Lily Lived

These ppl are from muslim backgrounds, so they say this in response to the fact that backbiting (not "gossip") is a sin.

Warning people about abusers, predators, and other evil is NOT backbiting. That's safety and it's something you need to do in Islam to protect the community. Talking about abuse or injustice is also not backbiting.

Backbiting is the gossip people do for fun, to ruin someone else's reputation. People can have all sorts of delusions about it, but in reality when you have a victim blaming, misogynistic, status obsessed culture..... it's not the abusers or the men who ever get gossiped about. It's women and other victims, almost exclusively. Let's not act like this is social justice.

For the past couple of days, I was doing someone a small favor. I did my part of it, but the person fumbled their part.... and then as a way of dealing with their own disappointment, they lashed out at me semi publically. Tried to unfairly deflect blame onto me.

A certain group of people are just like that... if you are agreeable to doing people favors in general, they deem you weak. And then when they need someone to lash out at, they pick you.

(And you usually have no way of identifying these people until they lash out like this)

So doing people favors can become cumbersome. I try to be nice for the sake of Allah honestly, but this type of occasional backlash is still difficult to deal with. Especially in my current mental state.

Normally, I just fully ignore these types of people as much as possible. This time I politely pushed back, but then left the convo when they kept trying to argue.

One person who witnessed all of it thankfully defended me, and that was a huge relief.

As I was going about the rest of my day, I felt sad and maybe it showed on my face. Because 6 (or maybe 7) strangers went out of their way to be super nice to me for no reason, in a way that really stood out. One of these strangers was an elderly woman who I briefly passed by on the street.

All of that made me feel much better. The earlier incident probably got to me bc it's a deep family pattern for me.

Then I when I got home, I was reading the Quran and by fate came across this verse from Surah Baqarah:

One act of kindness was literally returned to me in 7-8 more acts of kindness, Alhamdullilah 😭 It's really amazing.

Anyway, everyone there was bascially verbalizing what I already felt inside. People go about their day as normal, but just under the surface is the knowledge of the genoccide. (Most people there were muslim, so maybe that was why it was like that)

The #1 emotion everyone felt about the genocide was guilt & shame for not doing more to stop it. And in new york, many people go about their day working with very vocal zionists, so there's a weird dissoance.

Secondary emotions are anger, horror, and grief ofc.

But I was surprised at how big the sense of guilt in everyone was. And it's valid.... we should feel guilty. I'm talking about this now because when I was making dua earlier, guilt over this was the biggest emotion that came up.