Is there really any hope?
I’m not really sure what to title this but I guess I just need a place to yell for a bit.
I’m 20F Arab and a lesbian and I’ve recently gotten into an altercation with my mum after she was sent a photo of me on a date with a girl without my hijab on (I’m a part time hijabi). I have no idea who told her or sent her the photo but she confronted me about it and said a lot of stuff that I don’t really remember about God and the right path and how she isn’t going to let me ruin my life.
I feel like everything is over, my life, my present, my future, everything. I don’t really know how to function anymore I’ve been so paranoid about people seeing me or noticing me now to the point where I’ve basically deleted almost everyone that knows me off of social media and I haven’t left my room for days.
And it’s not like she was loud or yelled or hurt me physically when she confronted me, she talked to me like normal and I can’t handle it. Why couldn’t she be angry why did she have to hug me why did she give me so much love when she should hate me. I hate her and I hate myself, I feel so suffocated by the love that she gives me to the point where I can’t imagine myself without it. Why did I have to be so stunted and reliant on my mother’s love that she gives not to me but to an image of the perfect Muslim daughter that she will never have. She doesn’t love me for who I am in front of her and it hurts, it hurts so much, but I can’t imagine a life without that love either.
I know that one day I will have to let go and force her to let go of me as well because this isn’t normal or healthy for either of us but I can’t even fathom how that would look like or where I would go and what I would do. The panopticon of culture has been hovering over my head since I was a child that I can’t do anything that brings shame onto the family or myself that I don’t know how to function without it anymore, in a context where 3eib or shame doesn’t exist.
I’m an only child and my father is a fucking asshole who doesn’t care about either of us as well and it weighs on me so heavily that I am all that she has and it feels like she is all that I have. I cannot bear the thought of leaving the home without a husband, in the proper way, because I’ve functionally never formed an identity away from her. I wish things were normal between us that I wasn’t cursed by this love, that I don’t feel like I’m committing some grave sin when I think about myself for once. Whenever I even try to do something for myself, go out with friends, take the hijab off, have fun, I’m always hit with from her that I am a part of her flesh and that I am not an individual but a part of a family unit and a community that I always have to think of first. It’s so suffocating but I don’t know what to do, it feels like I am drowning.
Every relationship or situationship that I’ve had since the age of 15 has blown up in my face because of this. I only just broke up with the girl I was seeing when my mum found out today and it was because of this, because of my fucking mum and her inability to have boundaries and let me be an adult. Sometimes I think that I’m not someone that can be loved, I’m made only for brief encounters with people that end when they realise how much of a coward I am. And I hate it. But I don’t know how to fix it I don’t have an answer I just don’t know.
I can’t pretend I’m straight for her sake and marry a man and have children like she wants me to I just can’t do that. But I’ve been so scared that that will be my life because I will be too scared to stand up to her and force her to let me go and grow into my own person. Everything is so much right now and I just don’t know what to do.