Former-ative

On returning to the person you used to be

Édouard Vuillard’s Woman by the Window (1898)

altMuslimah goes back online today, and what’s returning is neither a reboot nor a comeback. Both words assume you’re returning to something that stayed the same while you were gone, or that you’ve stayed the same enough to slide back into it. Neither is true here.

I started altMuslimah as a book club in my mother-in-law’s basement, in my twenties, before I had a legal career or three kids pulling at my time. It became a place where Muslim women could ask questions that didn’t fit neatly into a mosque sermon or a cable news segment, and it grew faster than I expected. When I envisioned it in 2009, I imagined a room, however virtual, where people slowed down enough to think out loud together.

My own life eventually filled up with work and motherhood. The internet changed, too. Rumination gave way to rage, community to clickbait. Long, uncertain thinking gave way to hot takes built for a scroll, not a sit. The kind of conversation altMuslimah existed to have became harder to sustain, and in 2021, it went quiet.

Something in me quieted when altMuslimah did. My life itself was hardly quiet; work and children made sure of that. I stopped writing and thinking in a certain way, following a question without knowing where it would lead. Somewhere along the way, I began to think of that voice as belonging to an earlier version of myself, before everything that came after.

Writers across Substack’s community of midlife women, including those Midstack curates each week, often describe the strange experience of coming across an old photograph of yourself and feeling recognition rather than nostalgia. One of those writers, Cool Best Friend, put it exactly right: looking at old pictures felt like running into someone you used to be. There she is, unbothered by the years, startlingly familiar.

The best word I’ve seen for this is “former-ative,” both former and still forming. A former self keeps working on you long after you file the chapter as closed, shaping which instincts you trust and which ones you talk yourself out of. When you encounter her again, in an old photograph or in the pull toward a project you set down years ago, you begin to see that she was never as far away as you thought.

We tend to describe the midlife version of this as a return to some younger, more authentic self. I’m not sure I buy that construction. It feels more like a conversation between who you were and who you’re becoming. Midlife may simply be when the earlier voice becomes audible again.

This past summer, I went to see Sarah McLachlan at Wolf Trap. A couple of hours before the show, my daughter and I had argued, the kind of fight that isn’t really about the thing it appears to be about. I drove out there with the argument still sitting just beneath the surface.

By the time I found my seat, the sky had gone that particular bruised green it turns before a summer storm. Within the hour, the storm broke, rain coming down in sheets past the edge of the roof while the people on the uncovered lawn stayed anyway, blankets soaked and umbrellas up, swaying as though the weather belonged to the show. Cicadas kept going underneath the music between songs.

Then McLachlan started talking about her eldest daughter. The year her daughter turned nineteen, everything between them had gone sideways in a way she couldn’t fix by trying harder. Her new record, her first in nearly a decade, had grown out of that year.

My own daughter is nineteen.

I sat there under that roof, rain coming off it in a curtain, the fight I’d just left still warm somewhere behind me. I hadn’t expected to cry, and then I was. McLachlan was describing something I was only beginning to understand: how the child you have spent years raising can suddenly stand before you as someone increasingly separate from you, and how much love can hurt at the moment it has to make room for that separation.

And somewhere inside that recognition was another nineteen-year-old: me.

For a moment, the distance between those years collapsed. I could remember being the daughter who believed adulthood meant moving farther into a life of my own, and I could feel what it was to be the mother watching that movement from the other side. The nineteen-year-old I had been hadn’t vanished when I became the mother of one. She was still there, somewhere inside the way I loved my daughter and the difficulty of letting her become herself.

McLachlan was returning, too. Nearly a decade had passed since her last record, and the years between had become the material for the new one. Sitting there, I thought about altMuslimah’s own years of quiet. I had treated those years as an absence, but maybe they were part of the formation.

The conviction behind altMuslimah is still the one I had in my twenties: faith is the frame everything else sits inside. But I understand that frame differently now, and the intervening years have changed what I bring to the questions I was asking then. Motherhood alone has taken ideas I once understood abstractly and made me live inside them.

I believed then that there was value in making a room for questions without immediate answers, for the kind of thinking that needs time before it knows what it thinks. I believed faith belonged in that room, too, reaching into the parts of our lives that resist easy categories. I recognize that conviction now because I’ve spent twenty years discovering what it asks of me.

altMuslimah comes back today carrying those intervening years with it. The instinct began with a twenty-something woman in a basement. Two decades later, at a concert in the rain and then at a keyboard, I recognize her again.