How It's Going: May 2025
A monthly update & round-up
Welcome to How It’s Going. This is a new monthly round-up of my life and writing, and a chance to check in with you beautiful people.
Life Lately
Ottawa weather has graduated from freezing my little toes off to way too hot and humid. Anyone who tells you we have four seasons in Ottawa is lying. We have raining-sideways-winter-aka-fall, deep freeze winter, wet-muddy-winter-aka-spring, and summer. Today the sun was shining so brightly, I nearly screamed my eyes! as I emerged from the house to run an errand.
Summer is tricky for me as a hijabi. I am partial to chunky sweaters, and they work for our other three seasons. Still, every year as summer roles around I realize I don’t have enough outfits to easily transition from office to out-and-about for Ottawa humidity.
Lucky for me, a couple of weeks ago it was time for another hijabi clothes swap. This is exactly what it sounds like. A group of us get together every few months at someone’s house with the castoffs from our closets and a potluck offering, and we see what’s what.
This is my favourite kind of shopping. I left the swap with several new long, flowy tops that will be great for summer, along with a couple of chunky sweaters, because I have a sweater problem😅. And it’ll be winter again soon, amiright?
On another note, as if to make a liar out of me for sharing an essay about their love of soccer and disregard for hockey, my boys are now watching hockey again. It started when both our hometown team and our favourite team made the playoffs after a prolonged absence. Both were ousted in the first round but it was enough to trigger some interest.
I’m not holding my breath this time. We’ll see how long it lasts.
Mood
If a person’s psychological state could be depicted in the form of children’s toys, mine would be a yo-yo. I am positively giddy with the arrival of more family in town. I am also in utter despair about the ongoing (and worsening) genocide in Gaza. Most nights, I want to scream into my pillow.
The micro and the macro are at odds right now. My personal life is frenetic in the good ways. Also, the world is a mess and it is messing with my mind to watch it all. I don’t know how to balance these two opposites.
Writing
I wrote about representation, and why I’m over it in my first essay for the unfinished letters series this month. I’m really proud of this one. Most of my pieces follow one thread from start to finish. But for this piece, I wove together several threads about how my thinking has changed on representation over the years.
For my second unfinished letter this month, I shared a piece about wrestling with my status (or lack thereof) as “someone who is cool”.
Once again, my favourite part was the discussion in the comments section. My friend
(who makes an appearance in the piece) may have gotten to the heart of my perceived paradox.
Can’t stop thinking about
This essay/poem from Dr. Ezzideen Shehab, recited by
The novel Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett. Ann has been one of my favourites for years, and this one lives up to her incredibly high standards.
The Artist’s Way. I just started this—I know I know I’m about a million years late here—and I can feel my resistance to everything. I am very resentfully doing my morning pages and hating every second of it. Holding out hope that this teaches me to get out of my own way creatively.
This hilarious clip of comedian Mo Amer talking about Hummus on Jimmy Kimmel
- ’s weekly round up of news from Israel/Palestine, including Netanyahu in his own words admitting that the goal of the war on Gaza is ethnic cleansing:
Lastly… a special request
Next month, this newsletter will be two years old. I started with exactly zero readers and now there are over 3500 of you here. Coming home to writing after years away has been clarifying and lifechanging. Even when things are hard, even when I am struggling in other areas of life, this space reminds me that I have a voice. That there are people like you who value the words of an Arab Muslim Canadian.
Today, I’m asking you to consider a paid subscription to Letters from a Muslim Woman. To support this writing in a practical and tangible way. To help me reach more readers with words that humanize, not demonize.
On top of the warm, fuzzy feeling you’ll get from helping me continue to write, you will also get access to my unfinished letters series, where I go into the unvarnished stuff I’m not comfortable sharing with the whole internet. I publish two new unfinished letters every month, and there’s a year’s worth of archives to catch up on.
If a paid subscription is beyond your capacity or just not your thing, I’m asking you to consider buying me a coffee, to keep the creative fuel going.
Tell me
Are you dealing with season-shifts? Do you have 4 seasons where you live or is it basically two? How do you handle professional office clothes in the summer (help pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaase 🤣🤣)
Have you read any good books lately? Got recs for me?
Do you do morning pages? Does it get easier?
Karen Armstrong's "A History of God" has been mesmerizing. It's dense, but it's introduced me to Al-Ghazali (whose crisis of faith is quite touching) and the mystics. It's also been an interesting reminder of how ecumenical Islam was at its inception (and still is for many). Armstrong has a biography of Muhammad that I'm looking forward to reading next. She is a former nun who now sees research as her faith practice. And from what I can tell, she really does approach research in a mystical way, trying to inhabit the worlds and emotional circumstances that defined faith for the people she studies, trying to feel and believe as they felt and believed.
I love morning pages! I’ve been doing gem since 2017. I find that they announce things to me that later occur—like my psyche knows what’s for me, and it’s just waiting for me to self-actualize enough to get there. I can look back at my journals and see a map to the life I’ve built, including concrete details like the house we live in. Back in 2017 I kept writing about living next to a baseball field. Now, we have one right outside our back gate.