Behind the Looks and Whispers: Living with Stigma

Life is meant to be simple but we humans sometimes make things complicated for ourselves. Everyone has his own way of life due to his or her upbringing and this might or might not be a problem to someone else. For instance, someone might have a problem with how I do my stuff because they didn’t grow up doing stuff that way but another person might also find it to be totally normal.

Speaking of stigma. So many people have to deal with stigma on the daily basis. It may be because of their names , their bodies, their ethnic group, nationality or even religion. I’ve had people who didn’t like me because I was a Muslim but I didn’t really have a problem with that. Funny enough, it happens to many other people out there also.

Personally, I’ve not had a family member of mine or someone close to me having to deal with any sort of stigma whatsoever but I have had to deal with various kinds of stigma in every room I step in. But that’s now what we are going to talk about today. This is a story of a mate of mine back in the university. So, as obvious as it is, we all come from our various walks of life to study and eventually we all get to know each other due to proximity.

So, in our first year all students from various specialties have to study the same courses for the first semester before we start studying in our various fields moving forward. I’d like to believe that was to give us all the opportunity to get to know each other and build our network which we did. So, there was this lady who was in our cohort and was also in the same hostel with me. We weren’t friends but we were familiar with each other. That was as far as our relationship went. We would talk to each other anywhere we met but we never got close to know so much details about each other.

So, from the little I knew about her, she was a cool person and she had a good heart. But all of a sudden rumors started to spread around that she was engaging in some stuff. Honestly, it didn’t concern anyone but people just took it upon themselves to talk about it and spread the news. This lady was a Muslim and we would usually meet at the mosque for prayers.

Around our third or second year if I remember correctly, she got pregnant for her boyfriend and news had it that her mom had disowned her after she refused to abort the baby. Prior to that, most people stopped talking to her because of the rumors that were spread around about her during our first year and she had had to deal with that until that very moment. But, that wasn’t even what took me to tears. After she got pregnant, Ramadan was just coming and when we started fasting, we had to be going to the mosque for prayers and spending long hours there.

This lady also was coming to the mosque but what happened? Most of the sisters didn’t want to stand by her in prayers. Why? I didn’t know. I can remember standing by her in prayers so many times but most of the sisters didn’t want to stand by her and would either change positions or just go out and come back again to stand at a different place. She on the other hand felt bad about that and stopped coming to the mosque. She didn’t feel accepted there so she went ahead to visit a church on campus where she was accepted and started fellowshipping with them.

Till today, I still sit down and wonder who some of us think we are to judge others for something we’ve never had to experience. Life isn’t the same for us all so let’s all try to be accommodating to others instead of being the so called self righteous ones.

all images belong to me.