✍🏽 1,000+ Words: apology essay genre; everyone keeps dying; emotional mammies putting in their notice

Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We say Bismillah to initiate an act to acknowledge the intention and the ethics we carry with all that follows Bismillah.

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Table of Contents:

1. 🗑️ What was that?

2. ✍🏽 1,000+ words

   1. 😔 The Apology Essay Genre

   2. 📋 2024 Round-up

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1. 🗑️ What was that?

I thought I cried a lot in 2023, but 2024 incubated a different awareness. There is a spiritual wickedness. And before you get annoyed about me moralizing, I do not care. Something is not right, and that “not right” seems most visible in the uneven distribution of capital and empathy. But this “not right” also shows up in our interpersonal relationships as disposability, conflict avoidance, and straight-up deceit.

2023 taught me how to cry.

2024 taught me how to be curious about those tears.

2025, insha’Allah, will teach me how to mobilize that curiosity into something more than personal awareness.

So far, 2025 is off to a good start, and I am navigating with grace and focus. I spent the first part of the year sick with a series of mysterious allergic reactions. It turns out I was just allergic to nonsense! We are back now!

2. ✍🏽 1,000+ Words

2a: The Apology Essay Genre

I have been away…duh. And I was just about to do the whole rigamarole. But the meta-writer in me got distracted by form, so here we go.

A genre is a category of artistic composition characterized by form, style, or subject matter similarities. Wikipedia has a cute list of writing genres. 

Folksonomy, or user-generated systems of classifying and organizing online content, invites an expanded field of nested themes and microgenres. Audible identifies a few fun ones: small-town secrets, scammers & swindlers, crime-fighting kids, and supernatural schools. Microgenres are narrower, more niche, and “easier” to identify. Emergent platforms and interfaces impact how we understand genres, calibrate our expectations, and engage with readers. In the context of Substack, a platform I have grown to love because it reminds me of early 2000s blogging, the apology genre is the most curious.

The apology genre is usually an essay. It begins with “I am so sorry I have been away” before explaining the absence as a consequence of so much life happening, before ending with the promise never to let life “interrupt” public writing again. The writer reassures their readers that this time will be different. In most cases, it is never different, and the writer (read: me) has talked (or typed) their way into yet unsustainable obedience to routine — particularly given life, lifing and ADHD, ADHDing. The apology essay is confessional while not saying so much because too much realness erodes the illusion of _____ (fill in the blank with whichever confident persona you’ve crafted on this internet). The apology essay is defensive, but that defensiveness is braided into a non-defense of how much capitalism drains everything from you, not a defense of ego. The apology essay is speculative. The apology essay offers a new cadence that presumes life won’t happen again. The apology essay is a subset of fiction. But, the apology essay is not self-aware; it fashions itself as non-fiction. The apology essay also relies on a bit of delusion, a delusion some might call having an audience. Still, it is a delusion because I believe folks are doing just fine without my little random notes.

Y’all were okay, right?

2b: 2024 Round-Up

… a series of 2024 reflections and untethered thoughts (held together by the list's leash).

It was a long year of death and death adjacency (this is a content warning!)

planes, trains, and hotels

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I spent most of 2024 en route to something or someone. On March 8, 2022, I had a near-death experience while flying from Cleveland to New York. We had an emergency landing in Scranton, where I ceremoniously exited the plane, got a hotel room, ordered McDonald's, and watched The Office (set in Scranton). This fall, en route to Norway, I had a similar experience. I hate flying. It sends me into a panic because I sincerely believe that I am going to die each time I board a plane. I did much better on my latest flight from Los Angeles last week. I wrote and got some work done. I only had the start of a panic attack — let’s call it panic edging. InshaAllah, I can keep this energy. In less than 12 hours, I board another flight.

new home

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Amid another COVID infection this summer, I moved from my fifth-floor apartment to a much larger 2-bedroom apartment. Moving was stressful because I was starting a new job, was on frontlines of caretaking for my now-deceased aunt, and had a rough OCD-flare up that seems to only be quieting in these last few weeks. I learned that three months before I moved in, an older woman passed away in my apartment. Surprisingly, I ran into the granddaughter in the elevator one day. She wanted to come by to see what I’d done to the apartment. She showed me where she slept for sleepovers and where beautiful chandeliers hung. Shortly after, her mother knocked on my door and asked if she could see the apartment. She cried. I told her that my mom had just lost her mom, and while I do not know that feeling yet, if the emotional echoes from my mother are any indicator, I know it will be a heaviness I can only hold with the help of others.

everyone keeps dying

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On November 11, 2024, my aunt Monique passed away after a long battle that seemed to be exacerbated by the death of my grandmother the year earlier in March. In 18 months, I buried two matriarchs, designed two obituaries, and guided two funeral arrangements. I know the Los Angeles mortuary and obituary printing scene like the back of my hand. I have a good handle on casket prices and the best time windows for open-casket funerals before bodies become least appropriate for viewing. Last week, during the terrible Los Angeles fires, I was in South Central cleaning out my grandmother’s home with my mother and uncle. My mother found family reunion booklets from both her parents. Since then, I have built up the family tree to about 400 ancestors. One of the booklets included addresses for every family member, recipes, and photographs. Expectedly, the most available background information is for the Scottish ancestors (the family of the family that we are 95% sure owned my family in the DMV area — Quakers, “iron masters,” and slavers).

The stored vinyls are all mine now, and my uncle bequeathed all his physical media to me after seeing my joy when I held a Luther Vandross album. My mother gave me the gold necklace in my grandmother’s jewelry box. I have worn it every day as a bracelet. A piece of crystal from the house now holds my palo santo. The obituaries for Nan and Monique sit next to my Qur’an and a photograph of my family’s late dog, affectionately named kalbun (Arabic for “dog.”) I have begun to collect pictures for my parents and brother’s obituaries. I want to make sure everyone gets sent home in celebration. My auntie had an 18-page obituary, and we cut content!

I am not only thinking about the intimacy and pain of family death; I am also mourning this ongoing genocides and this feeling of extreme helplessness. I do not know what to do. In a lot of ways, the path to death doula work was one of surrender — if folks cannot have peace in life, at the very least I could support peace and comfort in the transition to the next stage. I told a friend recently that I often feel so sad about the world and that I am scared. I spend a lot of time in deep despair. I spend a lot of time wondering about how people sleep at night — how you grab a coffee after approving funding for more murder — how you listen to your favorite album when you know you just made it such that some people will never be able to hear their family’s voices again. He reminded me to not lose my humanity. Yes, a lot of days are spent confused about the state of the world — but I must remain present, alert, and human. We are meant to be hardened and look away. I can’t look away. And any direction I look in is yet another crisis so looking away is only turning my gaze to a familar elsewhere — like channel surfing … it is the same programming on every damn channel.

the emotional mammy puts in her two-minute notice

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Except for my immediate family and best friend, I have not talked in depth about these deaths. I find it hard to take up space in relationships because whenever I try, it backfires. Everyone is grieving something. It is unfortunate, and my immediate response is to shelf myself because whatever I am dealing with can’t be that bad, right? One of the (un?)intended consequences of this choice is that I unknowingly became an emotional mammy. I do not use this language lightly. Knowing the history of the caricature and the real lives of Black women who had to take on this role, the weight of this language is not lost on me.

I define the emotional mammy as someone who consciously and unconsciously takes on the emotional weight of others without regard for their own emotional needs. It is an accreting, lurking, and sneaky role. You fall into the role gradually. It sneaks up on you. Sometimes, you are manipulated into the role — if I do not do this, what will happen to them? You are whittled down to a precise and presumably abundant tool of emotional care because your existence is that of a resource, not of a human. You almost forget that you are struggling when you speak with them, not because they are such a comforting presence but because they take up so much space that remembering yourself becomes an inconvenience or annoying interruption for them. I have forgotten myself on several occasions. The reasons are always different. I forgot myself in my marriage because the dissociation allowed me to numb the abuse. I forgot myself in recently expired relationships because I was implicitly and explicitly reminded that their struggles deserved the only focus.

Since filing for divorce in 2021, then quitting my job, and then a bunch of other terrible things, I have not been okay. Something clicked on two Sundays ago. And it kept clicking. I often fear being called “mean.” I often fear acting in my best interest because I do not want people to feel the pit of darkness that is believing (or just realizing) that someone does not care if you live or die. So even if it means I am stressed or overwhelmed or don’t get dinner or am otherwise annoyed that I did not have time to sleep after a scary flight…I will still pick up the phone, respond to late-night texts, listen to voice notes, take the Uber, and send the Venmo … I want to prevent the worst thing I’ve ever felt. It seems hyperbolic, but I am serious, as sometimes you do not return whole from these moments. x`

I have never really come back from sharing about an incident of sexual coercion during my marriage and never being checked in on. And I never really returned from sharing that, then sharing that I felt hurt by the lack of concern and being told they didn’t understand what else they were supposed to do. Constantly having horrific things downplayed truly convinced me that what had happened wasn’t that bad. I remember doing intake once and the specialist said, “Are you okay?” to which I replied, “yeah, girl. I am fine. What’s up?” To which she responded something like…well you just summarized 30 years of deep trauma so casually. In was in that moment that I actually realized how much I’d internalized the sense that my life did not matter and that tending to others was a better use of my time.

My best friend and I were laughing about this a few days ago. And we joked about multi-tasking trauma — as in, we have never had the privilege to tap out and deal with just the things that have happened. And sometimes, somewhere between that and being gaslit into believing you do not matter, we are just out here juggling threats to our lives, deep betrayal, art careers, global wars like … nothing.

Since April 2024, I have been perpetually sick. If it isn’t severe gastrointestinal issues, it is the most recent bout of dermatographia and severe hives. I know it is all stress, and I need to get on top of it, but the tragedy is stacking tall. Sunday morning was unexpectedly chaotic, but it was also the first morning without hives or a migraine in a few days. Something about decisiveness seems to have lessened my inflammation. This was the first conflict in quite some time where my OCD did not go into overdrive. I did not over-scrutinize my responses. I did not go back and try to fix it or people please.

During a Buddhist meditation session years ago, the leader offered us an equation: pain x resistance = suffering. I do not like tidy equations, but this one makes sense.

I accept the pain of whatever has happened but do not try to leave the scene.

I sit in it.

I will learn, but I will not suffer.

I will make soybean paste Korean soup

I will pray.

I will play with my legos.

I will lift.

I will get a lot of rest.

I will not be angry, but will be alert and decisive.

I will leave anything and anyone that threatens my relationship to Allah and my relationship to my most ethical self.

Thank you for reading,

Kameelah 👽

Finally, while I do not organize my finances around paid newsletter subscriptions, wouldn’t it be cool if this little newsletter could allow me to take quarterly self-imposed writing retreats? Consider getting a one-year membership at USD 70 :)

How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL