I can pinpoint the exact moment I took the red pill.
I was sitting in the middle of my apartment in Washington, D.C., surrounded by dozens of cardboard boxes filled with things that made up my life for the past year. It was a Friday. I had completed my last day of work the day before and was officially resigned from the position that started the foundation of my post-grad life. I was starting my first day at my new dream job at a major media company in New York City on Monday.
My dad, or Baba as I like to call him, had just arrived from New Jersey with a moving truck to help me pack my things. He was sitting beside me on the couch as my cat, Karma, played with the streams of sunlight pouring in from the bay window behind us, which overlooked my beautiful Connecticut Ave. HR called from NYC about 20 minutes ago.
“We need to postpone your start date by two weeks,” they said on the phone, as I stared at the disarray of moving boxes around me.
“What do you mean you’re postponing? I’m starting in two days. I’m moving from D.C. to New York today. I have all these moving expenses. That would be two weeks of no salary. I could have just stayed at my job…”
“We’re postponing it by two weeks.”
Baba and I sat in silence on the couch, digesting that information. “You know, if you’re nervous, it’s not too late to undo all of this,” he said. “You’re still here. You can unpack your boxes. You can just go back to work tomorrow and tell them you changed your mind.”
It wasn’t that simple. And, in retrospect, I didn’t know what exactly I was leaving behind in that moment: Financial security. Comfort. A stable living situation. Certainty. But, I did know that I was painfully ripping myself away from the entire life I started to establish for myself in D.C., in exchange for what I perceived to be a lifetime opportunity. It’s easy to get romantic about life outside of a 9 to 5, but I didn’t realize just how much it brought to my life that I took for granted until it was soon robbed from me.
The only clarity I had was that I felt a strong pull towards New York City that May. The momentum was already swinging me full force, and everything was already set in motion for my relocation. I felt that there was a reason life was taking me to one of the media capitals of the world, in spite of whether I consciously felt ready for it. Even if it meant enduring a limbo-like two weeks — which soon turned into four, and then six, and you can guess how that subplot ended up.
Back to the couch. My options? Blue pill: Familiarity. Karma gets to remain perched on her windowsill. The ground of Connecticut Ave. remains firm beneath our feet. Red pill: take a risk and unintentionally discover just how deep in overdraft fees the bank account can go.
Karma jumped into my lap. “I think I’m still going to go,” I told Baba. “Everything happens for a reason. I’m sure everything will work out.”
I took the red pill.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, an entire relocation to the Tristate area, and countless sleepless nights later. I got a bleaker call from HR while enjoying a shish kabob dinner with my friend Aimann Rasheed at my favorite restaurant in Paterson, NJ. The media company that hired me was slammed with a multimillion dollar lawsuit that not only caused a total replacement of its leadership, but also resulted in the reckless negligence of my and countless other employees’ livelihoods.
Aimann is the co-founder of Biyo, a biometric payment system that has been making waves in the tech scene. At that moment, he could see that not even our kabob could keep me from the brink of tears.
“Listen, maybe it wasn’t meant for you. Maybe the best thing is that you focus on MuslimGirl. I think you’re supposed to be one of those amazing entrepreneurs. I think this moment is the hiccup in your story that changes everything.”
MuslimGirl picked up a lot of momentum in the media scene this year. A platform for Muslim women’s voices on contemporary topics in Western societies, our opinions and stereotype-defiant antics were getting mentioned everywhere from TIME to Fortune. I had been working on it while keeping my 9 to 5 in D.C. since I graduated college one year ago.
Now that just enough time has passed for me to look back on it, I keep thinking back to that sunny final afternoon on my couch in D.C. at the beginning of the summer. Right now, I’m well rested and fresh from my first trip to Dubai, where I spoke at the Global Islamic Economy Summit about millennial entrepreneurism. I’m banging out the second installment of my Forbes column, ironically a chronicle of what brought it to life in the first place. My Facebook profile got verified a couple of days ago, so I guess people can feel a little more inclined to like my weird statuses now. And I keep thinking back to that fateful moment when I was sitting on my couch in D.C.
If you had told me back then about everything we would build for MuslimGirl by the end of the summer, would I still make the sacrifice? Would I make that painful trade off? Would I think it’s all been worth it?
Even in the midst of all this hustle and the scrapping and — still — the uncertainty, I know I would have said yes in a heartbeat. But, now we need to get down to business: how will we establish MuslimGirl as a promising media venture? I’ll get into that next.
