A Muslimah's Struggles in Life - Part 1

A sister in Islam helped me with two of my essays. She is a wonderful sister , who I found to be lively till I read her following email regarding her struggles of her life. Despite all these hardship, I was amazed to see her so lively. She didn't mind helping others despite her hardship. I never knew about her struggles until recently when she mentioned it unconsciously. I thought I will share this email with you all and hope it would help us to make our iman stronger and be more thankful to our Merciful Lord!



Struggles of Life - Part 1


LOL! There's a good reason I'm in the writer's groups
- I love to write! But I am like Winston Churchill
who wrote a long letter to his father one day and at
the bottom wrote, "By the way, Dad - sorry this is so
long, but I didn't have time to write a shorter one!"
(Words spill out of me - only when I'm writing, not
talking - but I have to spend some time to edit it and
make it shorter most times!)

Unfortunately, I have no time right now to write for a
living or even as a hobby - or even shorten my email
correspondences! I have a lot of medical bills and
such (and any kind of stress - even happy stress -
sends my health spiraling downward again - I can do
very little and am doing good to get any housework
done or bills paid).

We are living literally day-by-day, praying to Allah
we make it another day and can feed, clothe, and keep
a roof over our heads. I guess that is my life story
though. My husband had a nice job working at Apple
until he got laid off with so many thousands of people
who are losing their jobs (it's cheaper for companies
here to hire people overseas, so we lose our jobs
here). I used to have a job as an International
Director of Operations at a software company in San
Francisco until I got sick and disabled. That is 5
years now. For a while I was hand-crafting soaps,
lotions, perfumes, aroma therapy stuff (it helped my
own health recover somewhat, so friends encouraged me
to go into business selling it - which I did for a
while over the internet). I didn't get any disability
income and the soaps business didn't make enough to
live on either, especially with my health
restrictions, space restrictions (we live in an
apartment, not a house), and inability to grow the
company because I was only one person who couldn't do
a big business all by myself. So I decided to move on
and do something else (hard decision - I loved making
the soaps, etc., and so did my customers!)

Now my husband is a real estate agent, which if you
don't know much about it sounds like lucrative work,
but he has to pay so much for his own advertising, pay
a lot in printing costs, only gets 1% commission on
anything sold anyway, and he works all hours -
sometimes 7 am to 11 pm. After he sells something, it
is usually a month or more before he gets his little
commission paid, too. This month I don't think there
is going to be any commission checks at all, so I am
trying to concentrate more on building my Legal
Services marketing business (pre-paid legal services).


Also, my kids are starting high school in a couple of
weeks and I am not exactly ready for that, either!

Lots of things came up this summer that just changed
all the plans I had, too. So at this point I am
really frantic, trying to get a lot of various things
done that had to be put off for a few weeks. Now it's
all piling up! Insha'Allah, I will be having an
easier time after September.

It's good, masha'Allah, that you have time to write
and that you can write so many things so quickly. You
have good ideas, too. That's one of the reasons that I
have held back from doing any article writing myself.
I mean, I have a lot of things already written, I
guess. Over time I have collected some in my computer
files (and some of those got lost because I had either
a computer crash, or the on-line files I kept them on
were with a business that went OUT of business and
then just deleted everything! agggh!) But it takes
me a long time to finish writing something. Actually,
it takes a long time to get STARTED. I usually have a
mental block on the first sentence or two that keeps
the writing delayed while I work that out. But after
I get the first sentence, then the rest of it just
comes flowing out faster than I can even keep up with!

I found that the best way to get myself writing is
when I am writing in response to something else that I
have a passion about. If it is a matter that I am
knowledgeable AND passionate about, I will write, that
is. I'm a super researcher, too. I have always loved
to research. But I'm not all that good when it comes
to someone giving me a topic that I don't know a lot
about (or care much about) and then asking me to write
about it - especially on a deadline.

Maybe someday I will collect all my writings and just
make a book out of the various topics I've written on.
Or maybe I will someday just collect all the
articles, edit them to bring them up-to-date if they
need it, and then use them one-by-one for single
publishing in magazines. I also have a life story
that some people find interesting - and few short
stories written. I've lived a lot - experienced a lot
of joy and a lot of pain in my short 45 years.

Well, speaking of bills... (ugh)... I have a big stack
of those, a lot of laundry, and some training sessions
to get through for my business. I better send this
off to you now before THIS becomes my next novel! LOL