My Story: Everything I Burned Down & What Grew Back
Partager
My Story: Everything I Burned Down & What Grew Back
By [Hind Silkan]
There is a particular kind of person who is born already too much.
Too sensitive. Too intense. Too loud inside her own skull. Too present in a world that keeps asking her to be less so. She learns early, the way children learn things they were never meant to know, that who she naturally is tends to make rooms uncomfortable. And so she begins the long, quiet project of becoming palatable.
I was that person.
I am still, some days, learning not to be.
This is not a redemption story. Or rather, it is, but not the kind where the protagonist arrives somewhere clean and finished, looks back at the wreckage of her old life, and feels only gratitude. The truth is messier than that. The truth is that I am writing this from the middle of it, which is the only honest place any of us can write from.
I want to tell you what happened. Not because I have answers, I have very few of those. But because I have lived some things that I think deserve to be said out loud, in full, without the aesthetic packaging that the wellness world would have wrapped them in.
So here it is. The whole thing. From the beginning.
I. The Girl Who Needed a Map
I was nineteen when I first understood that I had been navigating without one.
Not nineteen in the easy sense, the sense of youth being an excuse. Nineteen in the way that only neurodivergent girls who have spent their entire lives feeling slightly outside the frame of everything understand, which is to say: already exhausted. Already carrying years of translating herself into a language the world could receive. Already used to the particular loneliness of being in a room full of people who all seem to understand something she has missed.
I found the wellness world the way desperate people find most things. By accident, and then with everything I had.
The astrology came first. The birth chart, the rising sign, the moon in whatever house, the intricate and beautiful system that said, in essence: you are not broken. You are a Scorpio. There is no adequate way to describe what that feels like to a girl who has spent her life being told she is too much, to be handed a framework that looks at her intensity and says yes, that is correct, that is written in the stars. It felt like the first time someone had bothered to read her properly.
And then the full moon rituals. The candles. The intentions written in careful handwriting and burned at midnight. The crystals on the windowsill, arranged in patterns she had read about online, charged by a moon that hung in the sky with total indifference to whether any of it was working.
She believed. God, she believed.
Because belief, when you have been searching long enough, is not a choice. It is a relief.
II. The World That Told Her She Was the Problem
Here is what the wellness world gave her that she had never had before.
Language.
You are an empath. You feel things others cannot feel. You have a gift. Your sensitivity is not a flaw, it is a superpower. The people who find you too much are simply not evolved enough to hold your frequency.
For a neurodivergent girl who had spent her childhood being handed the opposite message in every possible form, this was not just appealing. It was oxygen.
She breathed it in. She built a life inside it.
She burned sage and called it shadow work. She pulled tarot cards before decisions, which is to say she outsourced her own judgement to a shuffled deck and called it intuition. She booked a Reiki session when her body hurt, then another when her heart did, then another just to be safe, until the act of turning toward her own pain had been entirely mediated by someone else's hands hovering in the air above her chakras.
She went to Bali. Of course she went to Bali. She sat in water temples she didn't fully understand, in linen she had bought for the occasion, surrounded by other women who were also looking for God in a location and calling it a retreat. She came home the same person she had been when she left, which surprised her, though in retrospect it shouldn't have.
You cannot fly to the thing you are looking for when it lives inside you.
She did not know that yet.
And then she met him.
III. Mr M & The Beautiful Lie
She was nineteen, which is to say she was the perfect age for a mythology.
The twin flame concept is elegant in its cruelty, that somewhere in the world there exists the other half of your soul, that when you meet them you will feel it in your bones, that the intensity of the connection is proof of its cosmic significance. It takes the most human of all experiences, the overwhelming electric feeling of encountering someone who seems to reach directly into the centre of you, and names it destiny.
She met Mr M. She felt it in her bones.
And so every red flag became a spiritual test. Every withdrawal became the runner phase. Every moment of doubt became her ego blocking the union. The framework had an answer for everything, and every answer kept her exactly where she was, which was somewhere she should have left.
She saw every sign. She had a spiritual label for every sign.
This is not a story about him. Men who are not ready, not able, not there in the ways that matter, they exist in every era and every community. They are not villains. They are people.
This is a story about what she did with the information she had. Which was: she handed it to a belief system that transformed it into evidence of destiny, and then she stayed.
She stayed because she had been taught that intensity is love. That if something hurts this much it must mean something this much. That the connection she felt was pre-written and therefore non-negotiable.
She stayed until she couldn't anymore. And even then, she almost didn't leave.
IV. The Movement & The Family It Stole
Somewhere in the middle of all this, the movement handed her another doctrine.
Your family lowers your vibration. Real healing sometimes means leaving people behind. You cannot pour from an empty cup. The people who don't understand your journey are not your people.
For a neurodivergent girl who had always felt slightly alien in her own family, slightly untranslatable, slightly too much for the rooms she had grown up in, this was seductive in a different way. Not oxygen this time. Permission.
She created what the community called energetic distance. She started seeing difficult conversations with her mother as evidence of unawareness. She started feeling quietly superior to the people who had raised her, not because she was cruel, she was never cruel, but because she had been handed a framework that made superiority feel like growth.
She thought she was healing.
She was performing it.
And so she found herself at some point in her mid-twenties with an elaborate spiritual practice, a carefully curated set of beliefs, an energetic distance from her family, a relationship she couldn't leave, a gift for reading people she was charging others for, and a persistent, gnawing, bone-deep feeling that something was profoundly wrong.
She was full of practices and empty in a way that had no name yet.
V. What Came Next, & Why It Was Nothing Like She Expected
She did not find Islam the way the neat version of this story would have her find it.
She did not have a moment of divine light. She did not hear something in the call to prayer that broke her open. She did not fall to her knees in a mosque and know.
She found it the way she had found everything else in her life, which is to say: hungrily, chaotically, with her whole self and no map, following something she couldn't quite name toward something she couldn't quite see.
She read. She questioned. She argued with it. She tried to make it fit around the edges of everything she already believed and found, slowly, that it wasn't asking her to do that.
It was asking her to put the other things down.
Not as punishment. Not as a trade. As a gift she hadn't known she needed, which was the gift of not having to hold everything at once anymore.
Here is what she was not prepared for.
She expected Islam to tell her she was wrong. To hand her a list of corrections and stand over her while she worked through them.
Instead it told her she was original.
Fitrah. The primordial, innate nature upon which Allah has created every human being. The original state of purity that exists before the world starts editing you. The self you were before the wellness industry told you that self was a project. Before the twin flame mythology told you that self was incomplete. Before the family-cutting doctrine told you that self was under threat.
The purpose of divine revelation, she read, is not to instil a foreign belief. It is to awaken and polish what was always there.
Not construction. Unveiling.
She sat with that for a very long time.
VI. The Things Islam Revealed That She Could Not Have Predicted
The first thing was about astrology. The Quran addresses the search for knowledge of the unseen, the ghayb, directly and without ambiguity. She had been outsourcing her certainty to a system of planetary positions. Islam asked her where she had put her trust, and the honest answer, the one she had to sit with, was: everywhere except where it belonged.
The second thing was about Reiki and the gift. "And if Allah should touch you with adversity, there is no remover of it except Him." She read that and felt something shift that had been locked in place for years. She had built an entire healing framework that had routed around God. Not excluded Him deliberately, never that, but made Him a finishing touch rather than a source. Islam handed the source back.
The third thing was about her family. Silat ar-rahim. The bond of the womb. She learned that the word for family ties in Arabic shares a root with rahmah, mercy, which shares a root with Ar-Rahman, one of the names of Allah. That family is not a lifestyle choice to be curated by vibration. That the highest form of maintaining those ties is doing so even when the other person hasn't.
She had been out here calling distance healing. Islam called it by a different name.
She called her mother.
The fourth thing was about Mr M. That she was not half a soul. That she had never been half a soul. That the twin flame concept, for all its beauty, was built on a foundational lie: that she was incomplete without a person. Islam disagreed, gently and completely. "And He is with you, wherever you are." Wherever. Not once you've healed. Not after the separation phase. Wherever.
She put down the mythology. The feelings stayed, because feelings do not obey theology. But she stopped building a cathedral to them. And that, imperfect and slow, was enough to begin walking out.
The fifth thing was the most devastating and the most freeing.
Muslim means one who surrenders.
She had spent her entire adult life in a spiritual framework that told her the self was something to be conquered. Mastered. Upgraded. She had been at war with herself so long she had forgotten there was another option.
Surrender did not mean defeat. It meant, in the most literal and beautiful translation, to surrender in peace. To stop fighting. To lay down the weapons, not because you lost, but because you finally understood that the war had never been the point.
The word Islam comes from the same root as salam. Peace.
She had been looking for peace in crystals and cards and healing circles and a boy who couldn't give it to her.
It had been in the word Islam the whole time.
VII. What She Knows Now, & What She Doesn't
She knows that she was not stupid. She was hungry. There is a difference, and it matters.
She knows that the longing that drove her through every detour, the Bali retreats and the full moon rituals and the tarot decks and the twin flame mythology, was always a real longing. Sacred, even. A hunger for transcendence, for being known completely, for a life structured around something that could hold her. The detours were wrong directions, not wrong desires.
She knows that her neurodivergent brain, the one that needs pattern and meaning and depth the way other people need air, did not betray her by finding astrology compelling or by falling for intensity or by needing the world to mean more than it seemed to. It was doing what it was designed to do. Looking for God in the best places it had available.
She knows that the movement lied about family. That the people who raised her, complicated and imperfect and sometimes impossible to translate herself to, are tied to her through something that Allah Himself described as part of His mercy. She is still learning what it means to love them without the performance of healing. She is getting there.
She knows that Mr M was a person, not a destiny. She knows that what she felt was real even if the framework around it was false. She knows that real and true are not the same thing, and that this distinction, learned slowly and at some cost, is one of the more useful things she has ever understood.
She knows that she will never be finished. That the fitrah she is returning to is not a destination but a direction. That some mornings she wakes up clear and some mornings the old voices are louder than the new ones, and that both are part of a life being honestly lived.
She does not know why it took this long. She has made her peace with not knowing.
VIII. The Only Thing Left to Say
There is a dua she returns to now, on the mornings that are hard and the nights that are long.
Hasbunallahu wa ni'mal wakeel.
Allah is enough for us, and He is the best of those in whom we place our trust.
She used to need so many things to be enough. The right planetary alignment. The right energy in the room. The right person to confirm she was on the right path. The right retreat, the right healer, the right reading.
Now she needs one thing.
And that one thing, unlike everything else she has placed her weight on, has never once moved.
She is neurodivergent and Muslim and still figuring it out. She has been naive and searching and wrong about things she was certain of. She has burned down frameworks she thought were her foundation and found, in the rubble, that the ground beneath them had been solid all along.
She stopped performing healing.
She started being here.
That is the whole story.
Or rather, it is the beginning of it, which is the only place any honest story can start.
A series written for myself, and anyone who needed to find it.