The girl who held everything together and quietly crashed.

Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuhu,

If you'd like to hear this chapter read aloud in my voice, the audio is just below. You can listen while you read, or set the letter down
and simply listen. Either way, I hope it finds you well.

Welcome back to From the Nest.

Last week, we talked about niyyah. About the eighteen-year-old who chose the future over the familiar. About a decision nobody around her understood, and why the rightness of a choice rooted in sincere intention doesn't wait for the outcome to be confirmed.

I ended that letter with a promise. That what came after the accomplishments would be harder to write. And I meant it.

This week, I keep that promise.

Let me paint you a picture.

A master's degree in cybersecurity and digital forensics, research published in internationally indexed journals, and presentations at conferences in rooms she had once only dreamed of standing in. Mentors who told her, gently and without exaggeration, that in two years she had done what most people do in two and a half years of a PhD. She was the youngest member of an international organisation's core team, followed by the head of the organisation, and, statistically, the youngest to hold such a high position. Before she fully understood what had happened, she was running.

Zoom meetings from bed rest. Events planned from hospital waiting rooms. Teams guided across time zones while her own body was quietly asking her to stop.

Everyone was asking her how she did it. How she held all of it together. And she had one answer, every time.

It's the barakah. I don't even know how I'm doing this.

She believed it. She meant it.

And she was wrong, not about the barakah, but about what she was doing with it.

Here is what I didn't understand then, and couldn't see until much later: there is a difference between a life that has barakah in it, and a life that uses the word barakah to justify hustle.

I was doing the second one. Calling it the first.

I was moving at the speed of urgency, filling every hour, wearing my output like armour, and telling myself it was faith. I was grateful, yes. Sincerely. But gratitude alone doesn't make a pace sustainable. And a pace isn't barakah just because you're grateful for it.

The crash, when it came, was not dramatic. That's the thing nobody tells you. It didn't arrive like a wave that you can point to. It arrived like the last grain of sand sliding off a surface that had been slowly tilting for years.

I left the leadership role. Not entirely by choice. The details are mine to hold privately, and I will. But I will tell you this: I left a place I had built with my own hands. A work I loved. A community that had become, in many ways, the first one I had truly belonged to. And walking away from it, or being walked away from it, the lines are always blurred in those moments, broke something in me that I hadn't known was still soft.

Then the PhD. The next obvious step. The natural destination for a research-heavy master's that had drawn admiration from the people who taught her. Offer letters came from prestigious universities across the globe. She nearly cracked an entrance exam. And then, one after another, the doors closed.

She couldn't understand it. She still doesn't have the full answer. But she is, now, at peace with not having it.

And then what followed was the hardest part to describe, because it didn't have a name. Every three or four months, she would try to stand up again. Build something. Start. Make sense of the season. And then something would shift; health, circumstances, the fragile architecture of plans she had made with her hands alone, and she would be back at the beginning. Point zero, again. Looking at the same starting line she had left months before.

I want to pause here. Because I know some of you are reading this and it sounds familiar. Not the specific circumstances, perhaps. But the shape of it. The trying, and the returning to the start. The sense that something is supposed to be happening and it isn't. The exhaustion of not knowing whether the pause is a problem or a plan.

I am not going to tell you this hadith made everything feel easy. That would be a performance. It didn't, at first. When you're sitting at the bottom of something for the third time in twelve months, words, even the most beautiful words, even the most truthful ones, take time to become felt rather than merely known.

I didn't know that yet. In that season, I was simply trying to survive the distance between who I had been and who I was now able to be.

But something was happening underneath, very quietly, that I wouldn't recognise until later.

I was finally becoming still enough to hear something.

A small gift before you go; the reflection, the action, and something to carry with you are yours this week as a gift card. Download it below.

One question before you leave.
What's one thing you've been calling barakah that might actually be exhaustion with a prettier name? You can say it here in the comment section.

Next week will be a surprise gift for you.
Whether you are following up on these emails since chapter 1 or just joined with us from this very chapter. Everyone of you will receive a surprise gift next Sunday, bi idnillah.

Until next Sunday,
Aiman Hafeez

The Rising Nest · A sanctuary for growth, protection, and clarity.