You can almost see the moment it happens. The eyes soften, the polite smile appears, and I suspect somewhere in their head they’ve decided I’m about to suggest we all hold hands, say something nice about the person next to us and promise never to have another barney. As though my vision for humanity is one enormous group hug.

It couldn’t be further from the truth.

I don’t believe belonging means the absence of conflict. I don’t think connection requires agreement. And I certainly don’t believe being a good human means being endlessly agreeable, pleasant or nice. Frankly, I don’t even particularly like everyone. I believe in disagreement, in tension, in the uncomfortable, messy, sometimes infuriating business of living alongside people who think, believe and experience the world differently from us. I just happen to believe we can do all of that without surrendering our humanity.

Which, apparently, makes me a Pollyanna.

The recent attack on Helen Haines has had me thinking about all of this. About the anger that seems to sit just below the surface of our public conversations, and the ease with which we can come to see each other as threats rather than fellow human beings. I was talking to a friend about it, trying to explain why, despite everything, I remain so committed to talking about the things that bind us. And I found myself saying, with more than a little exasperation, “I just feel like I’m that Pollyanna girl, and people switch off.”

She thought about it for a moment. “Yeah,” she said. “But it’s the important Pollyanna.”

And there it was. The important Pollyanna. The one we need precisely when the world feels sick and tired and confused and angry. Because perhaps the greatest mistake we make in times like these is allowing the worst of what we see to become the whole of what we believe.

When I move through everyday Australian life, I see something quite different from the country we’re often told we inhabit. I see people who, by and large, want remarkably similar things. We want to feel safe, and to know the people we love are safe. We want to make enough money to live a decent life, to care for our people, to enjoy ourselves occasionally without doing mental arithmetic over the price of everything. We want neighbours who look out for us. We want to gather, celebrate, worship, disagree and go about our lives in peace. We want to know that if something terrible happens, someone will have our back.

These aren’t particularly radical ambitions. They are, however, the foundations of belonging. And I think we sometimes forget just how often we demonstrate them. Even in the smallest of communal behaviours.

There’s the person who helps a woman manoeuvre a pram off the bus. The neighbour who mows your nature strip while they’re doing their own, or brings your bins in without being asked. The driver who lets you merge, not because they have to, but because they can. That peculiar moment when something funny happens in public and a collection of complete strangers catches each other’s eyes and laughs together. For a few seconds, everyone is in on the same joke. The person who moves a fallen branch off the footpath so nobody else trips over it. The smile exchanged with someone you don’t know.

Small things. Ordinary things. Things so unremarkable they rarely make it into our understanding of who we are. But they should, because these are the moments in which we practise being a community. Little acknowledgements that other people exist, that their experience matters, and that we have some responsibility for making the world a little easier for one another to move through.

I wonder whether we’ve become so preoccupied with everything that divides us that we’ve stopped noticing the extraordinary amount of everyday cooperation required to keep a society functioning. Every day, millions of people with different beliefs, backgrounds, politics and histories share footpaths, roads, workplaces, schools, hospitals and neighbourhoods. We irritate each other. We disagree. We occasionally behave appallingly. And still, most of the time, we find a way to live alongside one another. Not perfectly, not equally, and not without people being excluded, harmed or left behind. But there is something there worth noticing and, more importantly, worth protecting.

And then something horrific happens, like the attack on Helen Haines, and people run towards the danger. The people who intervened and rushed to help her didn’t stop to establish whether they shared her politics or her values. A person needed help, and they helped. What stays with me, too, is the kindness reportedly shown by one of those who intervened towards the alleged attacker. Even in the midst of something terrible, there was room to recognise another person’s humanity without excusing what had happened.

Of course, mowing a nature strip is not the same as putting yourself in harm’s way to save someone’s life. But I think both begin with a recognition that the world doesn’t end at the edges of our own lives. That other people’s safety, dignity and wellbeing are, in some small or enormous way, also our concern.

We are capable of terrible things. And we are capable of extraordinary things. Neither truth cancels out the other.

Perhaps this is where my Pollyanna tendencies become less about temperament and more about conviction. I don’t think we can afford to become cynical about our capacity to live together. Not because racism, hatred, violence and exclusion aren’t real. They are, and pretending otherwise would be its own form of cruelty. But because cynicism, when it becomes our default position, asks us to give up on the very things that make a better society possible. It convinces us that division is inevitable, hostility is natural and kindness is somehow naïve. It makes contempt look intelligent and hope look childish. And I’m not convinced that’s a particularly sophisticated way to understand the world. In fact, I think it’s rather lazy.

Australia has an extraordinary opportunity here. We are a pluralistic country, a continent containing multitudes of cultures, faiths, histories and ways of understanding the world. We are also a country shaped by dispossession, racism and exclusion, and those aren’t simply historical footnotes. They continue to shape whose safety we prioritise and who gets to feel they belong. I don’t want to romanticise Australia. I know too well that belonging isn’t experienced equally. But I do want to believe in what we could become: a country that shows the world what it looks like for people with profound differences to coexist safely, fairly and with dignity.

Not by pretending those differences don’t exist, or asking people to be quiet about injustice in the interests of keeping the peace. But by becoming exceptionally good at holding tension.

Because tension isn’t necessarily a sign that a diverse society is failing. Sometimes it’s the unavoidable result of people with different needs and perspectives negotiating life together. The question isn’t whether we can eliminate disagreement. It’s whether we can disagree without dehumanising; whether we can advocate fiercely for our own communities without treating the safety of others as a threat to ours. Coexistence doesn’t mean endorsing everything another person believes. It means accepting that we share a society, whether we like it or not, and that everyone’s safety and dignity have to matter within it.

I can almost hear the question. Okay, Pollyanna. But how?

I think the answer is both more ordinary and more demanding than we’d like. We come back, again and again, to the things we say we value: safety, dignity, fairness, connection, the freedom to live a good life and the responsibility to make room for others to do the same. We make those values visible in our everyday decisions, in our disagreements, in the standards we demand of our leaders and in the policies we are prepared to defend. We refuse to let anger excuse cruelty or fear justify humiliation. We notice the good without using it to deny the bad. And we recognise that the little acts of kindness aren’t substitutes for tackling injustice, but neither are they irrelevant to the kind of society we’re trying to build.

So what does that actually look like? It looks like resisting the urge to give someone the finger in traffic, because you have no idea what kind of day they’ve had, what they’re carrying, or whether your moment of anger might be the thing that tips them over the edge. It looks like being patient with the person serving you who’s taking forever to get your order right, because you don’t know what they’re dealing with or how many people have already taken their frustrations out on them that day. It looks like refusing to join the pile-on when someone says something you disagree with online, because there’s a human being on the other side of that screen, and disagreement doesn’t have to come with humiliation. It means taking responsibility for another person’s dignity as seriously as you take responsibility for your own, even when you disagree with them, even when they’re making it difficult. And perhaps, most importantly, it means choosing optimism not because it’s easy or because the world always deserves it, but because it’s what brings us back to the idea that we have a responsibility to one another. How we treat each other is not just a reflection of who we are, but a contribution to the kind of world we all have to live in.

Belonging isn’t the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from everyone getting along. It’s the work of creating a society in which people can be different, can disagree, can experience conflict, and still know their humanity is not up for negotiation.

Maybe centring the important Pollyanna means we each, individually, take responsibility for the impact we have on those we encounter as we go about our lives. Not that everyone is good, or everything will work out, or kindness will always win. But that our collective humanity is worth fighting for even when people give us every reason to doubt it. Optimism isn’t a refusal to see the world as it is. It’s a refusal to accept that the worst of the world is all we are capable of.

So yes, I’ll keep banging on about the important Pollyanna. Not because I think we’ll always get along, but because I think we have to find a way to live together, especially when we don’t.

We’re all in this together. Whether we like it or not. We might as well start acting like it.

I spent a lot of my younger life thinking I was boring.

I didn’t drink. I didn’t take drugs. I wasn’t raised around partying, dating or casual sex. There were rules around modesty, what we consumed, how we behaved and how we interacted with the opposite sex. Our lives were punctuated by prayer. We woke early. We fasted. We were taught that discipline mattered, that your body was an amanah, a trust from Allah (sbt), and that not every desire needed to be indulged simply because you had it.

And, if I’m truthful, for a long time some of that made me feel like a loser.

There is something particular about growing up Muslim in the West when I did. This was before social media, before algorithms, before you could find an entire community of people living something like your life simply by opening your phone.

There wasn’t a Muslim world in my pocket.

And there is another piece of context that feels hard to ignore today, on the 25th anniversary of September 11.

I was 15 when 9/11 happened.

So I came of age at precisely the time a lot of very serious people on television were having very serious conversations about whether Islam was compatible with modern Western life. Muslims were suddenly being discussed everywhere. Muslim women, particularly, became symbols in arguments about oppression, liberation and freedom.

Apparently, we needed quite a lot of explaining.

And possibly some liberating.

I think I absorbed more of that than I realised.

Our parents, many of them migrants themselves, were also trying to work out how to raise Muslim children in a culture they were learning to navigate. Sometimes Islam was handed to us beautifully. Sometimes religion, culture, fear and the instinct to protect became tangled together. And sometimes we got the rule without much explanation of the wisdom beneath it.

Don’t drink. Don’t date. Cover yourself. Come home. Pray. Fast. This is halal. That’s haram.

Meanwhile, outside our homes was a very compelling story about what growing up and becoming your own person was supposed to look like.

At home I had Seerah and hijab. At school I had Girl Power and American Pie.

When one way of living dominates television, advertising, schools, workplaces and popular culture, it doesn’t necessarily present itself as a culture. It just feels like normal life.

So I absorbed a hierarchy without really knowing it. Who was modern and who was traditional. Who was liberated and who was restricted. Who was sophisticated and who was sheltered.

And ours seemed to be the life that always needed explaining.

Now, maybe I was mistaken about some of what I was taught. Some things I attributed to Islam were cultural. Some things were unnecessarily restrictive or badly explained. I am definitely not interested in declaring every rule imposed on me a hidden pearl of Islamic wisdom.

But then something started to shift.

Or perhaps more accurately, the packaging did.

Not drinking became sober curious. Getting up at 5am is now a personality. Fasting is biohacking and gratitude comes in a beautiful journal.

We have no-buy years and digital detoxes. We declutter, limit our screen time, practise mindfulness and talk about dopamine and overstimulation. We pay people to teach us how to sit quietly, consume less, establish boundaries and reclaim our attention from technologies designed to keep taking it.

After decades of being encouraged to have more, buy more, consume more and experience more, we’re increasingly trying to learn how to say: enough.

And I keep having the same mental record scratch.

Hang on.

To be clear, I am not saying all of this is secretly Islam.

Salah isn’t Muslim meditation. Ramadan isn’t Islamic intermittent fasting. Dhikr isn’t a gratitude journal. Islam does not need a study, a podcast or the wellness industry to validate it.

But I am fascinated by what happens to an idea when you change the language around it.

Tell someone you don’t drink because of your religion and it can sound sheltered. Tell them you’re sober curious and it sounds intentional.

Religious fasting sounds austere. Intermittent fasting sounds optimised.

Ritual can sound antiquated until it becomes a morning routine.

Limits can sound oppressive until we call them boundaries.

Gratitude because Allah (sbt) commands it is religion. Put it in a beautifully bound journal and suddenly it’s wellbeing.

And modesty might be the example I find most interesting of all.

I also came of age as a feminist. I learnt about the male gaze, objectification and the commodification of women’s bodies. Increasingly, we have asked men to examine how they look at women, respect women’s bodies and boundaries, and reject the idea that women’s bodies are simply available for male attention or consumption.

Those ideas made immediate sense to me.

Perhaps because there was something deeply familiar in them.

Islamic modesty is often reduced to what women wear, but the Qur’an’s teaching doesn’t begin by telling women to cover. It first tells believing men to lower their gaze and guard their sexual boundaries (24:30), before instructing believing women to do the same (24:31).

Both men and women share responsibility for respectful behaviour, starting with how they look at others.

Your gaze is your responsibility.

Attraction doesn’t create entitlement.

Again:

Hang on.

I’m not arguing that modern feminism is Islam by another name, or that Muslim communities have always embodied these principles well. It isn’t, and we haven’t.

But come on.

Surely it is worth asking why an idea can become so much easier to recognise as wisdom once we change the language surrounding it.

Attached to religion, restraint can look repressive. Recast as intentional living, it can look sophisticated. Abstinence can look sheltered until it becomes sobriety. Limits can look oppressive until we call them boundaries. Ritual can look antiquated until we understand the psychology of habit. Modesty can look prudish while resistance to objectification is understood as agency.

These things aren’t identical. Their purposes can be profoundly different.

But the difference in how readily we recognise wisdom in them is worth examining.

And if you really want to annoy yourself, consider how much money there is in the repackaging.

Books. Podcasts. Courses. Apps. Journals. Morning routines. Retreats.

Ancient ideas about restraint, attention, gratitude, ritual and meaning have become an industry.

And here’s the slightly uncomfortable part for me:

I’ve bought some of it too.

I have sometimes encountered an idea through psychology, feminism, wellness or personal development and thought it was profound, only to realise that something remarkably similar had been sitting inside my own faith all along.

So perhaps the question isn’t only why the world needed it repackaged.

Why did I?

Why was I sometimes more willing to trust an idea once the religious language had been removed from it?

Part of the answer, I think, lies back with that 15-year-old girl.

When the dominant culture presents itself as modern, rational and liberated, while your religion is repeatedly presented as traditional, restrictive and in need of reform, you learn something about whose ideas are supposed to count as sophisticated.

And perhaps part of it lies with us too.

Because knowing what Islam asks of us is not the same as understanding why.

Prayer interrupts the day and asks us to step away from whatever feels urgent, recalibrate and be still. Fasting teaches us that hunger doesn’t have to be immediately satisfied. Zakat places a claim on our wealth beyond our own wants. Halal and haram teach us that simply wanting something doesn’t automatically make it ours to consume. The small practices of the Sunnah embed ritual and mindfulness into waking, eating, leaving home and going to sleep.

Our faith doesn’t wait for us to feel spiritual. It gives us practices through which belief shapes us.

Maybe I wasn’t boring. Maybe I just didn’t understand the wisdom beneath what I had been given.

But there is one more important difference.

Because the irony of needing wellness culture to help me recognise some of the wisdom in Islam is that Islam isn’t ultimately a wellness programme.

Salah isn’t there to make me calmer. Ramadan isn’t there to optimise my metabolism. Dhikr isn’t there to improve my mindset. Modesty isn’t simply a boundary-setting exercise.

There may be wisdom and benefit in all of those things. But they are not the destination.

Modern wellness and optimisation culture so often asks: What will this do for me?

Islam eventually asks me a much bigger question:

Who am I doing all of this for?

Allah (sbt) created us upon a fitrah, and our faith keeps returning us to the deepest truth about our existence: we did not create ourselves. We are not the centre of everything. Our lives have purpose and responsibility beyond satisfying our own desires. And ultimately, we return to the One who created us.

La ilaha illallah.

There is nothing worthy of our ultimate devotion, our deepest allegiance, our time and energy in the way that this knowing is – that Allah (sbt) is.

That is why these practices can never really be reduced to life hacks. They aren’t ultimately about becoming a calmer, healthier, more productive or more optimised version of myself.

They are about remembering who I am, what I am here for and Who I belong to.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, I find myself much less interested in proving that Islam belongs in the modern West and much more interested in questioning some of the assumptions my generation of Muslims absorbed about whose ideas represented progress, sophistication and wisdom in the first place.

Because at 15, I thought the sophisticated life was happening somewhere else.

Now, I have some questions.

And if I could talk to that younger version of myself — hell, if I could talk to myself on some days now — I would tell her to look again.

Learn your faith more deeply. Ask questions. Wrestle with the difficult parts. Separate what Allah (sbt) actually asks of you from the cultural baggage human beings have sometimes piled on top of it.

You don’t have to romanticise everything you were taught. You don’t have to pretend the struggle isn’t real. And you certainly don’t have to convince yourself that every restriction somebody ever placed on you was good for you.

But take the time to understand the wisdom beneath what Allah (sbt) has given you.

And don’t assume that an idea becomes more profound simply because somebody removed God from it, gave it better branding and put it on a podcast.

Dear Muslim, don’t wait for the world to rename what you have been given before you recognise its worth.

-Rana

I have just returned from Garma Festival. How does a Muslim woman—the daughter of Indian migrants—end up spending four days camping on Gumatj Country learning from Yolŋu Elders? It’s a question I found myself asking more than once.

Officially, I was there as a Board Director of Reconciliation Australia, leading a delegation of women from multicultural organisations. We were there because, after the Voice Referendum, there has been a growing recognition that reconciliation cannot be the work of Aboriginal Australia alone. Multicultural Australia has a role to play too. I have long believed those two stories belong together.

That work matters deeply to me. But this letter isn’t really about reconciliation.

It’s about Allah. Because somewhere between the red earth, the early mornings, the songs, the stories and the stillness, Allah showed me something I wasn’t expecting.

He showed me my own faith.

Garma is difficult to explain if you’ve never been.

It is often described as Australia’s largest Indigenous cultural gathering, but that somehow feels too small. Each year, thousands of people make the journey to Gulkula, on Gumatj Country in North East Arnhem Land, at the invitation of the Yolŋu people. Politicians, business leaders, artists, academics, journalists and community leaders all come—but once you arrive, everyone is operating on Yolŋu terms. You camp on Country. You rise with the sun. You listen more than you speak. You experience culture rather than consume it.

I’ll be honest.

When I first arrived, I was uncomfortable.

That discomfort began almost immediately, with the ceremonial welcome and the first Bunggul.

Bunggul is often translated simply as “ceremony”, but that hardly captures what it is. It is where culture is remembered, relationships are renewed, ancestors are honoured, and knowledge is embodied through song, dance and story. Clans gather to share who they are, where they come from and what they hold sacred.

If you’ve seen footage from Garma on the news, you’ve probably seen Bunggul. The dancers shift from the slow gait of an emu to the explosive leap of a kangaroo. The singing shifts between deep, guttural rhythms and long, haunting notes that seem to hang in the air. I came to understand, these songs carry stories, law, identity and history. They are not simply performances; they are living memory.

To my urban Muslim mind, however, it looked about as far from prayer or worship as I could imagine. As the Bunggul unfolded before me, my mind immediately did what many Muslim minds are trained to do.

Shirk.

The word arrived almost instinctively. I found myself observing everything through the lens of theological correctness.

Categorising before listening.

Assessing before receiving.

If I’m honest, I felt myself armour up. It was as though I’d walked into pagan Arabia. My instinct was to protect my faith, to hold it tightly, fearing that if I softened or tried to understand, somehow my own belief would be diluted. I felt like I was standing outside an experience everyone else seemed able to enter, worried that my Islam meant I had to remain at the door.

Sensing that hardness rising within me, I decided to ask rather than assume.

I turned to my colleague from Reconciliation Australia, who herself is Aboriginal though from the northern rivers of NSW, and asked, “Do they rehearse this a lot before the festival?”

She looked at me gently and said something I’ll never forget.

“It’s not performative. They don’t practise for a performance. They teach by doing. They learn by doing. This is their way. We’re simply witnessing it.”

That sentence stopped me in my tracks. In that moment, I realised I had been looking at Bunggul as though it existed for me. It didn’t. I wasn’t the audience.

I was the guest.

And perhaps, I realised, Islam has always known something about that too. I prayed that night asking Allah not to let admiration become confusion. I asked Him to keep my heart firm while allowing me to see what He wanted me to see.

And then something shifted. Perhaps for the first time in a long time, I stopped trying to decide what I thought. Instead, I simply paid attention.

I listened.

I watched.

I received.

Not because I was questioning Islam, but because I trusted it enough to know that truth has nothing to fear from observation.

Slowly, what had begun as discomfort became something altogether different. Not agreement.

Recognition.

The similarities were beautiful to notice. Not because our beliefs are the same—they are not—but because beneath all the differences I kept recognising echoes of the fitrah Allah has placed within every human being. That innate disposition that inclines us towards reverence, belonging, beauty, gratitude, community and something greater than ourselves.

It didn’t blur the theological differences between us. It illuminated them and if anything, I returned more deeply convinced of the truth and completeness of Islam.

Much of the urban, corporate world I spend my life moving through rewards efficiency, productivity and individual achievement, but leaves surprisingly little room for reverence. Everything is analysed, optimised and measured. Over time, you begin to learn that bringing your full Muslim self—your certainty in Allah, your conviction that life is ultimately spiritual and that everything points back to Him—is met with discomfort or exclusion. So, without even realising it, you hide that part of yourself and begin to armour up.

The Yolŋu did the opposite.

They invited us into a world where nothing was disconnected from meaning. Land, family, ceremony, responsibility and community all belonged to the same story. The sacred wasn’t something squeezed into the edges of life; it was woven through it.

Garma felt nothing like Melbourne, yet somehow a little like home. Not because I saw Islam reflected back to me. But because I recognised something the modern world had almost convinced me was unusual: human beings living with an instinctive orientation towards the sacred.

I realised that perhaps what I had been grieving wasn’t simply being a Muslim in the West. It was living in a world that so often mistakes the absence of the sacred for progress.

Perhaps that is why my heart rested there on Gumatj land. Not because I belonged to the Yolŋu. But because, for a few precious days, I was surrounded by people who understood that life is bigger than the individual, that identity is something worth preserving, and that the soul deserves tending every single day.

As Muslims, we know this. Or at least, we are meant to.

In the Yolnu people’s repeated ceremonies of healing, I found myself thinking about our constant return to istighfar. Their rituals were different, but the instinct felt recognisable: that human beings know life wounds us, that our hearts need tending, and that healing requires something beyond ourselves.

In the way they carefully preserve men’s business and women’s business, with different responsibilities, different spaces and different forms of authority, I was reminded that Islam too recognises distinction without requiring inequality. Their male Elders often lead public ceremony, while women quietly hold and transmit vast bodies of sacred knowledge, maintain kinship systems and preserve the continuity of community life. I found myself thinking about our own traditions of hijab, mahram and non-mahram, and the profound role Muslim women have always played in preserving faith, family and knowledge.

Their reverence for Elders stirred something deeply familiar. Knowledge is not treated as information but as inheritance. Age is not something to be worked around, but something to be honoured. It reminded me of the immense status Islam gives our parents, our scholars and those who came before us.

Again and again I noticed the centrality of mothers. Identity, story and belonging seemed to flow through them in ways that felt deeply resonant with our own tradition, where Jannah lies beneath the feet of our mothers and where so much of a child’s earliest formation happens in her embrace.

When I learned about the importance of birthing on Country, moving off to a special place in the bush, to bring life into the world, my mind unexpectedly returned to Maryam (as), who secluded herself, alone beneath the date palm, comforted only by Allah and His angels. The circumstances were entirely different, yet my heart recognised something beautiful about honouring birth as sacred rather than merely clinical.

Perhaps what moved me most was hearing, over and over again, the simple desire to be allowed to preserve their way of life. To practise it. To teach it. To pass it to their children without apology. As Muslims living in the West, that longing felt achingly familiar. We know what it is to worry about losing language, practice, memory and conviction in a culture constantly asking us to become something else.

The more I watched the Yolŋu people protect what was sacred to them, the more I questioned how seriously I protected what Allah had entrusted to me. I wondered how fiercely we protect our devotion as an Ummah. It wasn’t the same beliefs I recognised. It was the devotion with which they held them.

The Yolŋu teach their children patiently, deliberately, with enormous care and fierce intentionality. Identity isn’t left to chance or discovered in isolation. It is patiently cultivated through relationship, story, ceremony, responsibility and belonging. Their community gathers around them, teaching them who they are long before the world has the chance to tell them who they should be.

Isn’t that exactly what our Ummah is supposed to do?

Knowledge is not rushed. It is embodied before it is explained. It is practised before it is debated. I thought of the Qur’an. Tajweed. I thought of our meticulous chains of transmission that preserved our deen for more than fourteen centuries.

Then I thought about how often we reduce that sacred inheritance to something for children, or quietly outsource it to the imam, the Qur’an teacher or the local madrasa while the rest of life receives our real attention. We say the Qur’an is the centre of our lives, yet we rarely revere its keepers in the way we celebrate our CEOs, doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs. I found that confronting to admit.

Again and again, I noticed how inseparable the Yolŋu are from Country. They don’t simply live on the land; they understand themselves through it. Every story, every ceremony and every relationship seemed to begin by locating themselves in place. Country wasn’t the backdrop to life. It shaped identity, responsibility and belonging.

Their attentiveness extended to time itself. Dawn and sunset were not ordinary moments to be hurried through, but sacred thresholds in the day. I watched people sit quietly, singing their songlines until the first Bidibidi announced the sunrise, and I couldn’t help but smile. My mind wandered to Tahajjud and Fajr, to the Prophet ﷺ’s love of the early morning and to beginning the day with Allah before the world made its demands.

Again, I wasn’t seeing Islam reflected back to me. I was recognising the fitrah—that instinct to orient ourselves towards creation with reverence rather than simply move through it.

As Muslims, this should feel deeply familiar. Our faith has never separated the sacred from the ordinary, nor the spiritual from the physical world Allah created. We orient ourselves towards the Ka’bah. We mark our lives by the movement of the sun and the moon. We make pilgrimage to a place. The earth itself was made a place of prayer, and the Qur’an constantly invites us to look at the mountains, the birds, the oceans and the stars as ayat—signs pointing us back to their Creator.

I wonder whether many of us have unconsciously accepted a way of living that disconnects us from all of that. We compartmentalise our faith, confining it to the mosque or the prayer mat while the rest of life operates according to different rules. Garma reminded me that Islam was never meant to be compartmentalised. I wonder whether we have become remarkably good at defending Islam in public. I’m less sure we’ve become as good at inhabiting it.

There was another lesson Garma gave me. Not about faith but about leadership.

For more than fifteen years, much of my work has involved helping Australian institutions understand communities they were never really designed to understand.

Like many Muslims, I’ve often felt as though I’m forever translating—squeezing my story into someone else’s framework and making my case in rooms that had already decided what mattered before I’d spoken.

The Yolŋu do something profoundly different. They don’t chase power. They reposition it. The longer I sat with Garma, the more I realised it isn’t simply a festival. It is a masterclass in leadership. Rather than endlessly taking their story into institutions built by others, they invite the nation onto their Country, into their rhythms and onto their terms. If you want to understand us, they seem to say, come here. Walk where we walk. Wake when we wake. Listen before you speak. Learn our protocols before asking us to explain ourselves.

For four days, the usual power dynamics quietly shift. Politicians, CEOs, journalists, academics, artists and community leaders all become guests in a Yolŋu world. Australia doesn’t simply hear about Yolŋu culture; it experiences it.

That isn’t exclusion. It’s wisdom.

Because some things cannot be understood through reports, submissions or consultation papers. They can only be understood through relationship, presence and experience.

As Muslims, I couldn’t help wondering whether there is a lesson for us here too. We spend so much energy explaining ourselves, defending ourselves and trying to find our place in systems that were never built with us in mind. Necessary? Often, yes. Sufficient? I’m no longer convinced.

Perhaps we’ve become so accustomed to asking for a seat at someone else’s table that we’ve forgotten to invite people to ours—on our terms. The Yolŋu reminded me that influence isn’t only about having the strongest argument. Sometimes it’s about having the confidence to create the conditions in which people can truly listen.

What struck me most about the Yolŋu was how profoundly relational they are. Even when difficult truths were spoken, you never doubted that the relationship itself mattered.

I kept coming back to the opening ceremonies of welcome each day. Here was a people whose language had been suppressed, whose children had been removed, whose ceremonies had been discouraged, whose identity had been questioned, and whose connection to Country had been relentlessly challenged for generations. Imagine carrying that history and still choosing to begin with welcome.

That is an extraordinary act of generosity.

The ceremony wasn’t a spectacle designed to impress. It was an invitation. It was the Yolŋu saying, this is who we are. This is what we hold sacred. Come and sit with us. Receive us before you decide what you think of us.

That changed the way I understood welcome. Before they asked us to understand them, they invited us into relationship. They allowed us to experience their world before asking us to hear their story.

I found myself wondering how differently we might hear a Welcome to Country if we understood it through that lens. Not as a procedural acknowledgement or a box to tick before a meeting begins, but as a deeply generous act by a people saying, you are on our Country, and despite everything that has happened, we are still willing to begin with relationship.

There is enormous dignity in that.

Perhaps we need to become more confident in inviting people into our homes, our mosques and our lives—not as a performance, and not in the hope people will like us, but because relationship changes hearts in ways arguments rarely do. To let people experience Islam before asking them to understand it. To pray alongside us. To experience the warmth of our families and communities before encountering our explanations of the faith.

The Yolŋu reminded me that relationship is not the reward once understanding has been been reached. It is where understanding begins.

There was one final conviction I carried home with me.

I left Garma convinced that Muslims in Australia have far more to gain from walking alongside First Peoples than we have yet imagined. Not because it is politically useful, or because standing with First Nations somehow strengthens our arguments about Palestine or any other cause close to our hearts. Not because we hope to convert them, and certainly not because there is something to be extracted from the relationship. That would simply repeat the very patterns we so often criticise. We stand alongside First Peoples because Allah commands us to stand with justice, because every people are entitled to dignity, and because every community deserves the right to preserve what is sacred, determine its own future and pass its inheritance to the next generation. That alone is reason enough.

Yet there is another reason I found myself unable to ignore.

Long before Federation or White Australia. Long before many of our own families ever set foot on this continent, Muslims were already forging relationships with the Yolŋu. The Makassan seafarers who travelled from what is now Indonesia did not arrive as settlers or colonisers. They came as traders, building relationships over centuries that were characterised by reciprocity rather than conquest. They exchanged goods, language, knowledge and trust, and in doing so left behind a story that still lives in Yolŋu memory.

The Yolŋu remember that relationship.

Many Australian Muslims do not.

Somewhere along the way, we forgot that our own history in this country contains an example of how Muslims can walk alongside First Peoples—with respect rather than dominance, with reciprocity rather than extraction, and with curiosity rather than certainty. Perhaps that is why this encounter felt strangely familiar. It wasn’t entirely new. In some ways, it felt like remembering something we had allowed ourselves to forget.

Allah tells us that He created us into nations and tribes so that we may know one another. Not merely tolerate one another from a distance, but truly know one another. I couldn’t help wondering whether we have become remarkably fluent in navigating Western institutions while remaining almost entirely illiterate in the oldest continuing civilisation on earth. If Garma taught me anything, it is that allyship begins long before advocacy. It begins with adab—with listening before speaking, receiving before advising, learning before leading, and allowing yourself to be changed by the encounter. The Yolŋu do not ask us to become them, nor do they ask us to abandon who we are. They simply invite us to know ourselves well enough that we might come to know them too. As Muslims, that invitation should feel strangely familiar.

There was one final encounter I haven’t been able to shake.

Her name is Djapirri.

She is a Yolŋu Elder, a knowledge holder and, over those four days, one of our hosts. As my predecessor on the Board of Reconciliation Australia, she welcomed me with generosity, offering quiet guidance whenever I needed it. But it wasn’t simply what she knew that drew people to her. It was who she was.

Wherever Djapirri went, people gravitated towards her. She carried herself with a quiet authority that never demanded attention, yet somehow settled everyone around her. One moment she would be teasing us with the cheeky humour of a mischievous auntie, and the next she would offer a reflection so simple and so profound that the whole conversation shifted. She reminded me of my mum, and of so many Elders I have been blessed to know throughout my own life. There was something deeply familiar about her.

It’s difficult to explain what it feels like to sit with Djapirri. You look into her eyes and have the unmistakable sense that she is seeing the world through a depth of knowing you haven’t yet earned. Not because she claims any special insight, but because she stands in a lineage of memory. Again and again she would tell us, “My mother taught me this,” or, “My grandmother taught us...” Every piece of knowledge carried the fingerprints of those who came before her. None of it belonged to her alone. She wasn’t simply passing on information; she was carrying an inheritance. You don’t understand someone like Djapirri from across a room. You have to sit with her. You have to let her stories, her humour and her presence work on you.

As our time together drew to a close, I found myself wanting to offer her something of myself. Not to persuade her. Not to convert her. Not to assert my faith over hers. She had spent days sharing what was most precious to her—her people, her Country, her wisdom and her love. Leaving without offering something equally precious from my own tradition somehow felt incomplete.

As Muslims, when someone has touched our hearts, one of the most sincere gifts we know how to offer is du’a. We ask Allah to protect them, to watch over them and to envelop them in His mercy. Reciting Ayatul Kursi wasn’t about making a theological point; it was the most authentic expression of care I knew how to give. It was my way of entrusting someone I had come to love and respect to Allah’s protection.

Even so, I was nervous.

I didn’t want her to misunderstand my intention. I didn’t want her to think I was trying to diminish what she had shared with us or somehow assert myself. With a vulnerability I haven’t felt in a long time, I gently asked if she would allow me to recite Ayatul Kursi for her.

Her face lit up.

She smiled, nodded and welcomed the offer with such warmth, joy and love that every trace of my anxiety disappeared. As I recited, she simply received it.

In that moment, my mind went back to the first morning of Garma.

To the Bunggul. To the way I had instinctively armoured up, my Muslim mind immediately reaching for the word shirk. I had arrived fearing that opening my heart to another people’s sacred traditions somehow required me to loosen my grip on my own faith.

Sitting with Djapirri, I realised how wrong that assumption had been.

The more deeply I had stood in my Islam, the more freely I had been able to receive her generosity. Neither of us needed to become less certain of our convictions in order to meet one another with dignity, openness and respect. If anything, it was because we were deeply rooted that such an exchange became possible.

I have thought about that moment often since coming home. I found myself wondering how many of our own faith leaders would feel able to receive a sincere offering from someone of another faith with that same confidence in their own convictions. Have we become so concerned with protecting our boundaries that we sometimes mistake generosity for compromise? Have we forgotten that confidence in Allah should make us more secure in our own faith, not more fearful of another person’s sincerity?

Djapirri wasn’t threatened by my Islam. And I wasn’t threatened by her generosity. Perhaps deeply rooted faith doesn’t make us more afraid of difference. Perhaps it makes us more capable of receiving another person’s humanity without ever letting go of our own.

Throughout our time at Garma, Djapirri kept returning to one message. Again and again, she spoke about connection. About love between us. About our shared humanity. She wasn’t asking us to become Yolŋu. She was inviting us to know ourselves deeply enough that we could meet one another with openness, respect and care.

In that moment, I felt we had.

I left Garma convinced that Muslims in Australia have far more to gain from walking alongside First Peoples than we have yet imagined. Not because our beliefs are the same—they are not—but because Allah commands us to stand for justice, to honour the dignity of every people and to know one another. Allyship is not a political strategy. It is an expression of our faith.

As children of migrants, and as people who now call this country home, we should never forget that we live on lands that have been loved, cared for and known by First Peoples for tens of thousands of years. We have entered a story that began long before our families arrived. That reality should make us more humble, more curious and more committed to walking alongside those who continue to carry the responsibilities of Country today.

We don’t stand beside First Peoples because it strengthens our own causes, advances our own interests or offers us something in return. We do so because every human being is created by Allah, because justice is an act of worship, and because our faith calls us to be people of covenant, compassion and trust.

As Muslims, we often speak about feeling like strangers in this world.

Perhaps that should make us quicker to recognise those who have been made strangers on their own land.

- Rana

Australian journalists. Sporting administrators. Influencers. Fans. Airport selfies. Match-day countdowns. Packed stadiums. The pilgrimage is underway. As the photos accumulate, I realise they aren’t just documenting a tournament. They are revealing something about us.

Every four years, the World Cup offers something extraordinary: the chance to witness history and be swept up in a spectacle that transcends borders—at least for a while. If you’re fortunate enough to be there, I genuinely hope you savour every second.

As I scroll through airport selfies and promises of World Cup content, I’m struck by a feeling I recognise. These images remind me of another familiar ritual in Australian sport: every Australian summer, AFL coaches visiting NFL clubs, executives returning from Ivy League programs, sporting leaders making their now familiar pilgrimage to America in search of innovation and excellence.

In a time where we’ve largely outgrown Australia’s cultural cringe, if you’ve made it in American sport, you’ve made it. If America is doing it, perhaps we should be too. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But our perpetual admiration in the context of growing disenchantment with the American way of life, has become so instinctive that it dulls our curiosity. Admiration doesn’t simply shape what we aspire to. It shapes what we think to question.

I’ve been thinking about that while watching Australians travel to the FIFA World Cup in the United States.

This isn’t an argument that people shouldn’t go. Quite the opposite. To have the passport, the finances, the time and the freedom to travel halfway around the world for a sporting event is an extraordinary opportunity. With premium tickets reportedly reaching around $7,000 and even nosebleed seats costing hundreds before flights and accommodation, attending this tournament is an experience available to a very small proportion of the world’s population.

Perhaps that’s why I find myself thinking that extraordinary opportunities ask something more of us than gratitude alone. They ask for reflection. What has stayed with me isn’t that people chose to go. It’s how little public reflection seems to have accompanied the decision.

Perhaps I’m more attuned to this than most because I’ve spent much of my career working where sport, governance, human rights and inclusion intersect. During the Qatar World Cup, I wasn’t watching the debate from afar. I was in the rooms where organisations wrestled with what participation meant. I listened as journalists, athletes, administrators and fans publicly debated whether attendance itself carried moral significance. Influencers were asked whether they felt comfortable travelling. Governing bodies were challenged about what their presence might signal.

Whether people ultimately travelled wasn’t the point. The point was that the questions felt unavoidable.

Could sport be separated from politics?

What responsibility did governing bodies have?

Did attendance signal endorsement?

How should we weigh human rights against the universal power of sport?

The conversation was imperfect, inconsistent and, at times, performative. But it happened. This time, I’ve been struck not by complete silence, but by the absence of that same instinctive curiosity. The conversation hasn’t disappeared altogether. It simply feels quieter. Less urgent. Less searching.

The United States has kicked off their hosting duties for this year’s World Cup and prepare to host the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028 while navigating profound political division, the rollback of rights many assumed were settled, escalating attacks on diversity initiatives, increasingly hostile debates around immigration and growing questions about its democratic institutions. Add to that America’s role in global conflicts that many now see as morally indefensible, and it is difficult to argue that the political context surrounding these events sits entirely separate to the sporting field. Hell, the World Cup itself has thrown up the very question of how on earth does a host nation ‘welcome’ a team it is at war with?

These developments deserve nuance. They reflect economic insecurity, institutional distrust and political fragmentation across much of the West. But complexity has never prevented us asking difficult moral questions before.

When my mind swirls like this, I find thought experiments useful.

Imagine, for a moment, that the next World Cup was awarded to a nation rolling back women’s rights, actively igniting global conflict, hardening its immigration regime (in fact not even providing visas to some of the Sport’s athletes and officials), attacking diversity initiatives and facing mounting questions about its democratic institutions, encroaching far right regime.

Would Australian sport be talking differently?

Would journalists?

Would commentators?

Would governing bodies?

Would we?

I suspect the answer is yes. Because we’ve already done it. We did it with Qatar.

Our unwillingness to interrogate the places we admire with the same honesty we reserve for those we don’t alarms me. Our admiration doesn’t just influence where we look for excellence. It quietly determines where we stop looking for contradiction.

I’ve started wondering whether Australia’s political allegiance relationship with the United States is reflected more deeply in our sporting culture than we care to admit. Having spent the better part of a decade working across Australian sport, I’ve watched this admiration up close. American success has quietly become shorthand for sporting excellence.

Watching many of the same Australians who expressed concern about the direction of American politics now head enthusiastically to the World Cup has left me wondering where we draw our ethical lines. During Qatar, attendance itself became part of the moral conversation. This time, the questions seem to have disappeared. What strikes me isn’t the conclusion people have reached, but how rarely they seem to feel the need to explain how they reached it.

Of course, there are differences between Qatar and the United States. Their political systems, histories and human rights challenges are not identical, and this isn’t an attempt to flatten those distinctions. Many World Cup host nations have the spotlight pointed in the direction of their various human rights abuses. The point isn’t equivalence. It’s consistency.

If we once believed that attending a sporting event could itself raise ethical questions, what changed? Was it the host nation? Or was it simply easier to ask those questions of a place we had already decided was “other” than one we’ve spent decades admiring?

Sport doesn’t merely reflect culture. It legitimises it. The stories our sporting institutions tell become the stories we tell ourselves about leadership, excellence and what deserves our attention. That’s why this matters. Silence isn’t simply the absence of commentary. It shapes the boundaries of what we come to see as normal.

That absence lands differently depending on where you stand. If you’re a woman watching rights once thought settled become politically negotiable, if you’re a migrant hearing increasingly hostile rhetoric about who belongs, if your identity is routinely pulled into public debate, it becomes difficult to celebrate these cultural moments as though they exist in isolation. They rarely can.

And perhaps what makes that feeling so difficult is recognising who is absent from the conversation.

The people best placed to broaden the conversation are often the least compelled to. Coaches, commentators, executives, journalists and even influencers possess something many others don’t: the authority to make reflection feel normal. If they paused publicly, others might too. Instead, American sporting culture continues to be celebrated with remarkably little curiosity about the America in which it exists. Some are free to experience American culture and sport primarily as a spectacle. For many others, America can only be experienced politically.

And perhaps this is the conversation Australian sport needs to have before Los Angeles 2028. Not whether we should participate. We should. Not whether we should continue learning from American sport. We should. The question is whether our admiration has become so instinctive that we’ve stopped interrogating what it now asks of us. And more importantly - how do we honour and look after the athletes, administrators and fans who simply cannot comprehend an America that isn’t dangerous or political?

For years, Australian sport has rightly insisted that sport is never just sport. We’ve argued that it can challenge discrimination, advance inclusion and shape the kind of society we want to become. We asked those questions loudly before Qatar. Why are we asking them so quietly now?

What does it mean to celebrate American sporting culture while remaining largely silent about the political and social context in which that culture now exists? What are we signalling through that silence? Who feels included by it, and who feels abandoned by it? And what responsibility comes with being among the people whose voices shape our sporting culture?

These are uncomfortable questions because they don’t have neat answers.

But perhaps that’s the point.

If Australian sport genuinely believes that sport can shape culture—as we so often say it can—then our responsibility is not simply to celebrate excellence wherever we find it. It is to remain intellectually curious about the cultures we admire, especially when asking those questions becomes inconvenient.

Before Los Angeles 2028, Australian sport has an opportunity. Not to boycott or withdraw, but simply to ask itself the questions it once believed mattered. Because the issue has never been whether America deserves scrutiny. It’s whether we remain capable of scrutinising the places we admire with the same intellectual honesty we demand of everyone else.

And then the flip side: messages that are angry, sometimes vicious. Islam is bad. Islam is oppressive. You’re brainwashed. Take it off. Be free. Go back to where you came from.

All of this — the fantasy, the anger, the projection — because of the cloth on my head.

It is rarely neutral. I am either sexualised or made into a threat — desired or feared, consumed or rejected. Both are forms of othering. Both are racist. And both feel completely dislodged from my own sense of self.

In one version, I exist for someone else’s curiosity, their fetish, their imagination. In the other, I become something to push against — a symbol of everything they are uncomfortable with, everything they want to resist or control. There is no room, in either version, for me as I actually am.

Then there are the “allies”, who insist I must be liberated, who look at my scarf and project onto me a story of oppression. That projection, dressed up as concern, can be the most suffocating of all.

Because it comes with a kind of certainty — a quiet confidence that they already understand what this means. That underneath it all, the hijab must represent something limiting, something imposed.

It’s rarely said outright, but it sits there: that I am, in some way, compromised. That my freedom is partial. That one day, if I am honest or brave enough, I might see it the way they do.

This same dynamic is quieter in the boardroom or the workplace, but not fundamentally different. I am present, but peripheral. Eyes move past me. Contributions are missed or deferred. I am there, but not quite there — an inconvenience more than a contributor. The kind of diversity that is needed, but not always wanted.

And if you think you’ve always looked at me without prejudice or projection, consider the moments you may have caught yourself thinking: how does she wear that in this heat? Or: what an inspiring woman, out there doing all of this in a hijab. Or even: poor thing, she must have such a hard life. None of those thoughts make you a bad person. I’m not angry that you’ve had them. They are, in many ways, deeply human responses to difference.

But they do illustrate something important: that my image often arrives before my personhood does. The hijab becomes a lens through which I am first interpreted, and only then encountered as a person.

There is another layer to this that I find harder to admit.

There are those — Muslim and, more alarmingly, not-Muslim — who seem to derive value from my visibility as a hijabi woman. A usefulness. A symbolism.

And I sometimes wonder: what would happen to that if I took it off?

If I began showing up without the scarf, hair loose, blending more easily into the norm - would I disappoint you? Would I be read the same way? As compelling? As useful? Would I still be your symbol of inclusion, of progress, of the fight?

I don’t ask that to dismiss the very real barriers that come with wearing the hijab. They exist, and I have lived them. The resilience required to move through a world that reads you before it hears you is real.

But the question lingers.

What would you all think of me if I was no longer visibly different in that way? And more importantly — what would I think of myself?

The moment I start viewing the hijab through the prism of what everyone else thinks — what it means to them, what value they attach to it, what story they read onto me because of it — something becomes corrupted. The moment I catch myself wondering whether it makes me more admirable, more useful, more symbolically powerful, I feel an almost immediate urge to rip it off entirely.

But that, too, would be a reaction. And that, too, would hand other people ownership over something that was never meant to belong to them in the first place. In this way, I sit both freed by the hijab, and hemmed in by it.

In truth the hijab cannot be worn for anyone — not for the ones who fetishise it, fear it, or even celebrate it. It has to sit somewhere else entirely.

That aside, what many of us notice with all of this, is a broader discomfort with Muslim women who refuse to be easily read — who don’t conform to a single, stable narrative. There is both titillation and frustration around the idea of a Muslim woman who doesn’t align with our rigid projections of who she might be.

The very idea that my body and sexuality might be withheld from consumption by others is, in itself, so radical that it provokes both titillation in some (see my DMs) and frustration in others (see also my DMs). For some, the pervasiveness of the sexualised human form is so deeply tied to their liberal idea of freedom, and even to their sense of self, that choosing to preserve one’s image or remain unseen is read as victimhood.

And I understand where that comes from. We have been taught to read the hijab as a symbol first and a practice second — to interpret it through a lens of control, rather than relationship. But what that leaves no room for is the possibility that this might be something chosen. That I am not waiting to be rescued.

There is a version of this story — the oppressed woman pushing back — that is readily understood, even rewarded. It fits neatly. It travels well. It makes people comfortable in their concern. Playing that role can be, in its own way, lucrative. I most often feel the pull of it in largely feminist spaces I frequent, where the desire for me to speak to an oppression can sometimes reach fever pitch — as though the most compelling version of my story is the one where I am trapped, rather than choosing. But that just isn’t how I experience my hijab.

For many Muslim women, the hijab is not a costume or a public statement open to interpretation. It is a practice. A relationship.

In Islam, it is an obligation — but like any obligation of faith, it only holds meaning when it is lived. In relationship, in intention, in the quiet, daily choosing of it.

Within Muslim communities, it is often read as a visible marker of piety — a signal of commitment. For others, it is habitual, cultural, something inherited. This too can be a confining experience.

Ideally, it is something else entirely: a representation of one’s devotion to a higher power — a relationship that is deeply personal, and ultimately only knowable to God.

But we do not live in an ideal world. Nor do we live as ideal people.

For me personally, there have been moments that sit outside the neatness of any of these categories. Swimming in the ocean, the hijab slipping off, and instead of scrambling to fix it, just continuing — because there was no one around to see. Standing at the football, soaked through after beer and red wine had been spilled over me, taking it off until it dried. An alcohol-soaked hijab is, in many ways, a Muslim woman’s worst nightmare. Small, ordinary moments. And yet, they sit awkwardly against the idea of the hijab as a fixed symbol of anything.

There are also moments that are less practical that require more introspection and interrogation.

Like the times I want to feel desirable. To be seen as attractive in a world that values sex appeal — the very thing the hijab is, in many ways, intended to shield our vanity from. It is a complex quagmire to navigate, knowing that for most, the hijab itself is read as the opposite of sexualisation. There are some days I just want to look ‘hot’ - a thought process that itself is a prison. And yet, I can be sexualised with my hijab on — reduced, imagined, consumed. Not affirmed, but distorted.

The compounding of this complexity unsettles me. It makes me want, at times, to retreat entirely from view.

All of this sits alongside the expectation that the hijab should signify something clear, consistent and whole in nature. But the reality is far less stable. It is natural to assume that a woman in hijab is making a conscious commitment to her faith. Often, that is true.

But we cannot know the intention behind it. The state of someone’s faith. Their relationship with God. And so we are left with assumptions. The question is not whether we make them, but how tightly we hold them.

So yes, I wear the hijab as part of my faith. And I choose it — imperfectly, inconsistently, but sincerely.

Despite this, it remains a lightning rod.

The hijab becomes another site where women’s bodies are debated, regulated and interpreted — rarely by the women themselves. In France, Muslim women are told liberation looks like removing it. In Iran, women are punished for refusing to wear it. In workplaces, media and public life across the west, hijabi women are simultaneously praised as symbols of diversity and treated as inherently different. Across contexts and ideologies, the assumption remains the same: that women’s bodies are public terrain, and that the hijab must mean something available for everyone else to interpret. The result is a triple bind. Invisible to some, hyper-visible to others, and burdened by a deep well of internalised expectation.

It is exhausting to be turned into a symbol from every direction. Because I am not a symbol. I am a person. And yet, I have become adept at living inside other people’s projections — moving between them, adjusting, anticipating.

And to be clear I don’t mean this in a I wear lipstick for me kind of way. This is not neat ‘girl powering’ at its best. It is a grappling. What I am reaching for feels quieter. Less performative. More aligned. Like the difference between wading through mud and moving through water. Not ease, exactly — but movement without resistance. My relationship with the hijab sits within this. It is not static. It is a practice, a tension, a devotion, a negotiation. It is not evidence of oppression, nor a symbol of liberation. It is an indication that I am in a relationship with something larger than myself. And my individuality is in relationship to a higher purpose.

So the DMs will continue. The boardrooms may continue to overlook. The projections will persist. I am less interested now in correcting them.

Perhaps the real discomfort, and my real freedom, is not in what the hijab represents, but that it refuses to be defined by anyone but the woman wearing it.

This week it was Pauline Hanson, asking where they were — and suggesting, once again, that perhaps there aren’t any. The sentiment has surfaced before, reshaped by whatever anxiety happens to define the moment. After the Bali Bombings and September 11 attacks, it appeared as suspicion dressed as security. In the tensions surrounding the Cronulla riots, it became a demand for cultural loyalty. Long before that, the Afghan cameleers who crossed the Australian interior in the late nineteenth century — transporting goods, supporting exploration and helping connect isolated settlements — encountered their own versions of the same question. Their labour was welcomed. Their belonging remained negotiable.

For many years, I tried to meet those expectations. Not because Islam required it, but because public life seemed to. The boundaries were never clearly stated, yet they were widely understood: be visible but not confronting; principled but never inconvenient; successful, but always grateful. Faith became something managed carefully in public, shaped as much by media narratives and political debate as by religious conviction itself. It was an exhausting performance.

The problem is that these expectations don’t really reflect what Islam understands goodness to be. Islam has never asked Muslims to perform for acceptance. It has always been clear about what actually matters instead.

Let me take you through what is expected of a ‘good Muslim’.

Goodness Is Never About Optics

A good Muslim is not defined by what can be easily observed from the outside. It is recognised in the ordinary, often unremarkable ways belief shapes how someone treats other people.

One of the Qur’an’s most revealing moments arrives in the middle of an argument about religious correctness — about outward practice and who could claim to be getting faith right. Into that dispute comes a quiet recalibration:

“Righteousness is not that you turn your faces toward the east or the west…”
(Qur’an 2:177)

The verse does not dismiss ritual; Muslims still pray facing Mecca. But it refuses the idea that goodness can be verified through appearances alone. Instead, it describes righteousness through belief that holds under pressure, generosity even when it costs something, promises kept, patience in hardship and care for others.

Classical scholars understood this as a reminder that faith was never meant to be reduced to visible markers. Worship and ethics were inseparable.

Character Is The Actual Metric

Faith, in Islam, is never just a private declaration. It is expected to show up in ordinary life — in the way promises are kept, disagreements handled, power exercised and other people experience your presence. Belief is not measured only by what someone says about themselves, but by whether it makes them kinder, fairer and more trustworthy. When it doesn’t, the tradition treats that not as a small inconsistency, but as a sign that something important has gone missing.

When the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was asked what distinguished the best among people, his answer was strikingly consistent:

“The best among you are those best in character.”
(Sahih Bukhari)

It is a deceptively simple standard. Not visibility. Not rhetoric. Not even the outward performance of religiosity alone. Again and again, the tradition returns instead to qualities that are recognisable across cultures: honesty, humility, restraint, reliability and integrity when no one else is watching.

Another prophetic teaching makes the emphasis unmistakable:

“Nothing carries greater weight than good character.”
(Abu Dawud; Tirmidhi)

Safety Is A Religious Obligation

One teaching of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ feels particularly relevant in modern Australia:

“The Muslim is the one from whose tongue and hand people are safe.”
(Sahih Bukhari)

It is a strikingly simple standard. Faith is not measured by how convincingly it is argued or how visibly it is displayed, but by whether others experience safety in your presence. A neighbour, a colleague or even a stranger who disagrees with you politically should be protected from harm — not impressed, persuaded or reassured, but safe.

Another prophetic teaching reinforces the same ethic:

“Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day should speak good or remain silent.”
(Sahih Bukhari; Sahih Muslim)

The point here, is not silence in the face of wrongdoing. Islamic tradition repeatedly praises those who speak truth to power. What it cautions against instead is speech that wounds without purpose — the idle cruelty, gossip and performative outrage that damage relationships long before they change anything.

Faith, in this framing, carries an unmistakable social responsibility. Safety is not treated as politeness or good manners; it is treated as evidence of sincerity itself.

That is an extraordinarily high bar. One I think many of our public voices fail us in.

Justice Comes Before Tribal Loyalty

Speaking of which, Islam is unusually clear about what justice requires — especially when it is uncomfortable. The Qur’an does not allow fairness to depend on loyalty, emotion or whose side you happen to be on. Instead, it asks something far harder:

“Stand firmly for justice, even against yourselves or your parents or relatives.”
(Qur’an 4:135)

It is a confronting standard. Justice is not softened by family ties, political allegiance or the instinct to defend people who feel like our own. The expectation is not simply to avoid wrongdoing, but to remain honest even when honesty costs something — even when it risks reputation, comfort or belonging.

The Qur’an goes further still:

“Do not let hatred of a people cause you to be unjust.”
(Qur’an 5:8)

And if justice demands fairness even toward those we oppose, the tradition goes further still — asking not only restraint, but mercy.

Mercy Is The Model

Mercy, in practice, has less to do with feeling kindly toward people and more to do with how they experience you. It shows up in ordinary moments — choosing patience when humiliation would be easier, generosity when indifference would cost nothing, restraint when the sharp response is sitting right there. It shifts the question away from whether you were justified, and toward something harder: what did it feel like to be on the receiving end of you?

If justice demands fairness even toward those we oppose, Islamic teaching goes further still. The Qur’an describes the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ as:

“A mercy to all the worlds.”
(Qur’an 21:107)

The scope of that description is deliberate. Mercy is not limited to believers, nor reserved for moments of agreement or affection. Classical scholars understood it to extend to anyone encountered along the way — neighbours, strangers, critics and even enemies.

Mercy, in this tradition, is not temperament or personality. It is a ‘good Muslim’s’ responsibility.

Islam Does Not Expect Perfection

One of the more surprising things about Islamic ethics is how realistic it is about human failure. People disappoint each other. They make poor decisions. They say things they regret.

What matters is not the absence of mistakes, but what follows them — whether responsibility is taken, harm acknowledged and repair attempted. Growth is measured less by avoiding failure altogether than by the willingness to return, apologise and try again.

In that sense, a good Muslim is not someone who never gets things wrong. It is someone who refuses to let failure become indifference.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ expressed this with characteristic clarity:

“Every son of Adam sins. The best of those who sin are those who repent.”
(Tirmidhi)

Repentance, in this tradition, is not about guilt. It is about returning — recognising harm, making amends and choosing differently the next time.

It begins to look less like sainthood and more like adulthood.

The Verse That Changes The Question

Islam ultimately measures goodness in a way that is both simple and deeply uncomfortable for anyone hoping to judge it from the outside. Status does not come from background, rank, culture or public approval. It comes from an inner accountability — the quiet awareness that one’s actions matter even when nobody else is watching.

The Qur’an expresses it this way:

“Indeed the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the one most conscious of Him.”
(Qur’an 49:13)

Race does not decide it. Nationality does not secure it. Cultural assimilation cannot manufacture it.

Because the standard being described is inward. It cannot be measured by politicians, verified by commentators or granted by majority approval.

In the end, it belongs to the space between a person and their conscience.

Why The Question Keeps Missing The Point

When Australians ask about “good Muslims,” what they are often really asking is whether Muslims deserve acceptance.

Islam never frames goodness as something performed for others’ approval. Yet Muslims are repeatedly asked to prove themselves anyway — not just what they believe or how they live, but whether their faith feels comfortable enough for everyone else.

By their own standard though, Muslims are asked to be honest because accountability begins within. To be just because justice matters. To serve because service itself is worship — not because someone else might finally feel reassured.

And perhaps that’s the irony. The qualities Islam describes — mercy, humility, generosity and integrity — are not foreign ideas. Most Australians would recognise them immediately as the qualities of a good neighbour. Or a good citizen. Or maybe just a good human.

Islam does not ask Muslims to be good in order to be accepted. It asks them to be good because they are accountable to a Creator. Mercy, justice, restraint, service and repair when harm is done are not public relations exercises. They are religious obligations. Goodness, in Islam, is private accountability lived out through everyday behaviour.

So Pauline, perhaps the more interesting question is not who qualifies as a “good Muslim” but whether any of us are consistently meeting the standards of goodness we so confidently demand from others.

It’s delivered with the same urgency usually reserved for clearance sales.
Use it now. Spend it freely. Don’t waste it.
Because, apparently, time is coming for all of us with a vengeance.

For years, I accepted this idea without thinking too much about it — that youth and beauty were the premium currency of early adulthood, something you were supposed to maximise before the market inevitably collapsed. Recently, though, I’ve started thinking about the entire arrangement a little differently.

Because if youth and beauty were actual financial assets — the kind you could take to a financial planner — no sensible advisor would recommend investing heavily in them.

They depreciate.

No matter how many serums you buy, how disciplined your Pilates schedule is, or how enthusiastically you hydrate, youth and beauty are still the equivalent of driving a brand-new car off the lot: the value begins dropping immediately. And yet, for some reason, we are encouraged to treat these rapidly depreciating assets as though they are our primary source of worth — something we should “make the most of” while we still can.

Which, if you think about it for more than five minutes, is a terrible deal.

Because what happens when you organise your self-esteem around something designed to change? Later inevitably arrives. You wake up somewhere near a milestone birthday and suddenly the conversation shifts. Now it’s time to discover deeper meaning. Reinvent yourself. Invest in friendships. Volunteer. Develop “inner beauty,” a concept that was suspiciously absent from most conversations when you were twenty-five.

At the same time, you are also encouraged to optimise the very thing that is supposedly fading. There are now procedures, treatments, maintenance schedules, and subscription services devoted to helping you look “refreshed,” which appears to mean looking exactly the way you did ten years ago, only with better lighting.

All of this is presented as the natural lifecycle of womanhood: enjoy the attention when you’re young, brace for the fall, and then rebuild your identity around more meaningful pursuits.

And lately I’ve found myself wondering why we accepted this deal in the first place — why we were encouraged to spend the one asset guaranteed to depreciate, and call that empowerment.

What if there didn’t have to be a fall at all?

What if, instead of spending our youth and beauty as though they were the central source of our value, we had invested our worth somewhere else from the beginning — in our humour, our relationships, our intelligence, our contribution, our character? The kinds of things that, unlike collagen, do not steadily decline with time but actually improve if you keep showing up for them.

Those are appreciating assets.
They compound.
They pay dividends.

In financial terms, it’s an extremely boring but very reliable strategy.

What’s slightly unnerving, at least for me, is realising that even though I never considered myself particularly beauty-obsessed, I still absorbed more of the narrative than I thought. The small sting of noticing a grey hair, the brief discomfort of seeing a face that looks a little different than it used to — those reactions reveal something quietly confronting: somewhere along the way, I too had allowed a portion of my worth to be stored in something designed to change.

Of course, the youth-and-beauty regime is hardly an individual pursuit. None of us arrived here on our own; we were gently — and sometimes aggressively — conscripted into it. Which is why the only foolproof resistance is resistance itself, first in our own minds and, eventually, collectively.

If, when we were young, we had simply put the mirror down a little more often — letting youth and beauty be exactly what they are, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of our much larger life story — we might have enjoyed them just as much, but without confusing them for the main characters. They were never meant to carry the plot.

That, I suspect, is the real challenge of youth.

So if you happen to be in your twenties and reading this, my best beauty advice would be this:

Invest heavily in the parts of yourself that do not depreciate.
Invest in the friendships that will still be there when nobody is calling you “glowing.”
Invest in your curiosity, your competence, your generosity, your ability to do meaningful work.
Invest in becoming someone whose value deepens rather than fades.

Because the best ageing strategy turns out not to be preserving youth.

It is building a life that does not rely on it.

You may, like me, have been pulled into the current social media obsession with reposting who you were in 2016 — or even 2006. The nostalgia-fuelled, mildly self-indulgent ritual has taken over our feeds, drowning timelines in recycled aesthetics from the noughties and 2010s. It’s a trend widely noted across TikTok, Instagram and X as part of the broader “2016 revival” cycle — from fashion to music to internet culture.

While we’ve been busy romanticising the past, sport has been quietly rebuilding it.

In the frantic chase for “new” and “fresh,” it only takes a light scratch beneath the surface to see what’s really happening. What’s old is being reheated, rebranded and sold back to us as innovation — a familiar pattern for industries addicted to trends, optics and business-driven honeypots.

The Australian Open and its Women problem.

Let’s start with the Australian Open.

Wrapping up last night in a blaze of Aperol spritzes and Louis Vuitton, the AO — now firmly positioned as a summer festival rather than just a sporting tournament — once again declared success through record crowds and social buzz.

But the crowds themselves became the story.

Reports of congestion, saturation and influencer overload flooded social media. Brand activations, creator lounges, VIP invite lists and sponsored outfit content now dominate AO coverage alongside match highlights. The ABC recently outlined the growing tensions created by Tennis Australia’s deliberate courting of influencer media.

This year Tennis Australia were generous in inviting me — alongside other inclusion stakeholders — early in the tournament. Because of that access, I found myself sitting adjacent to the influencer and celebrity ecosystem. And what I saw was hard to ignore: an aesthetic that’s been creeping in for years finally took over this season.

What I saw was clear. Through the influencer lens, the AO is overwhelmingly white, thin, bougie and curated. Content isn’t about tennis — it’s about outfits, access, exclusivity, “the experience.” Some argue this opens sport to new audiences, particularly women, given the demographic makeup of influencer culture.

And yes — expanding entry points matters. In a consumer-driven industry, it’s also inevitable. But we still need to interrogate where this evolution actually lands. Because looking at how this AO has been constructed and delivered — both in real life and online — doesn’t feel like progress.

It feels like the early 2000s.

The ‘AO woman’ is once again fashion-first, body-conscious, brand-aligned, consumption-driven. This mirrors the broader playbook we’ve seen with the Taylor Swift x NFL moment and F1’s Drive to Survive strategy: court women through aesthetics, celebrity adjacency and lifestyle branding.

It works.
It’s lucrative.

But it also reveals something uncomfortable. In shedding male-dominated sports media, what’s risen to the surface isn’t a diverse vision of women’s fandom — it’s a commercial caricature of it.

If I felt like I was being cynical I only had to look to Tennis Australia’s CEO, Craig Tiley who post tournament has publicly floated expanding the AO festival footprint into “fashion and wellness” activations — positioning the event even further inside lifestyle branding.

Frankly, this feels less like innovation and more like a reheated version of the fashion-and-diet culture playbook that’s been mining women’s dollars for decades.

When “women’s engagement” becomes aesthetic extraction

Because what we don’t see are the Martina Navratilovas. The Ash Bartys.

Where are the butch women? The queer women? The ones whose devotion to sport helped build a women’s sport industry now worth millions and celebrated as one of the fastest-growing sectors globally? Where are the women of colour? The un-manicured women? The obsessive, stats-nerd fans?

Hell — where are the influencers who are actually there for the sport, not just the look?

The saddest part is that many of these women were sidelined once before — pushed out when women were forced to “pick a lane” – either conform to narrow versions of acceptability or be an outlier.

And now, after all the talk of inclusion and progress, they’re being sidelined again. Only this time it’s happening quietly. Through algorithms. Sponsorship strategies. Brand deals. Whether ‘engaging new audiences’ or celebrating themed ‘inclusion’ events like the ‘Glam Slam’, we’ve convinced ourselves that visibility equals equity.

Visibility does not equal equity.

When “inclusion” sits comfortably alongside Barbie-branded beauty houses and pastel marketing campaigns, the outcome is predictable: the most commercially palatable version of us rises to the top.

Everyone else disappears.

It’s not evolution.
It’s regression dressed up as marketing.

Women’s fandom has been Stepford-ed — streamlined into a narrow aesthetic that’s easy to sell.

And to be clear, I don’t have a problem if your entry point to sport is because you like Carlos Alcaraz’s smile or think Lando Norris is hot. Or are only there for the vibe. Truly.

I have a problem when that becomes the dominant and only visibility of women’s place in sport — especially when it comes to how our money is valued — reduced to something that’s only allowed to be “girly” and endlessly commercial.

Because this is where the real tension sits: in the dollars.

Tennis, F1 and the NFL are celebrated for “cracking” women’s engagement. What they’ve actually cracked is how to engage some women — the most brand-friendly, aesthetically aligned, commercially desirable ones.

And yes — that’s very lucrative.

You only have to look at Cricket and Netball to see how deeply corporate sponsorships and values-driven partnerships now shape the game — from naming rights deals to campaign-led brand activations.

These strategies don’t usually trickle down into everyday fandom or grassroots culture — unless, of course, you put Katy Perry on a World Cup stage and call it growth. These sports often are values driven. They just don’t drive the zeitgeist. The end result of which is sport choosing the zeitgeist, preferring monetisation, not transformation.

It’s painfully familiar territory. Women in sport are once again framed through fashion, glamour and spectacle — more reminiscent of the early-2000s commercialisation of girlhood than any meaningful evolution. Sport has unleashed a Spice Girls–esque version of fandom — just without Sporty Spice.

The AFL’s multicultural déjà vu

And if we’re talking about going backwards, the AFL offers another masterclass — quietly reverting to its 2016–17 playbook by reigniting its obsession with India and the local diaspora.

My first job in sport at an AFL Club – I signed in 2016 - was in fan engagement — specifically created to “target Indian fans.” It didn’t take long for me to call BS on the framing and pivot toward broader inclusion work. Because even then, the motivation wasn’t cultural connection. It was commercial expansion.

At the time, AFL Clubs Essendon FC and Richmond FC were leading the push to court what was openly described as the ‘highly lucrative’ Indian community. AFL House followed with multicultural ambassadors, traineeships, themed rounds and overseas trips.

On paper, it looked like progress.

But when genuine, slow, relationship-based community engagement didn’t deliver instant returns, the commitment evaporated.

Multicultural programs were deprioritised and when Women’s cricket proved commercially profitable in the noughties, “Women and girls” became the new commercial frontier for the AFL. AFLW was rushed through. Multicultural engagement became a “nice to have.”

Fast forward to now.

After the 2021 census — much like after 2016 — India’s growing diaspora and economic influence became impossible to ignore. Once again, the AFL responded with a reactive multicultural pivot and renewed global expansion rhetoric.

Andrew Dillon is now in India having conversations about growth. Long-time community advocates are back in the spotlight. And finally, the numbers are whispering what the league has always waited for:

“Participation in Australian Rules in India has reportedly jumped from 150 players to more than 20,000 across 11 states — figures repeatedly cited internally as proof of concept for global expansion.”

Even one percent of Indian broadcast revenue would be massive.

And this is where the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.

The AFL is very good at extraction — at least in how value is systematically pulled upward while community ownership erodes.

Indigenous communities? Culture and talent historically mined, now demoted organisationally after significant backlash and breakdown of trust.
Women’s Footy? Fast-tracked, commercialised, homogenised and stripped from the true queer grassroots that built it, only to be slowed down and substantially de-listed.
Multicultural communities? Re-heated again and again as the next growth market.

Across all of it runs the same logic: communities are embraced when profitable and sidelined when inconvenient. That isn’t inclusion. It’s commodification.

Sport loves to announce progress. What it actually produces is repetition — old power structures repackaged as innovation, driven by transactional leadership and sold under new branding. And to be fair, that may be the business model of sport and fashion. I just wish it were delivered without the performance of social good layered on top.

And in that way, sport doesn’t just mirror global politics — it mimics its worst instincts. It chases power, protects profit, prioritises optics and treats communities as resources to be mined. The end result is painfully familiar: different branding, same power structures, same exclusions, same extraction. Which is why I keep writing the same articles — and feeling the same frustration — again.

Those were the words of the woman filming the horrific shooting of Alex Pretti — footage you have probably now seen from multiple angles across every platform. It was the first thing I saw when I opened Instagram on Sunday morning.

Another.
ICE.
Death.

As the hours unfolded, more clips surfaced. Different angles. Same outcome. And my feed filled accordingly. Relentlessly. Algorithmically. Brutally.

Watching a man already cowering on the ground be shot is a gut punch. It beggars belief. But what keeps replaying in my body isn’t just the violence — it’s the tiny moment before it happens. That split second before Alex Pretti is disarmed and then killed. The moment the woman behind the camera says the most obvious thing in the world:

What the f*ck is wrong with you people? Honestly?

It has been ringing in my ears ever since.

The most ordinary words can be the most devastating

In its mundanity, the phrase is profound.

It isn’t political theatre. It isn’t performance. It’s raw fear and shock colliding in real time.

And it’s the same sentence we keep saying to each other. In group chats. At family barbeques. Over coffee. Whispered while scrolling endless ICE raids and “breaking news” alerts.

Honestly.

She says it with a slight crack in her voice. The anger softens for half a second. What falls out isn’t rage — it’s pleading.

That one word is carrying everything.

“Honestly” is a code red

Honestly isn’t about party lines anymore.

It’s not Democrat or Republican.
Not citizen or “alien”.

It’s a blinking code red for humanity.

It’s saying: I am not arguing policy. I am watching a human being be hunted in front of me.

Honestly is:

How did we get here?

What went so wrong that an ICU nurse can be killed in the street?

Honestly, help me understand.
Honestly, somebody stop this.
Honestly, I don’t care about talking points or institutions or the performance of justice anymore.
Honestly, just give me truth. Give me sense. Give me a reason this cruelty is being allowed to exist.

Honestly is a cry to return to sanity. To human reason. To something resembling moral ground.

Welcome to the era of Honestly

When we say “honestly” in everyday life, we usually mean: no spin, no subtext, no strategy. Just the truth.

And that’s exactly where we are now.

You can hear it everywhere.

Jon Favreau, co-host of Pod Save America, urged Americans this week to stop spectating and start acting. Beneath the polish was a simple message:

Honestly. Time is up on watching from the sidelines.

Mark Carney, PM of Canada, told the World Economic Forum in Davos that the so-called rules-based order is effectively dead. His was another blunt truth:

Stop pretending.
Stop being complicit.
Build something new.

Honestly, the jig is up.

We are living in the era of Honestly now.

You can feel it in conversations. In protests. In exhaustion. In the way people are no longer interested in polite lies or institutional theatre.

There is no time left for pretence.
No appetite for platitudes.

Honestly doesn’t let you pretend anymore

I felt this recently at the Australian Open.

I walked into a hyper-commercial fantasyland — elite sport, luxury hospitality, corporate lounges, celebrities and influencers everywhere. A version of an experience I once would have enjoyed without thinking twice.

But one thought kept looping:

What are we all doing clinking glasses while the world is on fire? Honestly?

Even the ritual of posting the good seats and good drinks felt deeply hollow. More performative than ever, like I was under duress to do so.

The moment that cut through most was running into a journalist friend. No small talk. No “how was your holiday?”

We went straight to the real things. Hate laws. Extremism. Faith. Death. Truth. Survival. In a stadium built for spectacle, we had the most human conversation in the room. That’s what this era feels like.

Honestly keeps interrupting the theatre.
Honestly refuses to let us numb ourselves anymore.

An era of Honestly demands honesty

I know some of you will worry about me after reading this. I’m okay. Truly. I still find joy — in my spirituality, in the curl of my daughter’s smile, in real connection.

But working with people who can’t see or feel this urgency now feels like being stuck in wet concrete.

An era of Honestly demands honesty.

It means telling the truth when it costs you.
It means doing the right thing even when it makes you unpopular.
It means deciding — deliberately — to stop numbing yourself.

Real talk.
Real action.
Real strategy.

Leadership with spine. Thinking with integrity. Courage that costs something. Because if we keep choosing distraction, the ending isn’t abstract. We will be crouched on the ground helpless. And eventually bleeding.

And maybe the more important question isn’t: What the f*ck is wrong with you people? Maybe it’s the one we should finally ask ourselves:

What the f*ck is wrong with us?

To answer this question fully requires our intention. Our discomfort. Our action.

Honestly.

Watching Wicked: For Good felt less like a musical finale and more like holding up a mirror to the machinery of cha

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nge-making — especially as a woman of colour who has lived the tension between truth-telling and institutional power. Beneath the emerald shimmer is a parable about who gets to speak, who gets to survive, and whose stories are rewritten for public comfort.

It is, unmistakably, the story of the activist and the politician.

Elphaba and Glinda.
Truth and palatability.
Change and the cost of it.

The Activist’s Fate

Elphaba begins as the girl who dares to see injustice clearly — first in the suppression of Animals, then in Madame Morrible’s manipulation, and finally in the Wizard’s entire regime of smoke, mirrors, and propaganda. Her radical clarity doesn’t come from theory or ideology. It comes from her lived experience as an outsider from the moment of her birth. She is marked as “other” in a world obsessed with palatability, a world that wants its heroes neat and its truths digestible.

By the time we reach For Good, her trajectory is sealed. Her “No good deed goes unpunished” moment — that emotional pivot where she realises every attempt to do the right thing only deepens her isolation — mirrors the journey of so many marginalised women in activism. She saves Boq and is accused of taking away his heart. She exposes corruption and is branded a villain. She speaks truth and is labelled dangerous.

Sound familiar?

This is the script: the truth-teller becomes the problem, not the problem she is naming.

When Dulciebear, another outsider, quietly asks, “How can YOU survive here?” it lands with the full weight of marginalised wisdom. The question isn’t about capability. It’s about the conditions. This world will not protect you, and it will not bend for your truth.

Elphaba’s ultimate choice — to fake her death, walk away, and live privately with Fiyero — is devastating precisely because it is real. In our world, many truth-tellers, thought leaders, and movement starters eventually choose self-preservation over public presence. They leave institutions not because they are weak, but because staying requires contorting themselves beyond recognition. They choose freedom over visibility, authenticity over acceptance.

The heartbreak is not that they opt out.
The heartbreak is that the system never made space for them in the first place.

The Politician’s Burden

Glinda, meanwhile, becomes the face of reform — not because she knows more, but because Oz trusts her more. She is the woman the system is built for: blonde, beloved, class-aligned, aspirational, “good.” When the Wizard collapses in disgrace and Morrible is exposed, it is Glinda who steps into the power vacuum. It is Glinda who stands before the citizens and reassures them that truth has been revealed and justice is coming.

Elphaba could never give that speech.
Not because she doesn’t know the truth — but because they would never hear it from her.

Glinda’s privilege is not accidental; it is structural. She is the one whose reform will be accepted because her hands are clean enough for the public to trust. For Good makes this painfully clear: even when Glinda sees through Morrible’s manipulation, even when she chooses conscience over comfort, her path to leadership remains intact. She is wounded, yes, but not erased. The system bruises her but still ultimately holds her.

Glinda’s transformation is not simply emotional; it is political. She learns to read Elphaba’s moral compass — to understand the world not through her glittering vantage point, but through Elphaba’s scarred one. Her line, “Because I knew you, I have been changed for good,” is not sentimental fluff. It is an acknowledgement that the reformer’s wisdom is borrowed. It is inherited from those who risk more than she ever will.

Truth vs Perception

The Wizard and Morrible weaponise narrative — press conferences, staged miracles, fear campaigns dressed up as civic duty. They remind us that systems rarely protect themselves with facts. They protect themselves with story.

And Glinda, in the end, must wield narrative too. She has to construct a version of events the public can digest — something Elphaba cannot do, nor would we want her to. Elphaba’s truth is raw; Glinda’s truth is packaged.

This is the choreography of politics, advocacy, and every movement that has ever tried to shift a stubborn world:

• Truth-tellers speak plainly.

• Reformers translate strategically.

• And the public rarely sees the original source of the wisdom they applaud.

Is it uncomfortable? Absolutely. But it is the reality of social change: truth sparks it, but perception sells it. And the work of reform often sits in that uneasy space between what is real and what people are prepared to believe.

The Cost of Being First

Elphaba is the archetype of the ground-breaker — the one whose moral clarity arrives before the world is ready for it. Her ideas become mainstream only after she is gone. This is the pattern of social change: activists become martyrs, while reformers become ministers.

Elphaba becomes a myth, a cautionary tale, and eventually — thanks to Glinda — a misunderstood but necessary part of Oz’s rebirth. But she is not there to witness it.

This is what it costs to be first.

The Reformer’s Hope

Glinda, taking the seat of power alone at the end, mirrors many real-world reformers: she vows to reshape Oz using what she learned from someone the system refused to listen to.

She orders Morrible imprisoned.
She dethrones the Wizard.
She begins rewriting laws built on lies.

But she does this alone, from within a system that will always see her as legitimate and Elphaba as a footnote.

The Template We Don’t Want but Must Acknowledge

Wicked: For Good offers an imperfect but honest template for how change happens:

• The activist carries the truth and suffers the backlash.

• The reformer carries the narrative and institutionalises the change.

Both roles are essential. Both are tragic. Both are heroic.

For the marginalised truth-teller, there is rarely peace in reform. For them, the best life is often the one Elphaba chooses: authentic, free, outside the system, unbent by it but isolated and unable to fix anything in material ways.

For the reformer, the work is to use inherited power consciously — to make choices that honour the person who opened their eyes in the first place. There’s no escaping the system, only fixing it, with a life full of compromise

So in this all too familiar tragedy, perhaps the greatest hope is this:

That the Oz Glinda rebuilds is one Elphaba can one day re-enter — without disguise, without fear, and without needing to hide her true colour.

From boardroom meetings where someone’s messaging me about “gendered language data you might be interested in,” to late-night group chats swapping TV recommendations, to frantic school-gate texts asking, “Does anyone have a spare green T-shirt for aths day?!”—my life hums with vibrant, smart, silly voices that are, technologically speaking, always with me.

But when I look closer—and lately, I have been—I can’t seem to find much depth beneath the constant buzz. These relationships, full of warmth and wit online, rarely stretch beyond the daily hum of our digital lives. Let me explain.

My messages are a graveyard of exchanges like:
“Hey, are you free for a chat?”
Hours—sometimes days—later: “Sorry I wasn’t! Hectic day. Hope you’re okay.”
Or: “So sorry, I have to cancel tomorrow, Tommy’s got a school thing.”
Or the classic: “I know we booked this weeks ago, but I really need to prioritise family time this weekend.”

Sure, there are long text threads and group chats. We swap memes, vent about work, and offer micro-doses of connection that last just long enough to trick our brains into thinking we’re still close.

But when I say, “Hey, can we get coffee? I actually want to see your face. And, low-key, I really need someone right now,” I usually get:
“Oh my god, yes! I’m totally slammed for the next few weeks but let’s definitely do that. Maybe next month?”

Sometimes it’s even booked—then cancelled the day before.

I get it. People are busy. Life is really just what happens while you’re busy cancelling plans with your well-meaning friends. I’ve always believed you can’t wait around for people to call; you reach out, you show up. When they ask, you turn up. When you ask, they turn up. That’s how it’s meant to work. Which is why this stings so much.

I work in belonging—it’s literally my thing. I spend my days helping workplaces, schools, and sports teams understand how connection is as essential to human survival as food, water, or shelter. I’ve poured so much energy into creating belonging for everyone else that somewhere along the way, I stopped tending to my own. The kind that keeps me grounded, seen, alive. And now, in this freelance, solo season of life, I’m realising how easy it is to help others connect while quietly coming undone yourself.

Right now, I’m in a period of stress and deep need. And it’s true what they say: you learn who your people are. Turns out, my people are excellent texters, meme-senders, group-chat cheerleaders—and totally absent IRL.

Take my sisters. Beautiful, brilliant, selfless women who live like martyrs—devoted to families, causes, and good works. I love them fiercely, even as I resent how unreachable they’ve become. To get them together takes a campaign-level effort: multiple reminders, calendar holds, me doing all the admin, and a formal decree that says, “Turn up this day. I’ll handle the rest.”

After a particularly tough patch in our family, I decided we needed a day together. Not a weekend away—just a single day. Massages, scones, venting about our families—the kind of day that smells like eucalyptus oil and burnt coffee, with laughter that turns into tears and back again. I booked it months ahead. It became the thing I held onto when I needed comfort.

Then, a few days before, came the dreaded voice note. Her voice was sad but certain: “I know we planned this, but I can’t be away from the kids this weekend. Please go ahead without me.”

She had every right. That’s what we’re told, isn’t it? Put yourself first. But I couldn’t help thinking: when do you put yourself second, for someone else?

It’s starting to feel like I have friends and family in theory, but not in practice. I know if something truly awful happened, they’d show up. But the slow, quiet ache of loneliness, burnout, or grief—the kind that needs time—goes unanswered. Everyone “loves me soooo much,” but only via text.

No one’s bad. No one’s neglectful. But no one is intentionally there. And it makes you wonder: does anyone actually care? And if they do, is caring in your heart enough when what someone needs is your body in the room next to them?

What’s the point of having people who love you if you never actually see them? I scroll through group chats with incredible women—brilliant thinkers, change-makers, mums juggling ten things—and realise I can count on one hand—fingers to spare—how many real, intentional catch-ups with them I’ve had this year. Not a bump-in at an event. Not a shared work thing. An actual hangout. Is that enough connection?

And I know I’m not alone, even though I am so lonely. A national survey last year found one in three Australians feel socially disconnected; one in six are severely lonely. Twenty-five percent are persistently lonely. Loneliness is defined as “the distressing feeling that occurs when your social relationships lack the quantity or quality you desire.” Bingo.

So, I made a list—the people I want to see versus the people who make the effort to see me. And there it was: the gut punch. While I’d been chasing some, others had been quietly chasing me. In my inbox sat a small pile of messages I’d ignored or postponed. People I assumed didn’t need me. Their “Can I see you soon?” got buried under my own chaos.

Was I chasing the wrong people? Was I the arsehole?

I thought about the friends who’ve quietly disappeared—stopped asking for my time altogether—probably assuming I was too busy for them. One friend, deep in the trenches of parenting little kids, just lives in another world now. She’s nappy changes and Bluey; I’m flight changes and canapés. I know this phase will pass. Her “heckers” phase will end, my work trips will ease, and maybe we’ll find our way back.

But that realisation revealed another pattern in my friendship graveyard—the ghosts of old connections still flickering in my phone. Birthdays unacknowledged. Invitations half-typed, then deleted. I used to think that when I finally resurfaced—when I reached out—it showed I cared. I don’t think it does anymore. Because maybe when my sister, or that friend knee-deep in parenting, needed me, I wasn’t there. Maybe our rhythms drifted out of sync for so long—and our friendship hygiene slipped so quietly—that now, when I call, I’m no longer in their “sure, I can do that” circle.

Lately, I crave the real world again. But maybe I’ve lived on my phone so long that now, when I’m ready to show up, no one’s left at the party. So I tell baristas about my burnout. I make friends with strangers at dance class. I confess, half-laughing, half-breaking, “My mum has cancer, and this is the best thing for me right now.”

My people will turn up eventually—when the crisis is obvious. But right now, while I wade through the everyday griefs of life, I’m clutching at memes, quick voice notes, and the kind barista who says, “That’s really hard. Hope this coffee helps.”

There are endless frameworks and campaigns about loneliness. And yes, structural change matters—especially for people who’ve always lived at the edges of belonging. But maybe, for most of us, the answer starts smaller—with something like friendship agreements.

I know I could ask for what I need. I’ve even floated it: “Let’s put this in the calendar monthly!” The problem is, it’s already been proven that my friends—like me—don’t always turn up. We mean to. We want to. But the follow-through gets lost somewhere between exhaustion, guilt, and another week that slipped away. So how do you ask for commitment from people who are already running on empty?

I’ve thought about picking three to five people and saying, “Here’s what friendship looks like for me right now. I need to see you for a walk or coffee every couple of weeks. Can we do that?” And maybe they’d say, “I can’t, but I could call once a week.” That could work. I’d take that.

In my professional life, we’d call this an MOU—a memorandum of understanding. Imagine if friendship worked like that. A shared agreement on when and how we’ll show up for each other. It would take the stress out of feeling like I’m constantly letting people down. I’m very good at turning up when I know I have to.

What I really want isn’t grand gestures. It’s the text that says, “Leaving now, see you soon.” It’s someone sitting across the table, phone face down, actually listening. It’s consistency. A little intentionality. Someone who locks it in and sticks to it. I don’t need surprise flowers. I just need someone to remember.

Maybe that’s what friendship looks like at this age—less about big declarations and more about micro-acts of reliability. The check-ins that actually happen. The coffees that don’t get cancelled. The commitment to keep showing up, even when it’s not convenient.

Maybe if we started naming that—if we were brave enough to ask for it—our friendships could stretch to fit the lives we’re actually living now. Maybe we’d all feel a little less unseen, a little more held.

Otherwise, it’s people, people everywhere—
but not a real friend in sight.

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