My Abridged Personal History with Ramadan

I am not fasting this Ramadan. It’s been a few years since I fasted for Ramadan. I will probably not fast for another Ramadan. Admitting this in any form — my inner thoughts, one-sided existential rants with someone I met online, or posting it to the Internet for no one and anyone — is very daunting.

I was fasting full days in fourth grade. Before then, I did half days (fasting until noon) to practice. I was really proud of myself for being able to fast from sunrise to sunset. I’m prone to remember things in a negative way, but I don’t remember having trouble fasting as a kid. My strongest Ramadan memory is sitting in the elementary school’s front office and planning out my Halloween costume while the rest of my class had lunch and recess. I agreed with my mom’s suggestion that she call and ask my teacher if I could sit out, that way I wouldn’t have to be around food or exhaust myself by running around. (The greatest perk was using Ramadan to get out of gym class later on in life.) In middle school I cared about being with my friends, so I sat with my homeroom in the cafeteria and said I just wasn’t hungry whenever I didn’t want to explain I was fasting or why. It’s fucked up, but the normality of girls not eating to be thin in the 2000s helped me out here. The only person who had suspicions (or the only one who acted on it) was my seventh grade social studies teacher. He called my mom and told her I wasn’t eating at lunch. I was embarrassed then, but now I admire his concern.

The worst time to fast was during the summer when the sun set anywhere between eight and nine, and there was no school to distract me for most of the day. Whenever I’m bored, my love for snacks really kicks in. One afternoon, I was haunted by two packages of Twizzlers in my brother’s room. I snuck in and ate a piece. Then two. And probably a third. As I tried to silently take a strand out, I heard my mom on the phone with a close family friend. She was lightly bragging about me fasting full days (MashAllah!) and I heard my mom say that my fasting didn’t count until I hit puberty. Those unexpected words hit me hard. I was angry because I saw those Twizzlers as a possible compromise to a spot in heaven. I had felt a wave of religious guilt after giving in to my snack craving when in reality, I could have legally be eating something much better the whole time.

The older I became, the harder it was to fast. All I could think about was why. Why was I doing this? (the answer is too complex to answer here). In my early twenties, I kept up the false pretense by not eating in front of others and it evolved to flat-out ignoring the situation that was me not fasting during Ramadan. For anyone outside my immediate family who knew me to be Muslim-born, I played along again and didn’t eat around them or sat silent and let their assumption hold true. What’s the protocol when someone who’s unconsciously on the road to becoming an ex-Muslim interacts with someone who just assumes she observes Ramadan? Do I stay silent on the matter? Do I tell Muslims I’m actually not on my period when I take sip of water? I have it lucky now since I isolate myself from anyone and everyone on a daily basis. Anyone who did notice that I stopped fasting never said anything to me and I sure as hell was not going to bring it up. I had no way to put into words what was going on inside my mind. I just knew I wasn’t allowed to not be Muslim, and I was expected to have the courtesy of at least faking it. It was an idea that formed based off of a lifetime of context clues and unspoken rules. To simply just ‘not be (a practicing) Muslim’ had been such a huge hurdle in my identity. From my Muslim side, it was egregious. From the dominant American culture around me, it was silly to even worry about (the thought being, ‘who cares, you’re an adult and can do whatever you want’. Anyone with parents from another culture knows that Americans without immigrant parents don’t seem to understand that that’s not how it goes.)

As if my identity wasn’t splintered enough between Arab/Muslim and American, I started to tear a new line, one I believed to be preventable. I was born a Muslim. There was no choice. Anything else was deliberate perversion. It’s hard to say anything about America without it being political, but I can definitely say I love what I’ve come to think of as the true American spirit: ‘freedom of and from religion.’ No one ever seems to emphasis the from part. I think a lot of issues being talked about now need an angle based on one of the country’s constitutional beliefs: separation of church and state. This idea seem so unimaginable and yet the dream is real. That’s my American dream. Where else on earth is there a place like this? (No, seriously, I’m asking. Do other countries that are not dominated or ruled by religion hold this sentiment as part of their countries tenet? To be continued.)

I’ve come a long way. I had to acknowledge that the hurdle was there in the first place instead of jumping over it without looking down (à la if I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.) I discovered and embraced my true beliefs and had abandoned religion mostly in the comfort of my own mind, where it’s the safest. And now, years later, I don’t see the hurdle that was my lack of religiosity out of willful ignorance, but because I removed it from my path. The hardest parts of reconciling this part of my identity may be over, but damn does it haunt me. I’m arguably in the best country to divorce my birth religion…. and I still can’t fully commit. It’s still perverse to me to feel like a secular person, let alone to say it, let alone celebrate it. (I find myself wanting to celebrate it.) I still get stuck in my old ways of thinking. I think it’s because I just so happen to be particularly and deeply anxious in regard to shame, guilt and judgement — the three horsemen of the day-to-day ritual of any religious community.

I’ve been seeing Ramadan posts on my feed and it depresses me. I’m reminded of all the guilt and shame I can’t help but sometimes feel guilt and shame for not having. Oh yeah. I guess it’s the time where I would be feeling bad about not making up the days I missed from my period last Ramadan but also do nothing about it. My old life that I never really fit into anyway. The one my mom would love for me to have. Muslims are sharing how excited they are for Ramadan and the positive impacts it has on their lives when for me it was always a chore, another hurdle I hated clearing not because it was hard, but because I couldn’t understand why it was there in the first place. Sometimes I get bitter that I can’t fully enjoy my secular peace after doing the grueling mental work it took to take those hurdles off my radar and just be the person I feel I am. Post-Muslim life ironically has some of the same situations. If aspects of Muslim culture happen to be part of a conversation among non-Muslims, do I speak up and become the ‘person of authority’? Even if I know nothing? I’m at least culturally Muslim, right? Do I just stay silent and let the blind lead the blind as they wonder if fasting all day means like… all day?

My views and experiences with fasting has little to do with Islam and everything with my propensity for hating myself for anything I do, think, or say. It’s the reason why I’m so hung up on a religious life I chose not to have. And I’m very lucky the consequences for that choice were basically nonexistent. I have an angry group of Muslims on my shoulder who yell in my ear and have my voice. I get preemptively defensive around Muslims because the last thing I ever want to hear is the shame and guilt I feel is there because ‘it means I know I’m supposed to be closer God’. No, no. I have thought of every possible explanation and the only thing in my whole life that I can stand behind with complete conviction is that I am anxious about everything to a debilitating degree.