Fighting Life?

Maybe I am just not the kind of person things work out for.

Before reading this letter, there’s a small task I want you to do.

Go to your bookshelf or your notes app, or that pile of books gathering dust on your floor, and find the most boring, dry, uninspiring book you own. You know the one. The book someone recommended with great enthusiasm that you started and never finished, the one whose first chapter you read twice and still cannot remember. That one.

Until you receive another letter from me, I want you to read one page from it every single day. Just one page. With intention. No skimming. Read it slowly, the way you would read a letter from someone you love. I will tell you why in the next letter.

Now, let’s proceed to the main thing.

If you have spent years pouring yourself into things that did not work out, if you have watched your plans collapse quietly in the night while everyone else seemed to be getting exactly what they prayed for, if you have felt the particular humiliation of trying your best and still finishing last, then this letter was written with your hands in mind.

Allah says in the Quran:

“And do not lose hope in the mercy of Allah. Indeed, no one loses hope in the mercy of Allah except the disbelieving people.” Yusuf, 12:87

I want you to hold that verse somewhere close before we go any further.

Let’s talk about what has brought you here. You did not arrive at disappointment in a single afternoon. It was built slowly, the way erosion works. One failed attempt, then another. One door closed, then a second, then a third you were sure was meant for you. You watched opportunities dissolve. Watched people who seemed less prepared, less sincere, less hungry than you move forward while you remained exactly where you were.

And somewhere along the way, without announcing itself, a thought arrived and made a home inside you.

Maybe I am just not the kind of person things work out for.

I need you to understand that this thought is not a revelation. It is a wound that has learned to sound like wisdom.

Now, everyone carries something from before the failures began. A version of themselves that existed before the rejections accumulated. A self that had not yet learned to expect defeat. If you dig far enough back through your memory, past the embarrassments and the near-misses and the years that felt like they swallowed you whole, you will find something that still belongs to you. A dream you were afraid to say out loud. A capacity you stopped exercising because the cost of trying and failing again felt too high.

Photo by Michael Milverton on Unsplash

Find it. Not to return to it in exactly the form it took before, because you are not the same person you were then. But to remember that it existed. That you were once someone who wanted things without irony. Someone who reached without first calculating the odds of being refused.

That person did not die. They learned to hide. And there is a difference.

Growth after years of failure is not the same as growth after a single setback. It is slower, more suspicious, and more easily spooked. You will begin to move forward, and something inside you will say, ‘Remember the last time you believed in something.” And you will have to keep moving anyway.

The Prophet, peace be upon him, taught us:

“Tie your camel, then put your trust in Allah.”

This hadeeth has always struck me as one of the most practically merciful things ever said. It does not ask you to leap into the unknown with empty hands. It asks you to do what is within your reach and then release the outcome to the One whose reach is infinite. You are not required to guarantee the result. You are required to show up.

So show up.

Start the thing you have been postponing. Not tomorrow, or when conditions improve, and not when you feel ready, because the feeling of readiness is something that follows action, not the other way around. The confidence you are waiting for is buried inside the attempt you are afraid to make.

Personally, I know what it is to watch a plan fall apart and spend months wondering whether rebuilding is worth the risk of having it fall apart again. I know the particular paralysis of someone who has tried enough times that trying itself has become frightening. I am telling you this not to perform vulnerability, but because I think you deserve to know that the person writing to you is not writing from the other side of a mountain they scaled effortlessly. They are writing from somewhere in the middle, where the path is still unclear but the decision to keep walking has been made.

And I am still figuring things out alongside you.

Here is what I want you to do in the coming days.

Pick one area of your life where you have been failing or stagnating. Just one. Do not attempt to rebuild everything at once because that is overwhelming. Pick one thing. The business you keep almost starting. The skill you keep almost learning. The discipline you keep almost building.

Then make it smaller than you think it should be.

This is not because you are incapable of more. But because a small thing done consistently will outlast a large thing done once in a burst of motivation that does not return. Read ten pages a day rather than announcing a book a week. Write two hundred words rather than promising yourself a finished manuscript by month end. Pray two rak’ahs of tahajjud rather than pledging a full night of qiyam you know you will not sustain.

Don’t forget:

“A small deed done consistently is more beloved to Allah than a large deed done occasionally.”

Begin with what you can actually carry. Then build the muscle.

And when the despair returns, I want you to have this supplication ready:

“Allahumma inni a’udhu bika minal hammi wal hazan, wal ‘ajzi wal kasal.”

“O Allah, I seek refuge in You from anxiety and grief, from incapacity and laziness.”

The Prophet, peace be upon him, made this du’a. Which means that anxiety and grief and the feeling of incapacity are not signs that Allah has abandoned you. They are conditions that have always existed in human beings, that the best of human beings have experienced, and that Allah has provided a door for you to walk through.

Make that du’a. Then get up.

Nothing that is worth anything was built without the willingness to be embarrassed in the process. Every person you admire from a distance has a private inventory of failed attempts, abandoned projects, and seasons when nothing moved no matter how hard they pushed. The difference between them and the person who gave up is not talent. It is the decision, made over and over in private, to try one more time.

You are allowed to be tired. You are not allowed to let the tiredness make the final decision.

The stories we tell ourselves become the lives we live. So begin, slowly, carefully, and stubbornly, to tell yourself a different story. Not a story in which everything is fine and failure never happened, but a story in which failure happened and you are still here. In which the years were hard and you are still here. In which things did not work out the way you planned, and you are still here, with your hands open, willing to begin again.

Allah does not waste sincerity. He does not ignore effort offered in His name. What He delays, He does not deny. What He withholds for now, He often returns transformed into something your earlier self would not have had the capacity to receive.

Trust the process. Tie your camel. Keep going.

You are not behind. You are being prepared.