March 11, 2013 {Real-Life Confessions and Being Superwoman}
Firstly, I SINCERELY apologize to everyone who opened up their email expecting a new chapter from Confessions of a Muslim Girl. BUT PLEASE STOP AND GIVE ME A CHANCE. Just hear me out on this one. I’m not one to share my private life with you guys but I really and truly feel like you deserve an explanation for my absence and that’s what I’m giving you right now: my honesty, and I feel like that is so much more a valuable gift to offer than a few hundred words of a book. So please, just listen to me.
I don’t know how to outright say this, but I’ll say it as crudely and as simply as possible: I don’t feel like myself. Ever since I started writing COAMG, I go through this phases. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mood swing or anything. But it’s like this huge artistic and creative upheaval and sometimes it takes control of my world so much that I literally cannot FUNCTION until I release my pent-up frustration and half-ideas. It’s not a maniac depression phase, but…somewhat normal-er. And that’s why I write Battered, With Love (my second book) more often. It’s directly related to my life and some days it’s the only way I can cope.
In COAMG, I always have the characters confessing hard truths of their lives. Today, I find that it is easier to write about it than it is to actually do it. And I’m keeping in my mind that this is public so I’m being guarded about what I tell the world, but I think today I need to do my own little confession. Or confessions, I guess. I need to own up to a lot of…well, crap, that I’ve been going through. So let’s go.
People say haters make you famous. Haters don’t make you famous. They just make you feel annoyed and irritated and frustrated with the world. I’m not bragging here—please don’t think I’m bragging here—but where I live, I feel like I’m one of the few that actually has some sense and logic left in this stupid, corrupted world. And I guess that’s in part because of how I was raised.
I am essentially the eldest in my family, so that means a lot of responsibilities. A lot of my Eminem fans know that Eminem is always talking about how he feels like the world is on his shoulders and words cannot convey how I feel when I hear him confessing that. Because I feel the same way. Between academics, extracurriculars, other…engagements in my personal life, I feel like I’m always the one that needs to be okay, the one that needs to have it all together. I don’t know if any of you ever feel this way but here is my first blatant confession:
It is the scariest feeling in the world when the people you love look at you with so much trust and expectance and hope in their eyes.
And sometimes I feel like I’m failing everyone because I’m like Superwoman without the cape, or the hot high heels. It’s like being a shell of awesomeness but feeling…empty, because that awesomeness isn’t within. It’s like being an M&M without any chocolate on the inside.
And I do this, from time to time. I feel like I’m failing so I practice fake smiling in the mirror and put that game face on because if my life has taught me one thing, it’s that no one in this world will ever give you a break for what you go through. It’s either live or die. It’s the gritty truth.
But this time around, it’s different, and that reflects in what I write. This is where you come in. Sorry guys. Until now I know you’ve been reading a bunch of random, un-eloquent spewing of pent-up, frustrated thoughts.
COAMG and BWL are the two mediums in which I let my passion and determination bleed. And for all of you that have ever asked me what it takes to write a book, I tell you the same thing: you have to know who you are.
