For exactly one month and eight days, I am the person I want to be. I became free. I didn’t forget the burden I had on my shoulders one month ago, sitting and crying every night, pacing up and down in my room, coming to millions of dead ends. And the sick mentality that made me go through these.

I’m 17. I didn’t start wearing a hijab with the pressure of someone. I started wearing a hijab because I didn’t want to endure any psychological pressure. People around me always said, “always or never,” because I saw how things were, and I was manipulated. At 13, I was at the age of what religious people called “Akil baligh” (pubescent). Nobody can ever make me accept the argument that a 13-year-old child can question and make a rational decision until that summer month. In summer, I went to a boarding course that I could endure for only 1 week. The only thing that was told there was, “Don’t question, you’ll abandon religion if you start questioning.” I questioned. And I abandoned.

I hate all the sick mentalities that put the burden of not feeling like self on that person who feels this way, and that associate honor with hijab. My ideas and ideologies were not compatible with neither what I was doing nor the hijab I was wearing. I remember the chill running down my neck the moment I realized this. There were two roads ahead of me — two roads that end badly. I was either going to take off this piece of cloth, do what I want and get adverse reactions, or I would wear it forever, and I would keep saying, “I could be like that if I had another life.”

I chose the first one with all my courage, leaving my fears behind, people’s glances, insults, thoughts like will I be able to be with my parents just like before. Will I be kicked out of the house or just get away with beating. I laid aside millions of my speech trials and improvised only at the pinnacle of my patience. I told what I felt, what I thought one by one. “Ideas are true not when everybody accepts them, they are true when you accept them.” No young girl should be forced to go through all this just because she has a conservative family, while her peers suffer stupid pangs of love.Because neither body nor psychology can tolerate this situation. I would salute you, courageous woman, if you rejected the norms, the rules of behavior of the society you were born into, and succeeded in writing your own story!

Translator: Leto

(Image: Anastasiia Ku)