Confidence:

I think I have struggled with self esteem issues my entire life. Despite the number of times that I have been told that I am beautiful, I have never actually felt beautiful inside. Im guessing that these issues stem from the fact that I am an only child who literally watched my parents’ marriage fall apart or maybe it is just a part of my character. Its hard to explain where this feeling of low self esteem comes from but sometimes it feels like a battle that I fight everyday, and my last few semesters of college were the very peak of it.  This summer I overcame a good amount of this issue, and what I am about to say next may seem really corny but it is true in every aspect. I was influenced by a certain TV show actually, called Glee. When I first heard about this show I deemed it to be like any other stupid cliche drama filled show for teenagers. And then one day I came across an article about it and what the show aims to do for young people dealing with low self confidence. So I watched an episode online and was hooked from there. I spent my first few summer nights (before summer school started) watching episode after episode of the show until I caught up with the season finale. The show stirred up so many emotions inside of me and literally brought tears to my eyes because of how much I related to it. The shows entire anthem is about loving yourself despite your flaws or how different you are from others. The characters in the show do an amazing  job of displaying how god created us as unique individuals with beauty inside of us all. It basically just told me to shut up and love myself no matter what. I have heard that cliche so many times and it never affected me but this show somehow illustrated it so well that I immediately started to feel good about who I was after I started watching it. My favorite character on the show is a girl named Quinn. She is supposed to play the pretty girl on the show who loses everything including her popularity after she gets pregnant. Of course she is not the character that I relate to most on the show, thats another girl. But Quinn is my favorite character on the show because I admire her a lot. She is known to be the pretty girl on the show, so a lot of people envy/stereotype/are just plain rude to her a lot. What I love about her though is her amazing self confidence. She never lets the taunting get to her. She carries her beauty extremely gracefully and is never conceited about it, just very confident in who she is as a person and not her looks alone. I admire this character because she has this quality and I absolutely do not. I hope that one day I can carry both my outer appearance and personality the same way she does, confidently and gracefully. So to sum things up, this summer I learned that there is a really big difference between looking beautiful and feeling beautiful, and the latter is so much more difficult  yet so much more important to accomplish than the first.

Physics:

I took it at a community college and I honestly dont know if the reason I did well in it was because it was really that much easier, I worked extremely hard, or if I just had that much more confidence in myself after watching Glee. Honestly it felt like a little bit of everything. It was still torturous because I had to wake up early every morning to be at class by 8 and then learn physics for 4 hours Monday through Friday. And of course physics is physics no matter where you take it so it was still a lot of studying and I would come home and do nothing but eat, study, and sleep (and watch some TV I guess.) also because I took summer sessions 1 and 2 and summer classes go ridiculously fast with a test every week. This class was kind of life changing for me because I went into it really motivated and believing that I could do well and actually trying harder and came out with an A. Also this class was ALL math, something that I have always feared, so I feel like overcame a huge fear of mine. For the first time in college I felt like I was worth something. It reminded me of high school when I used to make all these amazing grades and be at the top of my class, I had missed that feeling so much, I loved being able to do that. In addition, physics gave me this confidence to go on and achieve my goals. I know its just one subject taken at a community college but to me it was like hey if you work hard AND work with confidence like you did in this class why not apply that attitude to your remaining incredibly difficult science classes? And I literally still have that feeling inside of me. Of course ill have to apply it next semester because im not taking any science classes this fall but I have the confidence that I can. InshaAllah (god willing). Anyway what I definitely learned from this class was that the minute you start to doubt what you can do, is when you set yourself up for failure.

Marriage?

I realized that I am secretly ready to get married and start a family. Oh if  only life were that simple. No matter how much I try to avoid the topic, no matter how much I fear marriage because of my parents’ divorce, no matter how much I tell everyone that I need to finish school and make myself financially independent before I get married, I am definitely ready for a committed relationship and also, I love kids soo0 much. Unfortunately the field that I have chosen to go into probably wont give me this option at the age that I am right now and I also want to utilize my time with my parents and enjoy my life as a child (as long as I am under their roof) as much as possible. I know that I am still a child in many ways  and that I have so much to learn when it comes to marriage but there was something about this summer that made me realize that I am ready for god to send who ever he has chosen for me into my life. It started when I had to attend the wedding of my Dads best friends son. I was kind of down because the guy who was getting married had wanted to marry me not to0 long ago. My mom had talked to me about it but I wasnt interested in him in that way and my parents both felt that he was probably not the right guy for me. I trust and respect my parents’ decisions and was also going with my heart on this one too. We were friends, I thought he was a great guy, but I wasnt ready to get married and didnt want to rush into anything. Now that I think about it though, he is a real catch for his new wife, smart, extremely good looking, loving, and god fearing. I wish them both so much happiness in their marraige. I couldnt help but feel lonely when his marraige was happening though, I felt like I had no one significant in my life. The couple looked so beautiful and happy and they were playing a slide show of the their wedding ceremony on the wall with this really pretty song playing in the background and I felt my eyes suddenly fill with tears. Tears of despair for myself not tears of happiness for the couple. Of course I couldnt let anyone see me so I started texting my friend so that the tears would fall away without anyone noticing. I dont know what it was, maybe I just got really into the moment, but I remember that I had never felt that lonley in my life while being surrounded by so many people. I was not at all regretting my decision to not marry him, I knew that was a decision that had come from god and that he was meant to be with someone else but everything at that moment seemed so perfect that I imagined myself in place of the bride for just a few minutes and drifted away from reality at that moment.

Death.

I was going to go into this long discussion about death because I experienced two deaths in my family back to back, plus the death of a neighbor, plus the death of a former teacher. But since I am finishing up this post so late (like months later) I dont wish to go to0 deep into this topic because it took me a very long time to come out of it. The time period when these deaths kept hitting me back to back to back was extremely difficult for me because I have never experienced deaths this close to me in my entire youth and young adult life. The first death was the death of a neighbor and almost immediatly was the death of my grandmother which was basically my first real death experience. Just because she was such a big part of my life. My fathers mother. The women whos arms I played in as a child, the fragile old lady who wrapped her arms around me as I became an adult. When she was gone, it was hard to accept because she was still so alive to me. Everything hit me so hard, that death was all I could think about. Not so much the other deaths as much as my own. I went through a lot of different feelings this summer but this was definitley the the final slap in the face. The summer changed me a lot, it made me a little bit stronger in its own unique ways.

The black swan and the swan princess were the two main characters in the movie  that each carried their own heavy symbolism. There are many ways that these characters can be viewed and this is just my interpretation of them and how it applies to my life.

The Swan Princess: This role was played by Natalie Portman as an innocent, sheltered girl who was naive and waited for things to come to her instead of chasing after them. She had hope that one day her prince would see her for her beauty and elegance and fall for her just as she imagined.

The Black Swan: Played by Mila Kunis who depicted a bold, cunning, and seductive girl who knew exactly how to get what she wanted. Her character was the corrupted version of the swan princess and it represented darkness and defense. She chased after the prince in hopes that he would fall into her seductive lure, but she wasnt looking for love,  just another way to get the things she wanted from life.

If you saw the movie, you realize at the end that Natalie Portman obliviously turns herself into the black swan. She beats herself up so much over not being as fast and cunning as the black swan that she tries to compete with her to such an extent that she ends up destroying herself in the process .

In the beginning of the movie Natalie Portman starts off as an innocent swan princess, but as the plot progresses, what she doesnt realize is that she has two roads that she can take. There is the road that allows her to remain the swan princess or the road that transfroms her into the black swan.

She unknowingly takes the road of the black swan and slowly takes the shape of it as she treads down its path.

———–

I feel like I can relate to both characters in my own ways, but I originally see myself as the swan princess version of Natalie Portman. Yet I still cannot deny the feeling that I have potential to be the black swan as well.

Like I mentioned above, she chose between two different paths and she unfortunately took the darker one.

I feel like I am in a similar place at this point in my life. I am standing before a fork in the road, one path leads to success and happiness and the other leads to darkness and disappointment.

You would think that the choice is simple, but sometimes its hard to fight the feeling that I am destined for the darker path in life.

Most of the characteristics I saw in the swan princess are characteristics that I have always felt in myself, hope, compassion, love. But I am at a critical point in my life where I feel like I am drastically changing and maybe taking on the characteristics of the black swan, loneliness, defense, and no real purpose in life.

But the black swan is so much more than a corrupted girl, shes so much deeper than that. This is a girl who has truly been hurt. Someone who has been heart broken and feels abused at times. She is someone whose circumstances have taught her to trust no one and only depend on herself.  I feel like the black swan was at some point also a swan princess, but she took the darker path and pretty much  just gave up on everything around her instead of overcoming the obstacles that the brighter path laid upon.

And so we are back to square one, which path am I destined to take? Because I seriously have potential to take either one.

There are days where things work out for me or I just feel extremely blessed and I feel like I am destined for the brighter path in life and there are days where I feel like there is not a single soul on this earth that I can trust and I am destined for the path that leads me to become a black swan.

What I find really ironic is that there are two people in my life that I can fit into both of these categories. I have two cousins, and both of the are two of the most beautiful women that I have ever met in my entire life. I pale in comparison to their beauty. They are both older than me and therefore both have made decisions on how they want to live their life.

One of them reminds me of the swan princess. She has this incredibly innocent beauty, such a pretty face, and charming smile. She found her “prince” in college and he is just an incredible husband who keeps her beyond happy. Her family and in-laws adore her. My family has often told me I look and act like her, inside I have always hoped that we not only share our looks but  the same destiny as well.

My other cousin is drop dead gorgeous, Her beauty is the kind where its really hard not to stop and stare. Her green eyes are a sea of beauty that anyone can get lost in. However she lives in an apartment all alone in the city far away from both of her parents. She comes from a broken family and is not on speaking terms with her dad. I feel like the divorce of her parents has led her to not trust anyone to such an extent that she might have lost hope in finding the right man. She is not fond of family because she feels that they have hurt her and considers her “friends” (who i dont think are a good influence on her) her family. If you compare her childhood pictures to mine, you wouldnt be able to tell the difference between us. Although I grew, and at some point stopped looking like her, sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and see a slight hint of her in me.

I think its pretty evident how I am comparing these two to the swan and black swan, and just as I am torn between the two swans, I get confused as to who I am more like between these two cousins of mine.

I feel that I am originally like the innocent one in terms of personality and values, but because I too come from broken family and have my moments where I dont trust anyone (not even family at times) I feel like I have potential to end up like my cousin who lives meaninglessly by herself without a real purpose in life.

Anyway those were some thoughts I had been keeping bottled up for a long time. I pray that I dont become any sort of “black swan” no matter how much I feel it inside of me.

I am thankful that I have a such beautiful religion that keeps me going, and I know that god has plan for me. Even though I have no idea what it is right now.

Shopping in Pakistan was so colorful, I miss it a little.

The boy I fell for in college could not have been anymore closer to me in ethnicity but is now engaged to someone outside his own race.

My life is shit ironic.

Even though in reality they really weren’t. The only difference then was that I was sheltered by a this dream world, where everything was mapped out for me and my biggest issue was being able to tell the boy I had fallen for how I felt about him.

But today, even that feels like an easy feat.

The semester ended a few weeks ago, and once again not like I wish it would have. But I am not going to complain.

I am thankful for what ever god has destined to be my life and I am ok with it  just knowing that all this has been pre planned by him. The concept of destiny gets me through my worst days.

My break has been going well, no school, no job but I have been taking a lot of home ec courses taught by no other than my mom.

Honestly I was a little afraid of us spending all this time together but I have been having more fun and have been more at peace than anything with her teaching me how to run a household.

Been spending a lot of time with the extended family as well since my uncle came to visit from London. It always bring our family together so much more than usual and lately I have had so much fun spoiling his adorbale five year old.

I have been really happy lately, but at the same time walking around with this weight in my heart.

This winter break I have had time to do a lot of reflecting and this year came to a close I had a sudden realization that I was not the person I had planned on becoming as I graduated from high school.

And honestly, I am so sick of constantly striving to be that person.

Another weird experience was the day before thanksgiving break. I left work and went into this fit of tears due to a particular circumstance. I probably cried for an hour and instead of going to the library to meet up my girls to go home, (I was really loathing the library and associating bad memories with it at this point) I went to my old psychology auditorium. I wanted to go there because I hadnt been there since I was a freshman. I had taken my first few breaths of college air in that auditorium. I had made my first A in that class. I just had a lot of good memories associated with that class. I went inside the auditorium. It was empty and dead silent. I took a seat in a chair towards the back and just thought back to the first class of my first day in college. How many expectations and desires I had back then. The abyss of empty chairs was some how comforting and for a while I could hear my psych prof talking in front of the class again.

Sometimes my friends have no idea where I am on campus. I think thats kind of cool.

I quit my job and got one on campus. And I like it. Yes I actually like it.

This may sound weird but it actually surprises me when good things happen, and to some extent it actually scares me. I can honestly say that this job is the ONE thing on that campus that I do not hate.

Im grateful that I have something.

The other day I dropped the f bomb on facebook and perhaps half the world fell out of their chairs.

It was wrong, I know, I am ashamed, and I deleted it.

Even though it doesnt change the fact that people have already judged me but I dont really care.

I curse, even though it is wrong. It was part of the environment that I went to school in as a child and I can honestly say that I do it (occasionally) only out of therapeutic purposes.

But the world doesn’t know that and  there is no point of me exposing my sins so lets just keep that here.

Lately there has been so much of this wishing I was someone else.

Everywhere I go I observe people around me  and I just want to be them for a while. Im so ungrateful but I cant fight the feeling.

TV, facebook, school, music, work, library, friends (especially friends), random people I see on campus, friends of parents/their kids, cousins (especially the married ones), and mostly the freshmen that I mentor.

They have their entire  undergrad experience ahead of them. Opportunities are waiting anxiously to be seized by them, friendships are waiting to be made, and the right person just might be waiting for them to come along.

Opportunities that I failed to seize.

Two things that I am constantly noticing about women that interact with everyday is the color of their lipstick and their wedding ring.

Im not sure why.

I have always identified with her because we both went through the same type of struggle growing up. As we grew, our challenges grew so big that it led us to separates paths in life. I went one way with my problems and she went the other way with hers.

On the first day of college we were reunited again. It was an amazing moment. I walked into my art history class,  scuttling to find a seat. As I was about to sit down, I felt a strong gaze fixed upon me. As I slowly turned my head to meet this gaze I found myself staring back into the eyes of the girl I had started my difficult journey with.

Somewhere along the way we had parted but fate brought us back together once again. But this time we werent innocent helpless little girls. This time we had fought hard through our battles and came out as strong successful women.

For a minute we both just stared without words. It was after we finally found the words to express our feelings at that moment did our reconnection with each other began.

And here we are, I can easily say she is still one of the most amazing friends that I have, though I dont have many friends at all.

Shes also one of the few people in my life who shares all of my secrets and understands what I have been through in the past. She is one of those people who I can talk to about absolutely anything at all and I am lucky to have her in my life Alhumdulillah.

But one thing that I have noticed is that although our lives are parallel, there is a stark different between us. One of my biggest issues is that I let me past haunt me.

I keep feelings bottled up inside and let them take over every once in a while. I have let my difficult circumstances develop a bitter exterior upon me, a layer that doesnt belong on me.

I am genuinely a fun loving, happy person. But lately I have been walking around with this bitter shell that keeps me from enjoying life. And I feel like people have started to notice that and im soon going to be classified as those hopeless misanthropics in society.

But that sad part is that I am not like that at all. I am just stuck inside this shell and I just need something or someone to come, break it apart, and set me free. Still I am thankful for the people in life who truly see me for who I am beneath this bitter exterior.

The reason I admire this friend of mine is because she is the exact opposite of me. She genuinely enjoys life to the fullest. She really has her life together.

She knows exactly what she wants to do with it, she has a good job, shes involved on campus, but most importantly she takes out time for herself. She socializes, she makes friends, has fun, but at the same time keeps a balance between everything. I wish I was more like her.

I noticed she doesnt let her thoughts consume her, she doesnt let  show what she has been through.

She only shows how happy she is today. How strong she is today. And how (MashaAllah may Allah continue to bless her) put together her life is today.

In my opinion she doesnt let anything or anyone tell her she isnt good enough and quite frankly she is one of the most beautiful people I have ever met. Inside and out.

Allah grant me the ability to make myself as stong as her.

Something else has been on my mind though, its been haunting me for a while. This feeling is so real but it kills me to not be able to reach out and grasp it.

He has been on mind. I dont know, I dont  know who “He” is anymore. I thought I did but I was obviously wrong about that.

Lately ive been having these dreams. God, they feel so real. I dream that he is with me, close to me, taking care of me, protecting me…holding my hand.

Why does it feel so real?

You would think that holding someones hand is just a normal physical feeling, but I just realized that its not.

Its so much more than that. Its a mentally comforting feeling. Its so beautiful. It feels like someone is there to wash away your tears. That person becomes all that you can see in those few minutes.

All the world becomes a mere shadow and it just feels like everything is going to be okay and that no one can touch you.

How can there be so much comfort in that one feeling? Theyre just hands.

It blows my mind that I realized all of this just from a series of dreams ive been having. Incredible.

This is puzzling me to such an extent that I am starting to wonder if the real moment is drawing nearer to me.

Its as if these dreams have given me a glimpse of the soul that is going to complete me in the near future.

Its hard to explain but I can feel his essence, what he will be like or what his soul be like  at least. Its confusing.

All I know is that wow, he has a beautiful soul and if I really am lucky enough to attain it someday then Allah has truly answered my prayers in this life.

And now this anxiety is really starting to get to me. I wish reality would come sooner.

——–

Something else that hit me today was that fact that I am going to be traveling alone soon.

Airports make me disgustingly sick. In an emotional way. All the memories I have of airports are of painful goodbyes and feelings of stark loneliness.

The flights that I have gone through during the last several years of my life have been full of nothing but tears and a torn up heart.

I try to work on it every time I have to travel by myself which thankfully isnt too much anymore but every time that feeling of loneliness takes over.

Here I am traveling between two people I love yet in the middle I am alone as I can possibly be.

Theres nothing I can do about it because there is no way to fix the circumstances that I am in and I accept that.

Maybe there is only one way to  heal my despair during this time.

Him. Hes missing from my life right now but he is the key to defeating this feeling of loneliness. He doesnt even know that his presence would make such a significant difference in this dilemma that I face every time I travel alone.

I dont know how many more trips I will have to make without him before he arrives but I all I know is that his presence will show me that I am not alone, no matter where I go, he will be by my side, protecting, caring. loving.

I have a really strong connection to this movie/song/book. When I saw it, I weeped out of the emotion that I so strongly related to. The character brought the person deep down inside of me to life, the person I show to no one. She allowed me to see how I really feel in relation to the world around me including those I love. And she allowed me to see what kind of guy would fit into this complex character of mine and be the one person I/she could give in to. His character was perfect for her, and he was exactly the kind of person she needed to walk into her life at that moment.

Sometimes I get goosebumps just because this song feels so real to me.