Ding! Ding! Ding!

By Aisha Hasnain

Someone asked an orator: “How long does it take you to prepare your speeches?” The orator replied: “It depends. If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”

I have been given seven and a half hours to write this article so gauge its splendour on that parameter.

Ah, so Aisha, where are we? March 2025! Nine years. How heart-breaking it is that nine years ago in class 11 you had worked on your first article, almost reached the end of the process but eventually decided not to get it published. The reason being your anxiety issues gaining momentum. Your article was about hope and courage but when challenges starting pouring your way, your mettle was put to test and you questioned the sincerity in your article. You did not feel ready and I feel sad for the fragile 11^th grade student you. And feel I should. Let me get to a bit of an extreme: I should mourn for the decomposed dead body from the days of your youth. They have been a back-breaking nine years and gratefully you have found some answers. Aisha, sometimes the only thing that makes trials difficult for a person is their age. You were a tiny doll who lived like a 70 year old woman in her mind. Thankfully you have been able to shatter that web and let yourself live for once like a 26 year old that you are. Keep going.

You lost seven years of academic life and your well-wishers have constantly said that you were committing a sin by letting your intelligence go to waste like that. This is their concern for you. The only way you can convey the intensity of your anxiety to them is revealing the fact that the SOS medication does not help you whatsoever. It does nothing. Don’t take their words to heart. Don’t succumb to the pressure. They don’t know that it will only land you in an asylum. How much can one explain? And you don’t need to explain every time. Have courage for silence. You keep your focus on your values and disorganized goals. They don’t know that you are waiting in a huge line under a merciless heat for your turn to rise and that waiting there alone needs one hell of grit. Keep going, I said.

When was it that you received a phone call from God telling you that you are a writer and not a mathematician? Last year June. Math was always the easiest to prepare for in school. No rote learning. You were as bad at parrot-fashion as you were good at completing your home-work with dedication. Rote-learning was a nightmare. I think you must have received a volume of messages from God about the writing instinct in you but they were left unattended because of your never-ending love for mathematics even after it broke up with you in grade 12. He was compelled to call you. Now you have become fond enough of writing that when recently someone saw your artwork and told you that you express yourself better as an artist than a writer, you didn’t take it as a compliment. Take it from me that these 9 years have led you very close to your turn and your ideas about living have become very meaningful. You received quite some spanking from life until it made you learn to spell it right.

This article is one small badge of honour you will wear on your heart for show-off that your therapist chose you for today’s column of Mindful Fridays instead of his own article. This is your first published work, on the first Friday of Ramadhan. Good luck with your upcoming book. This time you are not waiting to see the sincerity in your ideas. You are presenting your journey unapologetically raw and naked, with sincerity.

• The author goes by her pen name, Aisha Hasnain.  She can be reached at [email protected]

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