Not Finding My Story | Becoming the One Who Collects Them | The Birth of Sit With Aqsa

Mid-recording this video I had a realization that genuinely stopped me. The relatability I was desperately craving during my lowest of low days, I found it. Years later. In my own podcast. Sit with Aqsa started during one of the hardest seasons of my life. A mental health struggle that made getting out of bed, brushing my teeth, taking a shower feel like the most difficult things I had ever been asked to do. And when I went online looking for stories that were not telling me to YOLO my way through life, stories that actually matched where I was and not where I was supposed to be, I found nothing. I kept coming back deflated. I kept using the language of should with my therapist because somewhere in not being able to find anyone like me I had convinced myself that I was the one who was out of place. That I was the outcast. And the people who had promised to be there through thick and thin were nowhere to be found, which meant I was fending for myself in every sense of the word. And then God did what God does. Because years later, mid-sentence in this video, it hit me that the same person who could not find a single soul to relate to is now sitting across people from completely different lives, different struggles, different worlds entirely, and walking away from every single episode thinking how are we so similar? There has not been one episode where I did not leave with that feeling. And I did not plan any of it. Allah, who we as Muslims know is the most subtle, the most generous, took the exact thing that broke me and turned it into the thing that keeps filling me back up. When I share about Sit with Aqsa I always go back to my hard days as where it started. But just recently I realized something deeper about the anchor underneath all of it and it goes back to my roots, to Islam, to what it means for me to be an unapologetically Muslim woman who wants everything she puts forward to be a reflection of that. Our Prophet, peace be upon him, did not just tell people how to do good. He showed them. He was someone who could have had the most glamorous life imaginable and chose instead to be a man of service, to the people and ultimately to Allah, because his anchor was always how much he had been given. That is what I keep coming back to every time I sit with someone. There is this image I always come back to. A crowded room where everyone is looking at one thing and somewhere in the corner there is a person feeding a stray, journaling, quietly doing something good when no one is watching. I would always go to that person. And my dream, if I am being honest, is to travel the world just to find those people. The ones I call the friends of Allah. The ones who keep choosing good even when life has given them every reason not to. I want to sit with them, hear them, and put their stories out into the world not just to give them a platform but so that someone sitting alone somewhere, going online the way I once did, desperately looking for something to hold onto, finds it. Finds a story that makes them feel like what they are going through is valid. That they are not the outcast. That they are not alone. That is what this is. That is what it has always been.