Trivialities

A big part of my struggles in life has been to escape the concern with trivialities.

I pulled together a bunch of my pictures to send to my family. I realized with dismay that most of my pictures show me dressed in sleeveless shirts, tank tops, bikinis, cropped pants, and other “immodest” attire. I sent some pictures anyway and asked my sister to censor me as necessary when showing the pictures to my parents.

And I realized yet again how heartsick I am at all this brouhaha over bare arms. Jesus fucking Christ. The Muslim world in general and my family more immediately apparently don’t have any problems bigger than the amount of skin I routinely bare without ANY consequences to my health, safety, happiness or career.

Of course my family has bigger problems but all of them take a backseat to the the immorality because of which violence against women is necessary.

It’s disheartening.

The sad fact is that trivialities control the lives of people who don’t know how to put things in common-sense perspective. What matters is not what seems to matter; what matters is what a society sick with religion has drummed into you. There are occasional outbreaks of rationality where my parents might realize that our temporal well-being and happiness is what really counts, but then the overconcern with a strangely skewed morality takes over. It gets transmitted as muddled messages. Parents care about a daughter’s education and career but just can’t bring themselves to give it the same urgent importance as the education and career of a son.

My parents can sometimes actually sound progressive. They didn’t want to “marry me off.” They appreciated my intelligence and wanted me to get higher education. But when I graduated high school, there were no plans in place for me. The situation wasn’t critical as it was for my brother. The whole household was afire with the need to send my brother to college — without that, nothing in his future could be assured of going well. Me? Not so much. I was smarter and more ambitious but it hardly mattered.

Hypocritical reassurances would be given me when I spoke vaguely of going to this university or that, in this country or that. Sure, we’ll send you. When I did more concrete research and laid down what I would need from my parents to actually continue my education, the response was… resistance. All the old prejudices against letting a mere woman roam free in the world without oversight and restraints. Of course I couldn’t go to Dubai, was I crazy? And who would look after me, pray? Of course I couldn’t go to America, did I know how expensive that was going to be? And who would watch over me, anyway?

No matter that my brother had gone to both Dubai and the United States before me. Ah, but he was a man! Able to look after himself in the big bad world, you see.

What was puzzling at the time (and enraging) was that my parents could pretend with the best of them that such woman-limiting thoughts were not in their heads. They never let on that they would flat out refuse to let me continue my education unless I proposed something which appeased their prejudices. They also didn’t make any effort to actually promote the cause of my education. It was all me, I was on my own.

I ended up proposing Pakistan, which met with resistance as well. But still, they were reassured that there would be a phalanx of relatives watching my every move and scandal-mongering. Of course, the stupid twits would’ve been better off if the whole Pakistani universe I moved in hadn’t known everything I did that didn’t quite fall under the “Islamic and Proper” banner, but they made the mistake of assuming I was a normal Muslim girl who would behave however her elders and betters wanted her to behave. They thought I would have the normal amount of shame and restraint that they believed must have been bred into me from a guilt-ridden childhood.

Too bad for them that they were wrong.

Pakistan was simply not an option for my brother. It wasn’t good enough for education purposes. For me of course, Pakistan was plenty good enough.

So they paid through the nose for my brother’s American education for seven long years.

My sister has graduated high school but she’s reliving what I went through after my graduation. No plans in place for her, no higher education in sight.

My brother, even after his expensive education, wasn’t able to get an appropriate job and is working as a security guard and his income still needs to be supplemented by my dad.

Yeah, you read that right — my 28 year old brother who got an American education at great expense, is living in America — the land of opportunity — and unable to entirely support himself. He’s mooching off my dad, who has single-handedly slaved all his life to scrape together a living for his family.

My sister is not getting an education because she has a vagina and oh my god, whatever are we going to do about that!

Because obviously, it’s more important to keep her arms covered and her pussy protected from unauthorized cocks than to actually get her equipped to be independent and successful in her life.

Muslims will never progress until they stop thinking their chief way of protecting their traditions and culture and families is to guard every vagina in sight with a paranoid and rather ridiculous fervor, which includes the necessity for violence.

Meanwhile, I’M the big disappointment, the kid who destroyed everything.

All I did was say, fuck this shit — I’m going to live my life. It’s all I could’ve done. For this, for keeping my nose clean, being independent and successful (I’m directly competitive with kids my age who grew up in America and got expensive American educations — I’m even ahead a few years, both in income and employment), I’m judged (negatively) by my family, including my brother and my sister.

I could’ve achieved this differently, they say. I could’ve asked nicely instead of snatching what I wanted and “destroying the family.”

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!!

It’s hard to believe sometimes that my brother and sister share the same parents as I do. They honestly believe I could’ve asked nicely to marry an infidel, move to the United States and live my life independently and MY PARENTS WOULD HAVE CHEERFULLY AGREED!

Christ.

I know why it is that they have such a different perception. I knew my parents wouldn’t support me because I’d tried the ‘nice’ tack and it had failed. I also knew the limits of my parents’ tolerance because I was the only kid who really tested them by “acting out.” I refused to wear hijab and watched my dad get closer than he’s ever been to hitting me. I insisted on going out on walks alone and expressed my desire to socialize with friends — only to be forbidden on pain of endless haranguing from my mother.

The fights I had with my mother! The arguments I had with my dad! Neither of my siblings were that troublesome — nowhere close. Both mostly did as they were told, while kidding themselves that that’s what they really wanted.

Maybe that IS what they really wanted.

But the fact remains that I knew what my parents were willing to give me and the list did not include my freedom. Period. There really wasn’t much else I could do but simply snatch my freedom and leave, and consequences be damned.

As I said to my sister yesterday when she accused me of destroying the family, it was either destroy the family or let them destroy me. And unfortunately, I’m just not cut out to be a slave to trivialities.