The hands thay won't let go

No one locks the door. No one raises their voice. And yet you feel it, a held feeling, somewhere behind the chest, like time is moving and you are not.

You try to find a path forward. You take one step toward what you think might be yours, and the ground shifts. The people around you change shape, the circumstances rearrange themselves, and somehow you end up exactly where you started, except more confused than before.

You begin to wonder, what is it that they actually want from me?

And the strange, aching truth is this: they may not fully know either.

Because often, it is not really you they are holding onto. It is their own unlived life. Their own unmet hopes, dressed up and handed to you like an inheritance you never asked for. They suffered in certain ways, and somewhere in that suffering, they decided that if you live it too, if you carry the same weight, walk the same narrow road, then maybe their suffering will finally make sense. Maybe it will have been worth something.

So you become the proof. The continuation. The version of them that gets to try again.

And you do not even notice when you stop knowing what you wanted before all of this. You forget the shape of your own wishes. You forget what you loved before you were asked to love what they needed you to love instead.

This is the fear that holds tighter than any hand ever could, the fear of disappointing people who are only trying, in their own injured way, to keep you close. Not to trap you. But because letting you become fully yourself might mean facing the parts of their own life they never got to live.

Time feels like it is running out because you can sense yourself disappearing in slow motion. Every day you postpone yourself is a day further from the life that was actually yours to build.

Islam speaks clearly here, even when people around us speak in circles. Each soul stands before Allah alone. "Each one of you will be questioned, alone." Not as your mother's unmet dream. Not as your father's redemption. Not as anyone's second chance. As yourself. With your own answers.

This does not mean abandoning the people who love you. It means refusing to let their unhealed grief quietly become your assigned destiny.

You are allowed to feel the weight of their hopes without becoming a vessel for their sorrow.

You are allowed to love your people deeply and still walk a path that is entirely your own.

The confusion you feel is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that you have outgrown a story that was never fully yours to live in the first place.

They are not trying to trap you.

They are trying not to drown alone 

and somewhere along the way,

they handed you the water.

Bisma Shaukat 

Clinical Psychologist | Researcher | Writer