Dear Diary, I want to tell you about my relationship with Hell.

Sunday School

Assalamo alaikum wa rahmatullahe wa barakatohu.

Peace be on you and the mercy and blessings of Allah.

. . .

Every Sunday for an unknown amount of years my brother and I were sent to Qur’an and Islamic classes at the local Masjid. I hated it most of the time. But, unsurprisingly, I really loved the Imam’s wife. She was young, pretty, and progressive. (Ah, so I have always been gay.)

“So, this isn’t really something we’re supposed to tell you,” she says. I love it already.

“There is a hadith (an Islamic teaching) that says depending on your sins, Hell is more like a prison term. You serve your time for the severity of your sins, and once that time is over, you can go to Heaven.”

Now hold on a minute.

To say I was mindblown about this new fact is an understatement. I attribute this moment to be the small opening given to me that allowed me to live the life I have today. I was 10 years old.

Before this, I believed there was only black or white. If not Heaven, then Hell. But now there was grey. And we absolutely love the grey.

What the Hell?

Okay okay I know Hell is a pretty intense topic. But the concept of Hell was a massive part of my childhood and early adult life. It was used to guilt me into waking up to pray, to stay awake to pray, to respect my parents even if they didn’t respect me, to do good deeds, to make sure my entire life was about Islam and Allah — Everything.

I was scared for so much of my life.

Until I finally took a moment, looked at the bigger picture, and saw that the people who were making me afraid of god and of hell were people who said they were good people and actually kind of weren’t as good as they said they were. They were judgemental, had a god-complex, and would spin words and create reasons why they might do something under the guise of it being because it was written in a holy text or “god” told them to.

And then I looked at the people that were apparently supposed to go to hell. And they were kind. And good-hearted. And warm.

Huh?

The years I started to see a little more clearly is when my whole world began to turn upside down. What did this mean for me? I began to realize that I was stuck in a world I knew I didn’t agree with, and I could no longer fall back on what I knew.

Secret Boyfriend

There are a lot of rules about relations in Islam. A lot of strict families would expect to chaperone their daughter’s dates with a proper suitor. This would also keep them from other sinful things such as touching each other, kissing, etc.

I think there was a part of me as a kid that knew I was never going to follow these rules. Probably because I never even remotely had a crush on a Muslim boy when I was growing up. (Don’t forget about the Imam’s wife though!)

I started dating Eric when I was 19, he was 23.

This was my first real relationship. We met while working at Starbucks and then ended up going to the same college.

He was so supportive and patient with me while we worked through our difference in beliefs. He was raised Catholic, but was basically agnostic at this point, and found ties to spirituality elsewhere. And I was of course still a strict practicing Muslim in all facets. But most of all, he was very patient with the fact I had been hiding our relationship from my dad.

I knew he would never accept Eric and our relationship, no matter how good of a person he was or how good he was to me or how much we loved each other. Islamic teachings say a Muslim woman can only marry a Muslim man, so no questions asked — that is what they believed. If I were to do this, I was basically buying an express ticket to Hell. And if they stepped aside and allowed me to (as in, not even a full hearted blessing), then I’d be throwing on some extra passengers on my ticket.

Eric and I discussed this a lot, as well as we could, being so young. I asked him if he would ever convert just to be with me and appease my parents. I didn’t try to persuade him in that direction, as I knew a decision like this was his to make. He told me he would think about it, but eventually, he decided that he couldn’t do it. He wished he wanted to, but he knew he had to be true to himself. I understood, and something in me told me it wasn’t right to break up with him over this. So we stayed together and continued on, business as usual.

After I graduated it became clear I needed to tell my dad about us. My mom, who I had told in confidence a few years into our dating, had been asking me for months to tell him, as she felt like she couldn’t keep a secret this big from him for this long. What held me back was that my dad was never a very easy person to talk to, and I never trusted him to act rationally. After deliberating on how to approach him about this for a while, I eventually decided on writing him a letter (clearly my favorite outlet), as it would be the best way for me to get out all of my thoughts without being interrupted or yelled at. And it was the best chance my sentiment would come across the way I wanted it to.

As expected, it wasn’t received in the best way. But eventually we agreed that I should bring Eric to meet them and we could all go from there. So we made the 90 minute drive to my parent’s house. As soon as we sat down, it was basically an interrogation session about Eric’s beliefs, some uncomfortable moments of being told we shouldn’t be having sex, and a lot more I don’t really remember. We weren’t even offered dinner or snacks! We left after a few hours, and again…basically continued on business as usual. While, at the time, I wasn’t the most confident in telling my parents I didn’t agree with them, I still didn’t let their opinions dictate what I could or couldn’t do.

Later that year I moved to Boston for my first post-college job, and a month later Eric proposed to me. I said yes, and, because it was 2014, we updated our relationship status on Facebook…my entire family was blocked, but I overlooked telling people not to share the news with them. Within days, my parents managed to get wind of it.

My mom sent some emails and text messages about obedience, and how kids need to fall in line with their parents’ wishes. Expected. But my father showed something deep and dark within him that I’ll never forget. Not expected.

He called and left me countless voicemail messages. Things that I couldn’t bear to ever finish listening to, and am grateful this was 10 years before message transcribing was implemented so I didn’t accidentally read them. These were words that most people probably shouldn’t say to another person, let alone not a father to his daughter. Because of this, I don’t remember much of what I heard. But the snippets I do remember were him telling me I was going to Hell for “what I’m doing”, and that I’m going to drag him and my mom and my brother down with me. This was around the time I stopped listening and deleted the message, along with any others he sent.

My dad and I didn’t speak again until after Eric and I broke up in 2017 — over 2 years of no contact. And it was never the same.

Freedom

During the first few months of Covid, I took up every hobby I could think of. One of them being reading as many books as I could. So my friend Kacey recommended Educated by Tara Westover. If you haven’t read it, it’s a memoir about growing up in a very religious Mormon household that is also preparing for the world to end. Education is looked down upon by their parents, but about half of the siblings have a yearning to learn and eventually pave their way to college, Tara being one of them.

This book changed my life.

Tara’s upbringing and internal struggle was so relatable to me that it took me weeks to get through the first few chapters alone because her father was so hauntingly similar to mine, and Part One focused on her home life. The unsettling feeling about the role religion was playing in my life was swelling to a point I couldn’t ignore anymore. The gears started turning a few months prior when my driver’s license was about to expire and I needed a new picture. I debated whether I should wear a hijab or not. Ultimately I had decided to wear it because it felt wrong not to, and it was such a public thing to make such a consciously different decision about.

Then, I read that Tara was wearing modest clothing, as many strict Mormons do, while living at her dorm at BYU. But her roommates were not, despite being at a Mormon university. She realized she and her family were the odd ones out, even among other Mormons. She writes, “I understood now: I could stand with my family, or with the gentiles, on the one side or the other, but there was no foothold in between.”

Now, I could do a full analysis of how important Educated is to me and what stuck. But this line alone struck me so swiftly, that I could no longer ignore my truth: my family was living a life that I was so clearly resisting for years.

The rest of the world, or the gentiles as Tara Westover’s family puts it, was anyone that was other. Even if they did follow the same religion, if it wasn’t devout it was wrong. I saw that with how my dad handled my brother and I. It didn’t matter if I did well in school, became the highest earner in my family, or was just a really good person — nothing would ever be enough if I didn’t give my absolute all into Allah and our family. And it didn’t matter if I thought otherwise.

For years I had been trying to live two lives: one to appease my parents to keep the peace, and the other one. The real one. That one is where I was happy and living how I wanted to live. And it hit me that I believed that the Hell my parents were so afraid of was a fake hell, one that they were curating themselves. The fear they lived wasn’t how I ever wanted to live in this world. I had been trying to figure out how I fit into their world of religion, but it doesn’t work that way. If faith or religion was going to be in my life, I needed to figure out how it would fit into my world.

My next decision was the first true act of defiance that opened the flood gates and eventually led me to no longer being a practicing Muslim. I stopped wearing my hijab completely. I started doing my hair for job interviews. I changed my LinkedIn profile picture to a more recent photo of my hair down. I got a new ID a few years later.

Deciding to drink, or not being perfect about my prayers, or even dating who I was dating all felt rebellious to me, but this choice was different in that it was so incredibly public that it would be too difficult to roll back. I didn’t want to start a job not wearing a hijab, and then eventually deciding to put one on again, being forced to explain this to people. So I held on to this element for so long, because to take it away pretty much meant everything.

But as soon as I did it, I felt free. Free of the fear of the Hell I thought I needed to be afraid of for so many years. And free to finally have a clearer focus on my life, not one my parents wanted for me.

As for heaven and hell, I think they may be real, but I also believe those of us that try our best don’t have too much to worry about. But that’s just me.

🖊️ A.