I sat awake thinking of love.

I felt as if I was sitting back in the Temple of the Moon, this exact time last year in Cusco, Peru.

There was the same familiar feeling of embodying, once again, this huge, immense, universal grief for women and towards love.

The grief could feel like a burden, but I suppose I simultaneously embody what a gift it is to sit with the glory of the unrecognised woman.

To not only witness their resilience and perseverance, but to be feel it.

A humble sadness.

Celibacy didn’t begin as a spiritual vow or a moral stance. It gradually developed after leaving my partner, and choosing not to reach desperately for another body as a bandage for a broken heart.

I didn’t want to distract what needed to be healed by borrowing validation or attention from another.

For those who have known me a long time, it will not come as a surprise that sleep has rarely come easy to me.As a child, nights were filled with hypervigilance instead of rest.

My mother’s addiction meant I stayed awake listening to the sound of her moving through rooms, cleaning compulsively, music playing too loudly or for too long. When she was gone, I remained awake anyway, suspended in thought and hyper attentiveness.

My nervous system adapted to instability, not in a dramatic way, but in a quiet, internal one.

Deeply reflective. Acutely aware. Constantly tracking emotional undercurrents, shifts in energy, changes in tone.

This was not a personality trait, but a response to an environment that required vigilance. Neurodivergency likely amplified it.

Layered onto this was the complexity of secrecy. I learned early that telling the truth was unsafe, and so honest connection to self and others became fractured. I could not fully meet others where they were, nor pretend to be like other children, because my inner world was governed by realities that had no permission to exist outside the home.

Psychology now recognises that prolonged childhood stress, particularly when paired with secrecy, alters the nervous system’s baseline. What looks like introspection or withdrawal is often protection.

Merely thoughts not facts from an unconventional Muslim