*^'Eiffel Niqab~

1. Upbringing and Discovery:

I was born in a family that was partially religious, so it was complicated from the start. Both my parents are baptized Catholics but my father is an atheist and my mom doesn't have the time to go to church. I was baptized when I was about 10/11months old as a Christian Catholic and I'm the only baptized sibling and cousin for some reason. I was never raised with religious views, my dad basically made fun of the concept of religion and my mom didn't really talk about her faith. I didn't have a religious upbringing at all, and I was always a "dad's girl", so i just blindly agreed to anything he said, which meant i ended up being atheist until about the age of 10.

There are many things my parents never discussed with me during my childhood/middle-childhood, religion being one of them, and being the curious kid i was, i had to know more, i wanted to learn and to figure out what truly felt right. When i was in 4th grade, my best-friend was Muslim and knew most of what she knew because of her father (as her mother was a Christian). She is the one who lead me to start doing my own research on religion, starting with Islam. I wanted to know more, not only to educate and inform myself but also to figure out my own beliefs. 

I studied Islam for about 2 years 1/2 and it got to the point where I accidentally memorized Al-Fatiha while studying the Qur'an. I was fully immersed in the world of religion, controversy, debunking stereotypes, Islam, God and people's love for Him. I found something in religion that i had never seen before, i saw a light, i saw true beauty and hope. It felt like home. Without realizing it, i started to change some of my habits: I practiced praying, listened to the Qur'an very often, sew a whole jilbab for myself, started wearing the headscarf as often as possible, and even memorized religious phrases in Arabic. I had NEVER once in my life invested so much time and effort into something.  And at some point in time, I started being so confused my mental health started going downhill; I started having the desire to convert to Islam, I was so immersed in my research that i had lost myself on the way. i sometimes cried at night, not knowing what to believe in. I told my then girlfriend that i wanted to convert to Islam and the only thing she told me was that she had "promised herself never to date a Muslim because the ones in her country were (supposedly) crazy". I turned to Allah (SWT) and just prayed, I was a lost child in the middle of a religious crisis at the worst possible moment. I was (and still am) so young and I didn't realize that this wasn't necessarily the ideal moment to focus on my own conversion and/or beliefs. There wasn't anything wrong with learning and doing research but figuring out your faith is such complex thing to do and that wasn't the right moment for me. 

Anyways I considered myself Muslim until middle school, and rumor that I had converted to Islam was going around, and if you've been to middle school then you know that nobody ever minds their own business (myself sometimes included), there's always tea and/or gossip. So i found myself being asked all types of questions about my faith, sometimes by people i had never even talked to or seen before. (To this day, people still ask me questions about wether i'm muslim or not, or if i'm a satanist but that's a whole other story). I started getting thousands of questions everyday from random people, and that lead to my close friends asking questions too, it was too much to handle.