Mini-Auto Biography

I figured I'd need one, y'know, for when I become famous and people start google-ing my name. :P

I was born in the bustling city of St. Petersburg, more specifically in Peterhof, the youngest of four daughters and I was raised a Grand Duchess. When I was eight years old, my father threw a grand ball to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Romanov rule. My grandmother was giving me a beautiful music box that sang a song we both knew so well, and a sparkling necklace that said "Together in Paris". Suddenly, a bad man (who wasn't invited to our grand ball)with a bat (the flying type) interrupted our party and cast a spell on my family. I know right? Mad rude…

I would hope that if you are a sane person reading this post, you know that I am in fact, not the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia. I just really liked the Disney movie.

I was actually born in Africa, in a place called the Pride Lands, to a King and his Queen. My birth meant that my Uncle Scar was second in line to take the throne and--

Okay, okay, I'll stop now.

I really was born in Africa though, but in Egypt. Cairo, to be more specific. We moved to the United States when I was two years old, and I don't remember much before the age of three. My first memory, actually, involved a yellow dress that I was very fond of wearing, and sitting on the beach in Sharm El-Sheikh with my parents and younger sister, who was still in diapers at the time. I remember being upset because I had dropped ice cream on my yellow dress.

But that's enough about toddler me.

The summer before sixth grade my parents decided that we'd move back to Egypt for a year, so they can go perform Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Makkah. Why did we have to go to Egypt for that? Well, one of my aunts living in Egypt wasn't married at the time, and she would be able to look after us while my parents were away. Hajj occurs roughly during the middle of the school year, so we'd have to stay for the entire year.

The schooling system in Egypt is not the same one used in the United States, but it's very similar to the one used in the United Kingdom. Education was based on three phases: pre-primary, primary, preparatory, and secondary. Pre-primary is two years long, and it is synonymous to America's pre-school and kindergarten years. Then is primary, which is five years long; followed by preparatory, which is three years long; and finally secondary, which is also three years long. When telling someone what "grade" you were in, you'd say, "Preparatory Year 2," and so on. So you see, a student graduating from a school in Egypt would go to college a year earlier than a student graduating from a school in the U.S. It was just my luck that I had finished my five years of 'primary schooling' and I was placed in year 1 of preparatory school. When we returned to the United States, I took the entrance exam for Al-Ghazaly High School, and they placed me in eighth grade. And that's the story of how I "skipped a grade". It wasn't because I was some kind of super smart child prodigy; I was just in the right place at the right time, so to speak.

High school was whatever, I guess. I transferred to Marist High School, a catholic school in Bayonne, the summer before my junior year and I hated it with every fiber of my being. I was one of two of the first Muslim girl who wore the Hijab to enter that school, and I was the butt of everyone's racist jokes for a good month or two. I would come home every night and cry to my parents about how terrible my day at school was but they wouldn't hear it. So I trained myself not to care, and I found that if you do that long enough, you become numb. I had no friends, and I was the poster child for depression (not the clinical term, just the "I hate everything" term). I had a lot of free time, so I studied (I know, its sad, but I told you I was depressed). I'm not even gonna lie, I was pretty damn smart. And instead of people noticing me for "that thing I wear on my head", I started getting noticed for being "that smart girl from physics class". I was also taking studio art as an elective, and I guess I unearthed some hidden talent there too. My art teacher would display my work in the school hallways, and well, I was noticed for another "something else". Then one day, a group of girls came up to me during lunch and asked me if I wanted to sit at their table. And slowly, I made friends. And that's when people felt comfortable enough to ask me questions about my religion, rather than just make fun of it. And that's when I realized that in order to answer their questions, I had to answer my own first. I bought books about Islam, I asked questions, I searched. And that's when I started feeding my interest in giving Da'wah (literally, "summoning to a call").

Thinking back, I guess my junior and senior years were my golden years. I was smart, I had friends, I wasn't in love (which is always a good thing in my books; it's too distracting), and I was my parents' pride.

Someone once told me that in order for life to maintain its yin-yang balance, you couldn't have a good life all the time. When I first heard that, I thought to myself, "What nonsense." I was a high school senior, I had just gotten an interview with Yale, and I was on top of the world. Three years later, I can say that that person was right. I had a great childhood, and the first half of my adolescent years were even better.

I wish I can say the same about the second half.

College is…not what I had anticipated, to say the least. I hate NJIT, to say the least. I've developed anger issues, to say the least, and I swear I have never been more introverted than I am now.

Meh, there isn't much to say I guess, or to elaborate on, and I don't wanna write just another sob story. I'm just hoping my adulthood will be better, insha'Allah. Y'know, to go back to equilibrium. I just want my life to go back to normal. But 'normal' is a relative term, isn't it?