Reflections on a Past - Part I (b): the effects

In the last post (Reflections on a Past - Part I (a): back then), I revealed what I was like in “debates” (and stuff) in my earliest phase of engaging in online discussions with people. (I assure you, when I’d have those same discussions in person, I never yelled at my interlocutors. And I'd wait for them to finish what they had to say before I shared my thoughts. It's just that online, it's a whooole different aura, you know?)

Here, in this post, I’m explaining how those “debates” (and stuff) affected me mentally.

I’m really not exaggerating when I admit that these (online discussions) were very disturbing for me. Like I said, I couldn’t sleep. And my heart would start beating when I’d get a notification that someone I was in a discussion with had replied to my post and I knew that that person had disagreed with me. And because my heart would be pounding wildly while I’d be typing my responses, my reply would get longer than a few hundred miles, and there’d be so many exclamation marks and question marks, and I’d rant about how sad it was that Muslims in the west are so misguided. During these times, I wasn’t able to focus on my courses, I couldn’t sleep well or on time, I could think of nothing else besides how to reply to these misguided “so-called” Muslim souls who thought they were smarter than, that they knew more than, the One Ultimate Creator (male God) who created them. Really, I pitied them. I even remember sending out a looong email to a Yahoo! Muslim group (yeeeaaaah, I was active there, toooo) in which I “prayed” for all these lost souls and prayed for all non-Muslims to become Muslims and this and that. Really, I worried myself sick about the fate of all the non-Muslims and the bad Muslims out there. I was the best Muslim in the world, and everyone was to strive to be just like me if they were to attain heaven. I never claimed to be this good a Muslim even back then, though. Well, I guess, unless you consider my desperate attempts for everyone to become Muslim immediately if they wanted to go to heaven arrogance and stuff. I guess that is arrogant, now that I look back.

Coming up: 
- Reflections on a Past - Part II: somewhere in between
- Reflections on a Past - Part III: where I am today