Rant

Warning: Teenage angst alert! Please do not read if you have low tolerance for bitter moanings and melodramatic declarations against no doubt well-meaning but bumbling parents. Also, just this once, please refrain from offering excellent advice on the virtues of patience... this is simply a selfish, sulky, good ol' angsty teen rant, not a cry for help.

It's 'Eid night, and I feel... bored, lonely, restless. In short, miserable.

I've noticed recently that I seem to be in a constant state of... evolution, almost - intellectual evolution. Right up until now, I've always been satisfied with reading, with absorbing knowledge in anticipation of a great future.

But now... now, I want things to change. I want to stop reading so much, and I want to go out into the world and start *doing* things. Reading the news, listening to the adults talk about what's wrong with ourselves and with the world, makes me want to scream. I want to stop talking, stop reading, and just go out and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!!!!

I'm sick and tired of my passivity, and the passivity of others. By being so passive, by not doing anything, are we not indirectly responsible for the evil that's going on in the world?

My total lack of experience in the world frustrates me beyond belief. My parents, in their attempts to shelter me from the fitnah that surrounds us in this world, have perhaps been overzealous. As a result, my childhood was spent in isolation (hence my anti-social tendencies... like being downstairs typing this out while my Desi relatives socialize happily upstairs); my preteens were spent at the Dar (the Islamic centre my dad runs), and I was content; now in my adolescence I've been yanked away from my comfortable niche at the Dar and have been cruelly transplanted in a tiny backwater city where there isn't much to do and seemingly not much to learn from. As though the move to a new city wasn't devastating enough for me, it seems that my parents are insisting on making things worse by not recognizing how miserable I am here (even though it should be obvious - I've burst into tears often enough in the 6 months we've been here!) and waving off my loneliness as 'a phase'.

In my old city at least, I had the sisters from the Dar to help me out, to patiently listen to my passionate rants and convince my mother that I *wasn't* a silly, irresponsible child to be ignored, that I was a maturing young person with valid thoughts and opinions.

But now... now I truly am alone. Neither of my parents seem to realize that I need to be able to get out of the house, to be active, to be social with people other than the few giggly teenage girls I know from the Madrasah. They have no idea how desperate I am for the Dar women - or rather, they just don't think that my desperation is important.Telling them doesn't change anything. Once they've decided to think a certain way, nothing in the world will ever change their minds. Not even tears and tantrums from their sixteen year old daughter.

So I've given up on trying to convince them. But that just makes it worse for me. It makes me want to scream and cry and do something ridiculous and crazy just to make them realize how bad things are for me. Of course, I won't actually do something ridiculous and crazy, because I know from past experience how it'll turn out - the same as ever, for all my parents' talk of trying to make things better or whatever.

So. Back to my helplessness. It infuriates me. I've tried to be patient, but sometimes patience can really, really wear thin - like right now.

What does one do when one has been isolated from the world practically all one's life; when one's parents are totally stubborn and refuse to change their mind about anything, and having heart-to-heart talks don't change a thing; when one is virtually a prisoner on a (practically)desert island?

When dealing with others, my parents are fountains of wisdom and knowledge; when it comes to themselves and their children, they are deaf and blind to all reason.
They refuse to accept that I need to be able to experience life, to gain practical knowledge and wisdom in order to function in the real world. Yet it is they, who refuse to release me from my admittedly comfortable prison, who scorn me and my ideas, calling me naive and childish!

So here I am... helpless and useless... *Sigh* All right, I'll go to my room to tearfully bemoan my lot in life and leave you all in peace...