دار محمد Daar Muhammed

If you are used to a “keep quiet and sit down” approach, you may find it quite difficult to speak up later in life when you need to. You will continue questioning yourself if the words you have are ever ‘good enough’ to need to say them out aloud. If the culture you grew up in dictated that you must never be heard as a girl or that being born female, you can never get it right, you may feel your voice now evaporating every time you open your mouth to speak. Or perhaps you called out for help oneday or a few different times, trusting that help will come but ended up being ‘analysed’ not assisted because “you ought not to scream like this, you need to be polite”. You started doubting your own voice after that. You started to question whether it had any power. Every time you feel the desire to speak up and do something, you are drowned by a thousand doubts that stop you and interrupt your efforts.

It is rarely discussed— the difficulty in expressing yourself when your self-confidence has been played with. Because most people have a natural tendency to speak, present, and feel good about most aspects of themselves. To be otherwise is strange. On the other hand, you know what? Feeling too overwhelmed to say what you have in mind when bottling it up is your norm, is also a very human reaction. It is a crushing sensation in which, at that crucial moment, you are more concerned with shielding yourself from any potential shaming than expressing what you have.

This is a problem that has no quick fix but something that needs to be worked on as you go through life and see and hear and grow. The first step in this process will be to change your core beliefs about your voice— no, I don’t mean its tone or sound, but simply your voice— i.e to be heard. Be that by speaking, or writing, or any other way. That be it your pronunciation, your ideas, your expression or your points of view, you have tried very much, within the resources you had available to you, to refine them as much as you could. They are sufficient to make an impression on the hearts they are meant to reach. Do you realise that you have come a very long way? And your words become incredibly beautiful and powerful when you weave your faith into them. Did you realise this?

You need to remind yourself how your voice, by any of the means you are ready right now to use it in, reaches others. By what you have seen and where you have been, yours is most likely a voice we need amongst us. When you begin speaking, it is not merely your words but the passion that fuels them and the sincerity they come with that actually impact before anything else. Because that is how Allah makes it to be. As He is the One Who is carrying them. It is worth remembering this.