u/Cute_Particular632

I was born in a very toxically religious family, and ever since i was little I’ve basically have had rules of islam shoved down my throat. Once i was even enrolled into a fully islamic school in grade 1 and that was pretty traumatic. Over time it developed into religious trauma and i’d say it’s safe to say i’m not really a muslim anymore- or ever was if we ignore the fact i was basically forced. I still have to fast cause I live with my mom as i’m a minor and she would definitely beat me up if i didn’t fast. I don’t pray, read Quran or anything else though.

However, recently, my mom has been forcing me to read the quran, and eventually she came to a deal that she’d pay me, in us dollars, 209 dollars for me to finish the quran. Now that’s ALOT…but should i genuinely? Because i’m in a pretty bad mental state right now and reading the Quran makes me feel so empty and sad inside. I’d basically be starting from scratch and there’s also the fact that my mental state would deny it..lmk if i should take up the offer though…

Drawing is my coping mechanism, or at least one of many. I was talking to my mom one day about my interest in arts, however, i DID specify that it’s just a hobby and i wouldn’t be taking any classes of it or pursuing it as an actual occupation. However, my mom for some reason totally missed it. She said i you can’t take arts, and told her i was not really going to as i mentioned before but she had to for some reason start criticize me.

First she started with telling me how bad my drawings are and that i wouldn’t be able to even come close to to passing, especially since my sister, who had taken arts as a subject in high school didn’t pass, and my mom said her art was amazing and if she didn’t pass arts then i couldn’t even dream it. This was obviously very sudden to me, as i didn’t know why she was slandering my drawings all of a sudden when she didn’t even have a reason to. I obviously started defending myself and said she had no right to tell me that for no reason. I don’t usually let stuff she says get to me, but this one hit hard, because i’m not professional at drawing or whatever, but i’m passionate about it and i love learning new ways to draw stuff. Also because i’m a very competitive person and, as pathetic as it sounds, i genuinely do place my self worth on whether i can be better than someone or not. If i work hard on something and see someone do it 10 times better than me, i often just contemplate quitting it. Yes this isn’t the best thing but anyway.

My mom continued on saying how my art was actually super bad and my sister’s was very good, which is why she recommended my sister to take arts as a subject in the first place and she’d never recommend it to me since i was terrible at it as, according to her, i took after her in my drawing skills (which doesn’t even makes sense cause art is a skill? Not something passed on?) and this particular statement hit even harder than anything. I genuinely did start to tear up infront of her but i hid it well enough cause i knew she would tell everyone and also insult me if i did start crying infront of her. I genuinely had just came back after a remotely good day, a change from all the past days i felt empty, and now just coming back home and there was my mom yelling at me for being bad at something i was so passionate about.

It’s been a while since this, and i’m sure i missed alot of other cruel stuff she said about me cause i have bad memory, but these were probably the main points. Anyways, i thought i was sad for just one day. I did have a mental breakdown in secret on that day because i felt i wasn’t even qualified enough to draw at this point. I was wrong though and this day affects me even now, her voice echoes in my brain whenever i try to draw so i just stopped drawing, even after i took a slight break from it. I feel like i’m being immature, i should just suck it up but i can’t. Maybe i’m just done with doing so and my brain is so tired of “sucking it up” that the next bad thing that happened to me feel so bad i can’t get it out of my head, but i think it’s mostly cause art is, as i mentioned, a way i express myself, so those words may have hit a more deeper place. I dunno though. Also sorry if my English wasn’t the best here, i was in a rush.