The girl who learned to see hope in the dark.

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.

I want to begin this letter by saying: this one is different.

Not in format. Not in tone. But in the particular kind of courage it required. These are words I have kept to myself for a very long time. I am choosing to share them, not all of them, not the details that remain mine to keep, because I believe they belong in this story. Because someone reading this needs to know they are not alone in this specific kind of darkness.

And because silence, when it serves only the self, is not the kind of silence this space is built on.

She was a little girl full of dreams.

You know her by now. The front-line girl. The class monitor. The one who raised her hand before the question was finished. She was made of energy and warmth and an almost inexhaustible desire to be in things; in life, in rooms, in conversations, in the world.

And then her body, without warning, without permission, without the decency of an explanation, began to change in ways she could not understand.

She was a teenager. She did not know what was happening. The awareness wasn't there. The mentorship wasn't there. Nobody had prepared her, nobody was around to say: I've been here. I've stood in this exact confusion. You are going to be okay.

There was no one who could say that. So she stood in the confusion alone.

I will not go into the details. They are private, and they will remain that way, known only to the people closest to me and to Allah. I made a decision early in building this space that certain things belong to me, not to a public platform. I keep that decision.

But I want to touch the truth of it, because the truth of it is useful. Because I know there are women reading this who have their own version of this chapter: a body that surprised them, a diagnosis they didn't ask for, a physical reality that arrived uninvited and rearranged everything. And I want them to know: this letter is for you.

The hospital rooms. The waiting, three, four hours in a corridor, watching the clock, trying to breathe. Rushing to the emergency in the early hours of the morning. The pain is not only physical but deeply disorienting, because pain at that scale makes you feel like a stranger to yourself.

And then, sometimes, harsh words from people whose job it was to help. Medical professionals who spoke without care, in the middle of her worst moments, as if her fear was an inconvenience rather than something that deserved gentleness.

She lost faith in the medical fraternity for a while after that. Not in Allah, but in the systems that were supposed to hold people when they were breaking. The loss of that trust was its own kind of grief.

I still don't know the full "why" of this chapter of my life. And I have made my peace with that.

But I want to tell you what I found in the dark. Not because it made the dark easier in the moment, it didn't, always. But because it is the most important thing, this chapter gave me.

I found my Lord.

Not for the first time. But in a way that no comfortable moment could have gave me. In the space where everything else had been stripped away, where she could not rely on her own strength, or her output, or her ability to hold it together, she found that she was not alone. That she had never been alone. That the same Creator who fashioned her in the first place had not looked away.

There is a du'a.
The du'a of Ayyub AS, the Prophet who was tested with affliction so severe, so extended, so total, that it could have broken anyone. Who turned not to complaint but to his Lord:

Not a demand. Not a bargain. Just a naming. Adversity has touched me. And then: And You are the most merciful.

That is the entire du'a. The acknowledgement of the pain, and the immediate turning toward the One who is more merciful than anything the pain could suggest. No performance. No conditions. Just a wounded heart, and a Lord who heard it.

I recited this du'a more times than I can count. Sometimes with understanding. Sometimes with only the shape of the words, because that was all I could manage. And I believe, in the barakah of that sunnah, that He heard every version of it.

Here is what the illness taught me that I could not have learned any other way.

It taught me patience, not the shallow kind, the kind that is really just suppressed frustration, but the real kind. The kind that is a choice made again and again in the middle of continuing difficulty. The kind the Quran calls sabr, which is not passivity but active, willed surrender to what cannot be controlled.

It taught me resilience. Not the motivational-quote version, but the quiet, private, one-morning-at-a-time version. The resilience of simply deciding to try again today. Even when yesterday was hard. Even when the body is not cooperating. Even when the plan you made is not the plan the body allows.

It taught me that the most important thing you can have, when everything else is stripped away, its not achievements, credentials, or recognition. It is the knowledge that you are known by someone who does not need any of those things to love you. The Lord who created you knows the exact weight of what you are carrying, and is with you in it. Not watching from a distance. With you.

And it gave me something I didn't expect: a specific, embodied understanding of why women need spaces where they can speak about what is happening in their bodies and their lives without judgment. Without shame. Without being made to feel that their struggle is a disruption.

I was the girl who had none of that. And I never forgot what that absence felt like.

The Rising Nest holds that absence as part of its foundation.

I want to say one more thing before the closing. About the people who prayed for me without being asked.

Friends who make du'a for you before you have mentioned what is wrong, before you have gathered the words, before you have decided whether to ask, are one of the quiet miracles of a life lived in community. I have been given that. A handful of people, scattered across different corners of the world, who carry me in their duas to Allah even when I have forgotten to carry myself there.

I do not take this lightly. I count it among the greatest gifts He has given me.

And I pray that every woman reading this has at least one person like that. And if you don't yet, I hope this space becomes, slowly, part of how you find them.

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.

If you're in a hard season right now, you don't need to explain it. You can just reply, “I’m here.” That is enough.

Until next Sunday,
Aiman Hafeez

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