hey

Assalamualaikum 

Today's letter had been postponed for soooo long, I thought I should write an entry at the end of 2018 but soon afterwards—I completely forgot I have a blog. It’s already more than half of the crazy year; 2020 so here I am.

How are you?

Fine?

Alhamdulillah.

Not so good?

May Allah ease whatever is troubling you.
If this is not a hard request, mind if I ask you to smile before moving forward with my story? :)

I am fine, praise to Allah. Just like anyone living in the year of 2020, it had been a roller coaster ride for each one of us. Some had leave us, some lost someone and perhaps, some are moving for tomorrow with great difficulty. Hence, a lot of us find this year a bit harder than any of our past years but with hope of a better year coming In Sha Allah.

This pandemic made me miss people and the memories. I ended up reading back my old journals, looking back to the old photos and reminiscing the past although I am with them at the moment (like “Ahh, we used to do that right?”). Currently, I’m wrapping gifts for my childhood friends as I had bought some souvenirs from Indonesia in April. Yep, I had been keeping it for so long, I did gave out some but out of 10 gifts I’m preparing—it’s still a lot. I love wrapping gifts and writing letters as this give me time to think and ponder about the goodness I felt for having friends like them. I want to cherish this friendship for a long time—with this beautiful mindset.

I also had been very involved with hobbies during this quarantine period. I draw, paint and obviously, write. If you had noticed, my style of writing gotta be slightly different than the usual little (below 18) Zahirah. I am trying to get back the old style but I don’t know—it will comes back eventually soon or later if I keep on writing in blogs. Anyhow, maybe you are curious as to what’s the difference of writing in a blog and writing in a journal..? In my opinion, the biggest difference would be the niyyah (intention)—the fact that blogging is for sharing and journalling is for me, more personal and nonchalant. Nonchalant as I’ll just write whatever I want without really thinking what harm or response I will get. I just write but here I spend a little bit more time of thinking what benefit will my reader gets from reading my writings.

If any of you had noticed (my old readers?), I changed the layout and template of this blog to a much simpler one and thinking of making my entries more of a letter format. It would be like I’m writing a letter to you instead of writing an essay of what’s happening to me hehe. I just find it a bit more friendlier and better this way.

Hoping writing in my blog going to be my new favourite thing to do. Should be consistent, istiqamah. Pray for my journey! See you soon in my next letter.

Thank you.

x, Zahirah.