They
say knowledge is power and ignorance is the enemy but what you do not learn earlier
is how knowledge will change your whole existence. No one can predict your
transformation and no one will be able to tell you how you can survive and live
with all the knowledge you acquired and changed your life, values and sometimes even
your whole existence. Certainly no one, not even yourself can tell how to
deal with the aftermath of destroying your old everything and build new you!
I
am not sure anymore if this is an Arab Muslim problem or just human being
problem, but there is a struggle anyway. When you always strive for knowledge and enlightenment,
when you are open to a new perspective of life, and eventually you are not afraid
to absorb new ideas and values or even be flexible and tolerant enough to
live in continuous discovery. There comes the point when all of this makes you
feel like an outsider, no matter where you go no one can understand you fully.
Some people will understand some parts and disagree with other parts, some
people will not understand you at all but will embrace your weirdness anyway,
and others who usually are the closest group to you (family, friends and loved ones)
who knew you more or less your whole life and were the foundation for your character,
attitude and thinking and those will usually reject changes in you because it
is simply an alien to them.
Rejection
is not that bad especially when you already know your ground, and when you
reach a certain level of confidence toward your beliefs, rejection helps to shake doubts and examining the certainty of our new value system and make us
critically thinking if it is worth the struggle. Sometimes we win sometimes we
lose and through that we know what we did wrong and fix it, or learn from it.
But what is ugly about rejection when it is conclusive and total, when you
lose hope of changing the minds of the most important people in your life
because basically accepting your new you challenge their unquestioned
value system, it shakes their existence, and your presence in their lives become
a continuous struggle because they will always try to convert you from your new
ideas and values to validate their own and here comes the moment of
choice.
You
reached a point where you made peace with yourself and others but at the same
time with this peace comes the desire to keep it, finally after years and years
of questioning and struggling to discover things, you reached the place where you
know you cannot know everything and you are fine with it, you still want to
acquire new knowledge but it not an obsession or a fight anymore. It is more
of a smooth transition from arrogance and vanity to humbleness and modesty that
needs to be uninterrupted nor competed and therefore you have to make the choice
of keeping some people outside of your new you, no matter how close they are to you it
is agony to make them accept you as you are or even slightly understand
where you come from because they will always think that they know better.
Critical
thinking, reading, and analysis always been part of me, and I am grateful that I
was lucky enough to learn how to question myself, doubt my values and examine
my thoughts but I honestly did not expect the burden that came with it, I am
still not sure if that was influenced by my background as an Arab of Muslim origins
or is it the case with the way I chose for my life and the methods I followed,
and I guess I will never know because I will never be able to imagine life from
a different perspective, I will always be the Arab girl who rebelled against
everything including herself and when the time comes where I have to choose, I always
will choose my revolution because it is everything and to lose it and give it
up, it means to lose myself!
