Fourteen years. That’s how long I gave — fully — to this journey. Years spent orienting every decision around safety, survival, protection. Years where there was no space to imagine anything else.
The career I once built now feels distant. Not lost — just no longer reachable by the same route. And now, with the realisation that I am AuDHD myself, I can finally see why survival required such total reorganisation.
I did what I had to do. But surviving is not the same as living. And now the question arrives quietly, insistently: What now?
The world has a habit of demanding permission slips for existence. To rest. To work. To opt out. To belong. To be spared harm. Every system seems to insist that life must be justified, assessed, approved.
The constant background noise of threat — whether through policy, rhetoric, or the casual disposability of certain lives — is exhausting. So much faith in systems that are clearly brittle. So much complexity layered onto things that should be simple.
With my son, I get to focus on what is good. On presence. On care. On small truths that hold weight. Alone, I see how much of the world is built on unnecessary cruelty, distraction, and performance. How much of it is man-made. How much of it asks us to accept harm as inevitable.
I refuse that.
This is still the Punk speaking. It never left. It just stopped being loud.
People sometimes mistake the Punk for anger. For rebellion as performance. For the young woman outside the mosque, the Artistic Director making noise in spaces that didn’t want her, the mother fighting tribunals.
But the Punk was never really about noise. It was always about this — the quiet, unshakeable refusal to accept a diminished version of reality as the only available one. To look at a world built on unnecessary cruelty and say: I don’t accept the premise.
The Sufi found Allah in the darkness. The Punk refused to let the darkness have the final word. Neither alone would have been enough. Together they became the ground.
There was a time when I went somewhere very dark. When all the answers had gone. When all the tools in my toolbox had stopped working. When life felt pointless. Hopeless. When everything felt impossible and no amount of faith, knowledge, or belief could pull me back.
I will not tell you everything that happened there. Some things are too interior to place in a public space. Some gold is too hard-won to give away. What I will tell you is that I went in and I came back. And what I came back with was not certainty. Not answers. Not a map.
What I came back with was a different orientation. A remembering, really.
I had been given much depth. The intensity. The capacity for immersion. The mystical thread that had run beneath my life since childhood — through the art, through the grief, through the mothering, through the faith. I had spent years experiencing these things as burdens, as the reasons I could not walk through the doors everyone else seemed to find so easy.
In the dark, I began to understand them differently. Not as deficits. As gifts. Not as the problem. As the abundance.
And from that understanding, a choice became possible that had not been possible before.
Of all the ways people choose to make meaning, I choose a God-idea. Not as an escape. Not as denial. But as an orientation.
Evil exists — I see it daily. And precisely because that is true, I choose to align myself with what is also possible. After years of living in reaction — to systems, to threats, to harm — I am no longer interested in shrinking my inner world to match the outer one.
I want to live. Not loudly. Not impressively. But deliberately. I want a life shaped by meaning rather than fear. By beauty rather than compliance. By care rather than permission.
Fourteen years taught me how to survive. What comes next is learning how to live — without surrendering what survival taught me.
I have nothing by the world’s measures. This world is currently pushing me and I am facing severe injustices. My peers have holidays, possessions, houses, mansions.
My lower self knows all of this. It keeps the score. It feels the gap.
But there is another self — one I have had to learn to reach, and keep reaching for — and from that place the abundance looks entirely different. The abundance of the soul is like gold. I would not trade it for any of it.
I am the richest girl alive.
Because that is what I chose for myself.
And perhaps that is also what this whole project has always been. A map. For my son. So that when I am gone and this world comes for him — and it will — he will know where to find me. In the nothingness held by divine. In the place where the soul laughs gently at the circus. In the gold that cannot be taken.
Come and find me here, my son. This place is yours too. It always was.
And then I realised something.
If I built this for you — if fourteen years of refusal and returning and finding the ground and losing it and finding it again produced something worth leaving — then perhaps it was never only for you.
Perhaps every zawiya ever built was first built for one person. And then the door was found to be wider than the builder knew.
I built this for my son. I leave it open for you.
Turn to look at the world. This one is for everyone the world tried to extinguish. You’re still here.
Zawiya Discussion
The world has no language for what comes after survival. Here is some of what exists.
When a prolonged crisis finally ends, the nervous system does not simply relax. It often enters a state of profound disorientation. After years of running on survival adrenaline — hypervigilant, responsive, always braced — the quietness of safety can feel destabilising. The body does not know immediately how to be still. The identity built around crisis does not know immediately who it is without one.
This is not weakness. It is a completely predictable neurological and psychological response to the end of chronic threat. It has a name in trauma research — the window of tolerance expanding, the system slowly learning that it is safe to come down. But it can feel, from the inside, like falling.
The question ‘what now’ is also a systemic one. How do we rebuild a life, a career, and an identity when our old maps have been shredded by years of disability, systemic exclusion, and survival-level stress? The world offers very little support for this transition. It celebrates recovery as a return to productivity. It has no language for the slower, deeper work of learning to live rather than merely endure.
Late-identified neurodivergent women in particular often arrive at this threshold having spent decades performing a version of themselves the world could accept — and find, on the other side of unmasking, that they must rebuild almost everything from the inside out. This is enormous work. It deserves to be named as such.
The Devotional Lens
Every tradition that has walked the dark night has understood the same thing — that what dissolves in the darkness is not the self but everything that was never truly the self. The stripping back is not destruction. It is the most precise form of return.
In the classical Sufi tradition, the dark night of the soul — fana, the annihilation of the ego — is not a crisis to be avoided. It is a threshold to be crossed. What dissolves in the darkness is not the self but the performed self — the accumulated layers of compliance, approval-seeking, and fearful smallness that have been mistaken for identity. What remains, when those layers fall away, is something older and more real.
The Qur’anic concept of Bast — joyous expansion — follows Qabd, constriction. The two are inseparable. You cannot expand without first having been contracted. The mystics of every tradition understood this. St John of the Cross walked the dark night and emerged into the living flame of love. Rumi’s reed cries from separation and discovers in that very crying the music of connection. Bulleh Shah danced in the ruins of his certainty and found God waiting there.
To choose a spacious God-idea from inside the darkness — not after it, not once the light returns, but while still inside it — is one of the most profound spiritual acts a person can perform. It is not denial of the darkness. It is the refusal to let the darkness be the final word.
When we align ourselves with Al-Jamil — the Beautiful — and Al-Wasi’ — the All-Encompassing, the Spacious — we are not choosing fantasy. We are choosing the largest available truth. And that choice, made freely from the depths, is what the tradition calls tawbah — not repentance in the punitive sense, but a turning. A reorientation of the whole self toward what is real and good and enduring.
The nothingness that holds — the divine embrace that waits beneath all the noise of the world — is not emptiness. It is the fullness that the Sufi masters called Fana fil-Allah. The dissolution of the small self into the vast loving reality of God. Not a loss. The greatest abundance there is.
The Sufi keeping the thread to Allah. The Punk keeping the thread to self. Both held. Both necessary. This is what fourteen years built. This is what the zawiya holds.
Questions
What does the transition from surviving to living actually require of you — and who or what is helping you make it?
Where in your life have your greatest depths — your intensity, your sensitivity, your capacity for immersion — been experienced as burden rather than gift?
If you could leave a map for someone you love — showing them the way to the place where the soul rests — what would it say?