Nokia 6680
My mom used to feed us a spoonful of pure honey every morning before going to school. She believed it’s the best way to wake up the brain, with something that’s healthy and pure. We would get up every morning around 6:30 am, shower, get dressed, have a spoon of honey and then my dad would take me and my siblings to school.
One day, as we were in the car driving to school, my dad asked me to hand him my phone. He had a habit of going through our cellphones regularly.
I handed him my phone and as he looked at it, he saw that my wallpaper was a picture of a famous Arab pop star. He didn’t like that, he thought that idolizing people went against the principles of Islam and more importantly, it went against “real men” behaviour. As he saw the wallpaper of my phone, he rolls down his window and throws my phone out onto the highway. I look out from the window to watch the phone become hundreds of small pieces. I didn’t cry or shout or react, I knew that it would cause more harm to react than not to. I had a very effective and helpful coping mechanism. The method was simple, I would shut down, pull away from everyone around me, and start to fantasize about an escape. I needed to dissociate from living with him in order to survive. I had so many different fantasies of how I would eventually escape my home, and living in these fantasies helped me get through the day. And it did. It worked so well for me to live in dissociation.
20 years later, I find myself reaching for that same coping mechanism every time I feel like I am in a challenging situation. Shut down, pull away, plan an exit. It prevented me from practicing forgiveness. I used to think of forgiveness as a defeat, because whenever my dad would be abusive towards my mom, she always ended up forgiving him and moving on. I thought that maybe if I was the one that held onto the resentment towards him, then there would be justice. Because I didn’t want to accept that he got away with his abusive nature. I took it upon myself to resent him on her behalf. On everyone’s behalf.
Today I realize that even though that coping mechanism protected me from that evil, it is now becoming a detriment to me. Because not every situation is the same and not every person in my life is my dad. The people in my life today, the people who I love, they don’t deserve that same treatment from me. And more importantly, I owe it to myself to recognize that I am only scratching the surface of what forgiveness is. Just because I didn’t practice it at home, doesn’t mean that I don’t have it in me. That shattered Nokia phone brought me so much joy, and today I realize it brings me a very important lesson. I am not broken and I can forgive and move on. Not every situation requires an exit strategy. Maybe there is a world where it’s possible to stop the car, pick up those plastic little pieces and glue them back together.
