I was genuinely confused during my Amal Orientations.
Aside from the fact that I had never thought there could be such immensely polite people out there, I was mind-boggled and to be honest, a little too queasy (a̶n̶d̶ ̶b̶o̶r̶d̶e̶r̶l̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶j̶e̶a̶l̶o̶u̶s̶) about how much they smiled. I was three months into the ‘roaring twenties’ then and had pretty much accepted ‘perpetual bitterness’ to be my philosophy in life. And yet, there were these people who seemed to get that ‘the struggle was in fact real’ but were also approaching it with a sense of sincerity I could not fathom.
Yet, I knew one thing as I forced a smile to catch up with their energy, I had to learn their ways!
You can imagine my excitement when they all put their totkas on a platter and presented them to me for some reflection. So, here we go:
Self-Talk is essentially how you program your mind:
Haniya is a niece of mine, and like every annoying desi khala missing out on seeing their bachas grow because of the pandemora, I take great pleasure from bringing her into every conversation I have with my friends. And this was yet another one of those.
“Haani is the cutest person ever. Her mum used to tell her ‘good job’ or ‘well-done’ for any nice thing she’d do. And now, she keeps saying ‘good job’ to herself when she does something right’’.
My friend, who is a young sophomore, after giggling about it for a bit, stopped me in my tracks with this tea.
“We were never told ‘good job’ so we never say it to ourselves’’.
That got dark real quick, didn’t it?
As a former teenager not so long ago, I can vouch for the disastrous impact negative self-talk can have on you. Being a resident anxious person, I didn’t even know we could add to how our brains processed things until I was seventeen or something. Before that and even for some time after it, I was that angry penguin meme, sticking glittery affirmations, onto a page heaped with negative self-beliefs.
One thing that helped me create capacity for reaffirming self-talk was building a habit of meditation in my late teens for mindfulness; to essentially stay more rooted in the world around me, and to not get lost in the one inside me. And then, build a relationship with myself just like any other healthy one out there: inherently basing it in loads of compassion for the other party. Glad to know, I am doing this one right.
But You Gotta Come Out of Your Comfort Zone:
I can be painfully oblivious to the obvious at times. For instance, when a dear friend told me about Amal Academy I thought that the Amal in the name was the Arabic one. Amal in Arabic, in case you don’t know, refers to ‘hope’. Which wasn’t a threat to my general passivity in the slightest, so I was a lot more enthusiastic when I had applied. It wasn’t until the first session when our facilitator told us that it was in fact referring to our homeboy Iqbal’s Amal that all my alarm bells started ringing.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore Allama Iqbal. Especially being a Gen Z, his brutal jabs at the capitalistic structures that surround us are ever so close to my heart. It’s the ‘Amal’ point, that has us on different wavelengths. And to be honest, it probably isn’t even about him. It’s about me.
I don’t know how to say it more strongly, but I am NOT a fan of doing things. In fact, I wouldn’t do anything if I could help it. People say they have comfort zones, I have a ‘comfort’ planet. With loads of sleeping dens, and fluffy pillows!
So, naturally, I had a minute-long existential crisis when I found out they were gonna make me do things at Amal. In the first few sessions, I was the literal embodiment of this meme:
Yet, if I put my salt shaker down for a bit, I honestly think it’s beginning to grow on me. Trying things and figuring out whether I like doing them has massively added to my understanding of myself. I have found so many things I like to do, that I wouldn’t even have tried some time back, hadn’t it been for Amal. And that’s saying something because I have only been ‘living on the edge’ for a month now. Yet, experiencing this has opened my eyes to all the things that we miss out on by staying in our tiny igloos for only a few minutes of extra warmth. And how it’s so not a fair bargain.
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” — Anais Nin
Perhaps Form Some New Habits?
It won’t come as a shock to you now but we are a family of heavy sleepers. A cousin of mine legitimately won an award of sorts for ‘sleeping in a morgue’ during her med school training. So, I still don’t know what my last two brain cells were on that day when I decided that I wanted to wake up at 9 on all my weekends for the next 3 months.
But whatever it was, it is paying well. Knowing that my sleep is gonna get affected; I now spend a lot less time reveling in my usual existential crises at night. Seeing me not simply rot on a couch anymore on weekends; my Mum hasn’t tried to lure me into doing CSS in a while. And knowing desi households, that’s gotta be a win, y’all.
And You Can Also Fake It Til You Make It!
Apparently, if we keep writing blogs acting like we have a will to live, we will someday have a genuine will to live. I am looking at this with a lot of hopes, you guys. 👁️👄👁️
