Dear Diary, I want to tell you about how I learned to understand perception.

In an earlier story, I told you about how I stopped wearing a hijab. Now I want to back up a bit to tell you about how I began wearing it and my experience with it, as it was all a bit unconventional.

Elementary School

One morning, I simply woke up and decided I wanted to wear a hijab to school that day. I was 9 years old.

Normally families encourage their daughters to start this practice around age 12, or whenever they begin puberty (aka when they become a woman).

But no one made me.

My parents were both surprised and impressed. I could see how happy it made my dad. While I can’t remember much about the why, I’ve thought about it a lot as an adult. I don’t think it came from some deep conviction. I think, if anything, I wanted to do something that felt meaningful. Something that I knew would make my dad proud.

He cared deeply about Islam. Not just as a belief system, but as a way of living “correctly”. And I was a child who wanted his approval, so in turn, I wanted to live “correctly”. I wanted to do the right thing, in the most visible and grand-gesture-esque way possible.

My mom, who converted to Islam, still wasn’t wearing one when I decided it was time to do so for myself. We never talked about how she felt when I announced this desire of mine — whether she felt proud, conflicted, pressured, or all of the above. But a few weeks after I started wearing it, she stopped leaving the house without her hair covered.

I’m not entirely sure where the pressure came from: herself, my dad, or the unspoken pressure of optics. What I do know is that the optics definitely mattered. A lot. A mother less covered than her daughter would have raised questions in the Muslim community that my parents would not be comfortable answering. And so, they made sure to restore that hierarchy.

And then 9/11 happened.

It was 2000 when my mom and I started covering our hair, so we were fairly new hijabis when a fresh hatred and fear of Islam rapidly spread throughout our country.

Thankfully, I grew up in Northern Virginia, so it was filled with pretty intelligent and progressive people. However, I remember being nervous about going back to school. I asked my parents if I could go without my hijab. My mom was okay with it. My dad considered it, but ended up convincing me not to do anything different. So, I kept it on and went to school.

I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I’m frustrated for my younger self. Remember, my dad was someone who pushed to live correctly for Islam and Allah, even if it made me uncomfortable. On the other hand, fuck the people who would have judged anyone, but especially a literal child for wearing a hijab. So part of me is glad to have been taught what conviction is, even if I was unwilling at the time.

I don’t know which version of myself I’m more protective of: the child who wanted to feel safe, or the adult who’s glad she learned early how to stand her ground. Both feel true.

I don’t remember much from that school day, so I’m guessing it may have been relatively ordinary. But what I do remember is what happened after I got off of the school bus. I overheard my best friend Grace’s mom tell her to be careful around me, and that maybe we shouldn’t spend so much time together anymore. This made me feel sad and hurt. And I was a bit surprised, because Grace and her family were not white Americans. They were people of color. From the choppy memory I do have, I don’t think Grace’s mom ever really did keep us from each other. I’m not sure if other adults got involved, or if that was just a moment of fear from her.

Ultimately, I guess the social aspect of being a hijabi that young during that time period was fairly uneventful all things considered. I was white-passing by way of skin and voice, so I was a girl people weren’t phased by. My hijab was the only disruption, and only for some. I wonder if that contrast softened the way people reacted to me, or confused them just enough to keep their questions quiet.

Teenage Years

In 9th grade gym, my class was playing indoor soccer. There was a moment where I likely was trying to be a showoff and tried to head the ball. I hadn’t played any sort of soccer outside of gym classes since I was 5 years old…so I missed. Of course.

The ball grazed the top of my head, which pulled the hijab clean off, exposing my hair. The game immediately stopped. Everyone quickly and respectfully turned around while I fixed it. I remember laughing in that moment and thanking everyone for doing that, but that it wasn’t that big a deal. It was an accident!

I discovered emo music and culture around this time as well. This meant I wore band tees, Converse that I wrote on with Sharpie, thick eyeliner…all black, of course. And every morning, I put on a hijab when I got dressed. Which, I must note, was also black, of course. I could be visibly Muslim, but also visibly angsty. Now looking back, I see what teenage me was starting to do. No matter what I was representing, I was always going to find a way to be myself.

College Years

College was interesting to say the least, mostly because I went to a state school in rural Pennsylvania. Campus wasn’t the issue, though. My professors and peers were all cultured enough that there wasn’t much of note in ways of how I was perceived with my hair covered. It was the town that the school was in.

There was a short stint of time that I worked at a Sheetz gas station my first year at KU. For those of you that don’t know what that is, imagine a made-to-order fast food restaurant, convenience store, and gas station all in one.

Now, this Sheetz was less than a 10 minute drive from campus. But the customers often made me feel like I had been transported to a completely different part of the country.

One day, I was working the register and ringing up an older man for his gas. He looked at me as if he were trying to figure something out. Then he finally asks, “are ya cold?” Some important context: this was early September in Pennsylvania, so it was likely still in the 70s. I looked back at him, confused.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, why’s your head covered?”

“Oh…I’m Muslim?”

“What’s that?”

“…my religion?”

I didn’t know what else to say.

Even recounting this now, I am appalled. Did this man never watch the news or pick up a publication a decade prior during 9/11? I remember women in burqas on many front pages of newspapers.

Because of this, my frustration here is not rooted in discrimination or prejudice. Because this wasn’t hostility, it was emptiness. And emptiness can be unsettling. Not only did I, and an entire group of people (the largest one in the world, I might add), exist outside his frame of reference entirely, but so must many, many others. Reflecting on this years later, I realize that his world was and is small. And I wonder how one can go through life in that way. He had just enough curiosity to ask me why I presented differently at that moment, but not enough to go searching for it outside of his small town. This is a theme for maybe another larger story, but I think it still belongs in this one.

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Not many shifts later, one of my coworkers told me while she was waiting in line for food on her break that one of the regular customers approached her. While I was working behind the counter, he pointed to me and said, “you guys hire those kinds of people now?” She was taken aback, but kept it professional, and simply said that our store didn’t tolerate discrimination. He rolled his eyes and didn’t press much more. I thanked her for telling me, and for standing up for me at that moment. An important thing I want to highlight is that I would have never had any idea about this had she never told me this story.

I don’t remember many big feelings or reactions to finding out that information. But it did stick with me, because I only lasted working at Sheetz for three months before deciding it was much more worth it to drive 35 minutes to the Starbucks in Allentown. It was far less upsetting there.

As far as I know, there were no customers there who uttered a negative word about my outward practice of faith. Just to paint the picture of this better-overall part of town: the years I worked there also gifted me my first experiences with trans people, one being a coworker and another a regular.

To end this time period on a sweet note, a few years later, I was working an evening shift. As I was ringing up some guy for his coffee, he asked me if I went to KU.

“Yeah, I do! Why?”

“Oh I just think I see you on campus from time to time!”

“Oh, nice.”

I didn’t know what else to say, I had never seen him! We had a bit of an awkward silence until he said:

“…I like your hat!”

I may or may not have laughed a little, but I thanked him and then he awkwardly walked away. He meant well! “Hat” is just still such a funny description for a full head covering.

Post-College Boston

A few months after I graduated, I moved from Pennsylvania to Boston. I was psyched to be in a major city where even more people knew things!

But this city is where I really started to understand the dichotomy of having privilege being a white-passing person, while also often being the only visible minority in a room because of my hijab.

The second time that I knew I was being judged was at a restaurant in the South End. I was out with a bunch of my coworkers, having a great time. Not a care in the world, and not noticing anyone being weird. A few weeks later, my friend Camile told me that while we were all out, some guy was staring at me with a dirty look on his face. It had to be because I was Muslim, because why else? We were all just sitting at a table. So she stared back at him until he noticed. Nothing major. Just enough to get him to realize what he was doing and to stop. But yet again: I would have never had any idea about this had she never told me this story, as it was out of sight for me.

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While living in Boston, my brother once told me that I seemed “whiter” because of the way I talked (he described it as valley girl. I did not and do not sound like that, but what can you do?), and the new way I dressed. He wasn’t totally wrong. I did conform in certain ways. (I went through a boat shoe phase ok? Don’t ask me about it.)

But simultaneously, I was more willing than ever to talk openly about Islam, about wearing a hijab, about being visibly Muslim in spaces where I often felt like the only one. I was trying to figure out who I was, and how to exist as I learned new things about myself. Part of this was also realizing that while I wanted to bring light to my differences, I also wanted the freedom to not wear my hijab as much. Which I dissected last year in one of my stories.

There, I talked about the responsibility I felt when starting to drink, and not yet deciding that I would stop wearing a hijab completely. To put it into perspective, for some people I interacted with, I was the only person they knew or met that was Muslim. No matter my own feelings about religion, I still respect that the sanctity of its concept should remain. Yes, I can have my own experience and journey, but deciding to get dressed and put on a hijab every morning also meant that often I’d be the only person some people would visibly see representing Islam. That meant something to me, and it felt bigger than myself.

Why’d I tell you all this?

So all of the above might seem like it’s a bit of a hodgepodge of stories. And you know what? It is!

These are my key stories. The ones I remember in the 20 years I was considered a hijabi.

I’m sure you noticed that there wasn’t too much bad, and in fact, there was a lot of good. I often wonder if I was oblivious to negativity like that in my direction. Or, did judgements only happen out of sight for me, like the two occurrences where someone I knew did catch hostility against me. And I’ve always wondered why and if there were many more I don’t know about. I feel like there has to be, because I know many other young hijabis have more stories than I do.

Not that I’m seeking to be judged, but I truly am curious why I wasn’t confronted or caught looks like I know others have. Were people confused why I looked and sounded “white”, but wore something that was, to them, inherently “not white”, aka dangerous, problematic, or scary? But I looked and sounded white enough that they didn’t feel comfortable questioning me about it?

Would I have more bad experience stories if my skin were darker? Or if I had an accent? Or if I dressed differently? Or what if I had been with a group of people that were all different skin tones and cultures, rather than a group of white people? Or maybe I’m just blessed/lucky/watched over/whatever you want to call it, and I was graced with a fairly good experience for some reason?

The truth is, I’ll never know how different my story would actually be if I had been perceived differently by society. But I do know this: the version of Islam people experienced through me was filtered. Because the version I experienced was filtered. Softened by my whiteness.

🖊️ A.