Shelina zahra janmohamed biography of michael
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Shelina Zahra Janmohamed's Blog, page 16
How it feels to be a grown up. Courtesy of Grim and Proper Cards
In my heart, I am still four years old. I look at a picture of me at that age, glowing skin, exuberant smile, cheeky glint in my eye. I'm still that girl, running around the garden, kicking a football, laughing in the summer sunshine, looking for my parents' approval as I explore nature.
I am still seventeen. Waiting for the results of my university application, tense with anxiety about how my future will unfold, studying hard to achieve the grades that will take me into my degree course. I'm full of hope and innocence that life will open its arms to me.
I am still twenty one, dressing for my first day at work. Savouring each day as I get up bleary eyed and commute across town to my job, my first grown up paid full-time work. I go because I am thrilled to be in the work force, not because they pay me. That's just a bonus.
I am still twenty five, trekking across deserts to explore the world, arranging last minutes flights to unplanned destinations, free of responsibility but laden with hunger to experience as much as I can. I'm learning about myself, about the world; making friends that will last.
I'm still a child, still a girl, still a youth, still a young woma
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Activism is also an internal struggle
It was in George Orwell’s words that I finally recognised what I am. In his seminal essay “Why I Write”, he describes the motivations for authors and comes to the idea of “political purpose”, in the widest sense of the term political.
He defined this as writing with the “desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after”. It was a motivation he said that tipped him over from a non-writer into the literary world.
Of course such motivation applies beyond writers, to anyone who seeks to change the world. When I look back on my journey to becoming a writer and activist, I see this desire embedded in its DNA. All of the travellers on this journey suffer its angst.
In my work, what I portray publicly does not always reflect the internal turmoil I face. The tumultuous inner life of the activist remains hidden.
To lay it bare is an act of vulnerability. Because the journey to create change, even with allies and supporters, is lonely, and at night it is only my own conscience that I sleep with.
There’s a longing simply to know that the perilous landscape of the inner struggle is something that others share, and to understand how others experience its ebb and flow
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