An Unorthodox Cleansing

I can now say that I finally understand what it must feel like to be a dandelion dancing in the wind or a piece of paper floating on water or a bird experiencing the amazing sensation of flight for the first time. It is amazing how big your own home can feel when you stop peering through a screen towards the outside world. It is amazing how important your own life becomes when you stop chasing after everyone else’s. It is an exquisite feeling to go to bed and worry about nothing but my family, my future and if I will even open my eyes the next morning. It feels like I am finally operating on the same wavelength as my life, like we are both tuned to the same melody, and it is truly divine.

Two years of a constant internal battle, a battle of wills. My will to know what is happening in everyone’s life versus my need to preserve my own life, to put all my focus on myself, on improving as a Muslim, a person, a daughter, a sister. It was me caring too much about other people while my own soul needed all the attention it could get. This is the sickness I have been trying to avoid and accept for the most part of my teenage years; the sickness of the Internet. It was not being able to go a few hours without touching my phone. It was needing to be “in the loop”. It was the crumbling of my confidence and self-security by scrolling through pictures of things I didn’t have and wanted, of experiences I never had and craved. It was torture. It was toxic. It was a ticket straight to a very unhappy and insatiable place. I only saw myself spiralling down this blackhole because of Islam, a religion that teaches you to be happy with what you have because you will one day lose it. It taught me to keep my focus on my own life, for that is how I will be most content. Of course it was right. Of course. True peace is only ever gained when you focus on you, when you place blockades on all those infiltrating thoughts and words and pictures and people.

At some point in your life, you realise how unimportant other’s opinions and thoughts become, similar to background noise that is always humming until your ears know no other silence. I believe it is circumstance that moulds the raw and moist clay of our minds to adapt to this, and even then, one cannot be completely immune. For me, many inconvenient circumstances started forcing me to place my phone down, despite the twitch in my brain that urged me to grab for it. It slowly became a habit until it became a normality. I remember questioning myself, wondering: why am I restricting myself from something that is so, so, so, so normal in this day and age, to stay “connected”? Of course, my stance wavered. I was unsure of my decisions, until I met five amazing Turkish women at my local mosque. They helped stamp a big, red “APPROVED” on my new lifestyle through my religion and faith. This one-eyed Dajjal–our phones and laptops and iPads–they are all ways of misleading us down dark and slippery paths, and I refuse to fall victim to its prying claws. Not again.

I like to think of my life as a mushy, thick sludge passing through a sieve. All the impure and toxic substances (i.e. those that are too big to pass through the mesh of the sieve) are filtered out, leaving clear, pure and golden liquid in its wake. This is me filtering those very things out of my life, out of my soul. Unsurprisingly, when I glance at this theoretical sieve, I see people, I see unhealthy attachments to materialistic things, I see hurtful words, I see long-buried resentment, I see the black putty of hatred, and worst of all, I see longing for all that I do not have yet want. But that is okay. It’s all okay because that molten gold–what is left of me–is filled with my family, my religion, healthy thoughts, contentment, gratefulness, books, a more focused mind, and most importantly: no technology.

If cutting off something so toxic is seen as abnormal in this age of ours then abnormal I shall be. Proudly, for that matter. It is sad that I had to go to such measures to finally feel such reverie (I didn’t even know I could get so lost in myself), but it was worth it. Every sacrifice, every pain, every loss. I hope that maybe sometime in the near future, I will be able to find a way to extract the healthy parts of technology without letting its poisonous vipers wrap around my heart. It is my greatest hope. But for now, I am perfectly content with this bliss that I am floating in, because I have been able to do something I never believed I could do.

And I am immensely happier because of it.