Bismillāh ir-Raḥmān ir-Raḥīm 🌿

When I was nineteen, I thought marriage was freedom.

Not love. Not destiny. Just escape.

After years of being micromanaged, misdiagnosed, and misunderstood, I was desperate for a way out — any way out.

And marriage looked like the door.

Justin wasn’t a soulmate. He was safety — or at least, that’s what I told myself. He was older, stable, calm, predictable. All the things my life had never been. And for a girl who had grown up in chaos, that kind of quiet felt like peace.

But I wasn’t ready for peace.

Because peace requires healing, and I hadn’t done that yet. What I called “freedom” was really just running — away from my mother, away from my pain, away from myself.

We married for all the wrong reasons. I wanted independence; he wanted obedience. And before long, I found myself trapped in a new version of the same cage I thought I’d escaped. My mother’s voice followed me into that marriage — the criticism, the guilt, the constant reminder that I was “too much.”

She’d call and tell me how to be a “better wife,” and somehow, he listened. The control I grew up under didn’t disappear. It just changed hands. Eventually, they both decided what was “wrong” with me wasn’t trauma — it was the medication for my “bipolar disorder”.

No psychiatrist. No evaluation. Just two people who needed an explanation that wasn’t them.

And before I knew it, I was on Lexapro and Clonazepam — numbed into silence. For four years, I lived in that fog. Until one day, I woke up and realized I hadn’t been living at all.

And when I finally found the courage to leave, I did what unhealed women often do — I ran straight into the next disaster. I chased freedom again, only to find it wearing a different face, a different name, the same pain.

But here’s what I didn’t understand back then: Freedom without healing isn’t freedom at all. It’s just another kind of captivity. It took me years — and a lot of broken versions of myself — to learn that you can’t rebuild your life until you stop building it on pain.

Now, when I look back at that nineteen-year-old girl, I don’t see shame anymore. I see survival. I see a woman who was trying her best with what she knew.

And I see how Allah was already guiding me — even when I didn’t recognize His hand in it yet.

If you’ve ever outgrown the version of yourself that everyone else needed you to be, remember — Allah doesn’t ask you to shrink for the comfort of others. He asks you to rise into who you were always meant to become.

With endless duʿāʾ and gratitude,

RebekahAnn 🌿

The NeuroSpicy Revert

If you found comfort here, pass it on — for the Prophet ﷺ said, “Convey from me, even if it is one verse.”

Get full access to The NeuroSpicy Revert at theneurospicyrevert.substack.com/subscribe