Why I Decided to Get a Grip (And Get Over Myself)

On starting a Substack

When I first started writing what would become Muslim, Actually, I had to be pushed by my agent into sharing more than a few cursory details about myself. Even though, like most millennials, I had blogged and LiveJournaled through my adolescence, the idea of volunteering personal information for a potential readership of thousands left me feeling queasy and vulnerable.

Something similar happened with Determination. I had such a hard time writing the protagonist, Jamila Shah, an immigration lawyer like me. I was so worried about readers’ make comparisons, their assumption that her story was mine, that for many drafts she was a lifeless, unsympathetic figure on the page. I had to play all kinds of tricks and games with myself to try and bring Jamila to life.

I don’t know if this stemmed from being shy or, for a long time, an only child. I overcame the worst of my shyness in mid-to-late twenties – or I just got better at masking it – but I never got over that discomfort with being perceived. I was happiest when left to my own devices, or doing the kind of work where I could fade into the background. In big social situations, I preferred to disappear. It’s not a coincidence, I think, that both as a writer and lawyer, I’ve focused on telling other people’s stories.

Maybe it had something to do with being raised by parents who instilled me with a fundamental distrust of the world. The world was a scary, unpredictable place, full of bad people waiting to take advantage of you – Riz Khan has suggested this is a legacy of Partition – so guarding myself against it, withholding parts of myself, was a kind of protective measure. I believe in a different story of humanity now, but that instinct to scope people and situations out before committing to them has never really gone away.

This is a longwinded way of telling you that I never wanted to start a Substack. The idea of sharing my innermost thoughts and feelings, thinking they were so important that people should pay attention, horrified me. Even now, as I write this, a part of me is resisting. My brain is trying to shut down, insisting that all this is so cringeworthy and wrong.

I’ve always felt that way about social media. In a world where everyone has spent the last however many years shouting, sharing, creating, opining, building brands and platforms for themselves, commodifying every aspect of their lives for likes and followers, I have felt the need to be quiet. Part of this was a response to the reaction economy, the expectation that we should all respond to absolutely everything quickly and unequivocally - I wanted to take my time. Another part of me was afraid of saying the wrong thing, or saying too much and regretting how I’d overstepped my own boundaries. But the truth is, the noise of social media also intimidated me, and I shrank myself. I told myself that I didn’t need to add my voice to the din. I had nothing important or worthy to say. I was not funny or quippy or incisive enough. I was better off fading into the background.

But I’ve been re-evaluating these choices recently. I think I want to speak more. It’s not that the world has changed – if anything, the more I try to understand it, the more confusing it becomes. And with the noise on social media continuing to travel in so many directions, I still find it hard sometimes to ground and locate myself and understand how I feel about an issue.

It’s not that I suddenly think I’m super important and worthy of being heard either. But I’ve done enough events in support of Determination now to learn that speaking off-the-cuff isn’t always so bad. Being open to strangers, wearing your heart on your sleeve, even if the words are imperfect, can lead to these wonderful human interactions that I love. I’ve found it empowering to speak openly and passionately about migration, for example, and find that people in the audience feel the same way as me. I’ve met young people who are just excited about the fact that I’m a writer and a lawyer, and I’m out in the world, doing my thing.

So I’ve begun to question the silence I’ve imposed on myself, choosing only to speak through my books and interviews, and not also through social media or a newsletter. Who benefits from this silence I’ve imposed on myself – especially when everybody else is talking? Am I not just excluding myself from the conversation altogether? What if I held all my fears and uncertainties in one hand – and silenced my inner critic for a minute – and spoke anyway? Who might I end up connecting with? What experience might I end up giving a voice to?

The prospect of a Substack remains terrifying, but I am going to try. I’m not offering to suddenly share the parts of my life or self that I had protected so fiercely before. Instead, I am willing, wanting to offer more of my thoughts about writing and being an author; migration and food; books, music and film. The sorts of things that I don’t usually write about but are hugely important to me. I’m picturing my Small Boats newsletters as these little containers of love, reflection and tenderness floating towards you, hoping that you might meet them with the same humanity.

In Other Business:

• Recipe of the Week: Ottolenghi’s Confit Celeriac with Orange and Dill. One of the best things I’ve eaten recently. The sauce has such incredible tang and depth.

• Song of the Week: Black Nirvana by Elodie. One of the most exciting pop singers around, but overlooked internationally, I guess, because she sings in Italian.

• What I’m Reading: By total coincidence, Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix.

• Next time: Pride Month Reading Lists and why I never appear in them!