with
Muslimah Tobias
The Unraveling
The first time I felt my soul scream, it was swallowed by my own silence. But, the silence was finally breaking.
It was late 2020, at the height of the global pause. COVID had slowed the world to a near standstill. Autumn arrived like an unspoken reckoning, the season of necessary endings and divine pruning. Outside, trees burned in shades of amber and rust, their leaves surrendering themselves to the earth. Inside, I sat alone in a darkened room, lights off, body heavy, dissociated from my own life.
I had just received news I could barely digest. I was pregnant with my sixth child, only weeks after deciding my marriage was over. I was distraught and overwhelmed.
I felt trapped inside a life I no longer recognized. My beliefs were not my own. My values felt porous. My identity, an assembled and manufactured mess. I remember wondering how I had gone from a confident, self-assured young woman—optimistic, expressive, alive—to a passive shell of a being.
I had become unrecognizable to myself. I questioned my very existence: Who was I? And how the heck did I get here?
What I didn’t yet have language for was this: I was living masked, armored by survival.
The Life I Learned to Survive
The truth did not arrive gently. It did not come as a sudden revelation beneath blue skies and fresh air. It arrived as grief, heavy and gray, lingering longer than I wanted to admit. It came as depression and the quiet horror of recognition.
I was living in hidden abuse—financial, spiritual, mental, and emotional. Abuse without visible bruises, yet with wounds etched so deeply they overwhelmed my nervous system and suffocated my soul.
As I traced the patterns, another truth surfaced. This was not just my story. It was generational. I had grown up witnessing a similar dynamic. I had sworn I would never become my mother. And yet, there I was. Humbled to my knees. Awake and unable to unsee what I had spent years rationalizing. Even when truth arrives, we don’t always answer immediately.
What kept me from acting sooner was fear. Fear of taking full responsibility for my life with children in tow. Staying masked offered familiarity. Routine. Predictability.
The illusion of comfort and stability. It spared me from confronting the reality that everything would have to change.
The known pain felt safer than the unknown freedom. So, I stayed until survival itself became too costly.
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