right now, rather than being fixated on where I want to be down the line. Because the future is and always will be completely uncertain, relentlessly elusive, and absolutely unreachable. It’s a moving target in the way today is not.
The Scorpio in me both struggles deeply with polarities, but also cherishes them. I cherish nostalgia and fantasies of the future just as much as I cherish presence. I cherish the generosity of depth people share with me even in first time meetings. I cherish the fact that each and every person is deeply flawed but still unconditionally worthy of love and grace.
Softness, tenderness, and femininity are often equated with weakness, and that’s more telling of a pained society than anything else. I was sitting in my masculinity for a long time, building walls of concrete to protect myself from being hurt, misperceived, and taken advantage of.
It’s interesting to see how differently the world reflects back at me now that I’m living in an energy that’s more balanced. More capable of receiving love in the same way that I so freely gave it for so long. More comfortable with people who don’t have the capacity to see me for who I am at my core. More dedicated to meeting people with the tenderness I so deeply craved as a kid who felt like she was from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.
I often joke to my friends that I’ve never felt like I’m even from this planet, dedicated to understanding, but perpetually misunderstood. Filled to the brim with contradictions. A bridge between east and west, spiritual and analytical, deep and lighthearted, melancholic and bubbly, scientific and religious, direct and compassionate, a dreamer with her feet planted firmly on the ground.
I’m from a family where I was the youngest to move and “assimilate” to this country, in a community where White women were my closest friends for a long time misperceiving and tokenizing me unknowingly, in a culture that constantly told me to take up less space because of my identity and every intersectional puzzle piece that makes up who I am.
Self assuredness is the greatest act of resistance.
Knowing who I am and understanding not everyone has the capacity to receive or comprehend what I choose to offer is the thing I have to hold most sacred because at the end of the day, when you live in a traumatized society, that trauma perpetuates itself through the illness that we are all rot with. Unless… we take time and space to actively and constantly decondition our minds and unpack our past experiences through the lens of acceptance rather than judgement.
People rarely are malicious unless they have been deeply hurt. You can empathize and have compassion for a person without justifying and accepting bad behavior. Having a sense of knowing that their actions are those of a wounded child makes it easier for me to put my ego aside and sit in the understanding that I am made of a soft type of steel that most are unfamiliar with. I can hold pain like heat. I am malleable and reflective. I am deeply guided by intuitive feeling and practical emotionality, and in actuality nothing can cut through my self-understanding.
I say that just as much as a self-affirmation, a reminder to myself, as a declaration.
I know who I am. I’ve always known who I was, even though I hid her for decades because in triggering others by merely existing, I felt deeply unworthy of love. But that’s life, isn’t it? Nothing is linear. The path to clarity is full of spirals.
I’m just grateful that I finally made it here, no longer hiding behind the façade of giving from a place of need, of unspoken obligation, but rather comfortably seated in a place of want, of genuine generosity guided by discernment. It feels lighter and safer. My body is finally at peace. All I hope for is that I can keep helping others know and accept themselves with the same clarity as I know and accept me. Through questioning, through building worlds, through embodying love, through presence, and through radical acceptance of every human being’s inherent worthiness.
These last few months and years have been terribly trying for so many. We are in the process of deconstructing the world as we knew it and building something brand new. We are exposing the inefficiencies in the way we used to think and feel, in the ways we were raised with trauma that wasn’t ours. We are holding each other in solidarity against the common enemy of pain.
Transformation is messy, but rewarding. Through the evolution, it’s sometimes difficult to see the light between the leaves, but even when you can’t see it, it’s always there. Trust yourself enough to know that sifting through the branches is the only way to move through the leaves to get to the top of the tree. The view is always worth it.
You are exactly where you need to be.
You need to be here to get to where you’re going.
Thank you for reading. As I gently come out of hiding and actively overcoming my own fear of being seen, I’ll be publishing more personal essays, musings, and hot takes on here.
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