i have everything but nothing at all
i'm twenty-three. if you saw my life written down you'd probably think i had it figured out. good grades in school, then imperial, goldman after that, the job everyone tells you to chase and i lasted one quarter before i left because i couldn't make myself care about it. then a yc startup, founding engineer. five countries in the last eight months. i play a lot of sport. my parents are good to me and i mean that and i have friends who'd pick up if i called them in the middle of the night. and i pray five times a day, i keep my fasts, i try to do everything i'm meant to do as a muslim and most days i manage it.
and i still feel empty a lot of the time. that's the thing i don't really know how to say to anyone, because it sounds ungrateful and it probably is.
i want to be clear that i'm not depressed or anything. i'm not sitting in the dark. it's more that i keep getting to the things i spent years working for and feeling nothing when i get there. or close to nothing. a day or two of something and then it's gone and i'm already looking at the next thing.
the part that gets me is that i can't even use the obvious excuse. i haven't drifted from my deen. i pray, i fast, i'm trying. if anyone has a reason to feel full it should be me. and i don't and that scares me more than if i'd just stopped praying and could point at that and say, there, that's why.
i looked into it a bit. there's a thing psychologists call the arrival fallacy, where you get to the top of the thing and the view just isn't what the climb promised. and apparently the chemical that drives you is mostly there while you're chasing, not when you actually get it. so you get the thing and the part of you that was lit up for months just switches off. that made sense of the goldman thing. i'd wanted it for years and it lasted about nine weeks before it went flat.
but that doesn't explain everything, because i already know all this and knowing it hasn't fixed anything. i left goldman thinking the problem was the place, the suits, being a small cog in something massive. the startup is better, it's actually mine. and i still feel it. so it's not the job. i keep changing the job.
so maybe it's me or how i'm living, rather than what i'm doing.
something i've noticed about myself that i don't love. almost everything on that list is something i can show people. the grades, the uni, the countries specially, the countries are basically made to be posted. and when something good happens my first thought isn't to feel it. it's to think about how it'll look when i tell someone. like the feeling has to wait in line behind the telling of it. i read about a therapist who works with high achievers, doctors, lawyers, the kind of people other people envy and he said the thing they admit in the end is that they're still chasing approval, usually from one person, often a parent, even when that parent loves them and already gave it. that's not exactly me. my parents are proud and i believe them. but the shape of it felt familiar. if a thing only feels real once someone's seen it, then it was never really about the thing.
this is where my deen comes into it, because there's an idea i keep coming back to. the heart described as having chambers, different loves in different chambers and one in the middle that's only meant for allah. and the problem is when you put worldly things in that middle one. not loving the dunya, you're allowed to love the dunya, the prophet loved his family and had wealth and spent it. the problem is putting those things in the spot that was only ever built for the one thing that doesn't fade. yasmin mogahed has this line about how if you put a vase on the edge of a table you can't act shocked when it falls. you put it there.
and that's the uncomfortable bit for me. i can pray five times a day and keep every fast and still have quietly moved my actual sense of worth out of that middle chamber and into the dunya without even noticing. the prayers can all be there, done properly, while the thing they're meant to be pointing at has slid somewhere else. i can be doing salah five times a day, which is supposed to pull me out of the world for a minute and put me in front of allah and the second it's over i'm right back to measuring myself by stuff that doesn't last. there's a thing about barakah, that it's not about how much you've got, it's about what fills your time, whether your hours go to something that lasts or something that just evaporates. and when i actually look at where my time and my worry go, i don't come out of it well.
there's a hadith i think about, that whoever makes the dunya his main concern, allah scatters his affairs and puts poverty in front of his eyes and he only gets what was already written for him anyway. and whoever puts the hereafter first gets his affairs sorted and a richness put in his heart and the dunya comes to him regardless. i recognise the scattered part. i recognise the poverty in front of the eyes, in a life that on paper doesn't have any poverty in it.
so what's supposed to go in the middle, if it's not the next thing on the list.
i know the answer. allah. i can say it and i believe it. but i'd be lying if i said i was actually living it, because if i had it properly seated where it's meant to be i don't think i'd feel like this as often as i do. knowing the answer and living the answer are not the same thing and i'm somewhere in the gap.
what i do have are a few things i've noticed. the times i don't feel empty, the times i'm not looking around for proof that any of it counted, are almost never the achievements. they're small and they're nothing you could put on a cv. talking to a friend and losing track of time and not performing anything. the middle of a football match, not winning it, the middle of it, when i'm just a body figuring out a moving problem with other bodies and there's no part of me standing off to the side watching myself. the few minutes after fajr, before i pick up my phone, before the day starts, when there's nothing to chase yet and nothing to show anyone and i'm just quiet for a second.
none of that goes on a cv. i don't think that's a coincidence.
i found out the old christians had a word, acedia, which isn't sadness, it's more like a flatness, a not-caring and the strange thing is it tends to land on people who are busy and capable and look completely fine. and someone wrote that despair doesn't always show up crying, sometimes it shows up showered and dressed and on time and good at its job. and our own tradition talks about a hardness that creeps into a heart that's drifted from where it came from, a heart still going through the motions while the life leaks out of it. i read that stuff and felt caught out.
so maybe the empty feeling isn't a fault. maybe it's telling me something. it shows up exactly when the doing is done and there's nothing left to chase, when it's finally quiet enough to ask what all of it was for. and i've been dealing with that quiet by booking another flight, finding the next thing, adding another line. staying ahead of the question. the travelling is partly that, i can admit it now. it looks like a full life and it works like running away.
i'm not going to pretend i've figured it out, because i haven't. i'll probably catch myself tomorrow already drafting how i'll tell someone about something good, the feeling stuck in line behind it like always. this has been going on longer than the time it took to write this and it's not going to fix itself because i wrote it down.
but there's one small thing i think i can do. next time something good happens i want to actually feel it before i tell anyone and remember where it came from while i'm at it. that's it. just get there a second before the audience does and see if anyone's actually home when i show up on my own with allah instead of with my version of myself.
or maybe i might find it empty again.