⚠️ Trigger / Trauma Disclaimer: This reflection mentions domestic violence, emotional manipulation, and medical trauma. It is shared from lived experience as part of a faith and healing journey. Please read with care, and pause if you need to. You are not alone. 🕊️

Bismillāh ir-Raḥmān ir-Raḥīm. 🌿

When I think about that season now, I don’t replay every fight or every lie. I remember the quiet. The quiet after the door slammed. The quiet of a bus rolling through the desert at 3 a.m. with three babies asleep across my lap. The quiet of hospital hallways where machines breathe for people who can’t. Quiet can be a mercy, but it can also be a mirror. In that quiet, I started to see what I could no longer excuse.

Why I stayed wasn’t complicated. I stayed because “wanted” felt like “worthy,” because attention looked like peace, because chaos was familiar and familiarity felt safe. I stayed because I had a baby on my hip, another on the way, and a deep fear that my children would grow up without the stability I never had. I told myself endurance was love. It wasn’t. It was survival wearing a borrowed name.

The Greyhound was not just a bus, it was a metaphor. Twenty-eight hours of stop-and-go, strange stations, stale air, and the ache of pretending this was a road to “better.” There’s a kind of hope that isn’t holy, the kind that says, “if I can just get there, I’ll be new.” You don’t get new from geography. You get new from truth.

Janet’s house taught me another lesson. Manipulation doesn’t always come with fists. Sometimes it bakes dinner, laughs loud, forges a receipt, pockets the rent, and smiles while you drown. Losing my father’s ring hurt more than losing the address, because it proved that people will take even the sacred if you leave it unguarded. Boundaries are not betrayal. Boundaries are how you love the parts of yourself God is trying to heal.

The hospital is where my denial started to fracture. People ask why I went. I could say paperwork or obligation, but the real answer is that trauma can make you loyal to pain. I went because the part of me that didn’t believe I deserved tenderness still wanted to earn it. I left with swollen eyes and an unexpected seed: maybe Allah’s mercy wasn’t a prize for perfect people, maybe it was a lifeline for drowning ones.

What I wish I could tell that girl is simple:

You are not difficult, you are discerning.

You are not broken, you are becoming.

You are not responsible for another adult’s choices, only for your own healing.

And healing doesn’t always look like one big door flying open. Sometimes it’s a hundred small locks clicking loose, one honest decision at a time.

If you’re reading this in your own quiet, here’s a prayer you can borrow:

Yā Allāh, Al-Latīf (The Subtle, Most Gentle),

soften what fear has hardened in me,

show me the difference between patience and self-abandonment,

and guide me to the kind of safety that makes me truthful. Āmīn.

I didn’t meet Islam because I was good at choosing men. I met Islam because, despite my choices, Allah kept choosing me. Over and over. In bus stations, in courtrooms, in NICU rooms, in the split-second decisions that looked like failure but were actually exits.

If this chapter resonates, the full episode walks through the details I don’t rehash here, not for shock, but for clarity. Stories lose their power when shame keeps them secret. Mine is out loud on purpose.

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