Dear Queen,

It's a feeling, a state, a circumstance of life that can't be explained until one experiences the feeling for themselves.

It's a time when an overwhelming and uncontrollable sense of despondency, despair, grief and fear encompasses and takes over the very soul of your being, imprisoning you in a world where in the sun still shines, but you can't feel its warmth.

The stars still come out at night, but you can't use them to navigate your way through the darkness; you still exist in the physical sense, but you are no longer alive, your spirit is, for all intents and purposes:

Dead.

You continue to go through the motions of life, fulfilling all of your obligations, but you have ceased living. You force a smile, when your heart just wants to cry. You laugh although, at that very moment, you can somehow feel your soul slowly dying.

Sorrow tucks you in at night and wakes you up in the morning, burning a deeper hole in your heart with every waking moment, a burn that you can really truly feel in a way that you never imagined possible. It's almost like while your heart is still beating; the rhythmic pattern of its beating has somehow been disrupted and is causing you to feel like you are being suffocated.

Your greatest fear is not that your heart will stop beating, but that it will never be returned to it's original state or that time will cause you to forget how it used to beat.

That somehow you will never be the same again, that the clouds enveloping you will never disperse, that the pain will never go away.

That your tears will never dry and that sorrow is all you are ever destined to feel.

Your mind is cloudy and you can't make sense of anything; you have a million questions and no answers. You try in vain time and time again to find a single purpose for your existence, but you come up empty each time. You pray with unbridled fervor and intensity that God has something better planned for you. The world and those whom you trusted have forsaken you and all you have to hold on to is hope that somehow God will miraculously see you through the rain and that there will be brighter days to come.

But yet you can't help but fear that happiness may simply not be in God's plan for you and that it will remain elusive and never find it's way into your life.

What if there is no light at the end of the tunnel?

What if your clouds have no silver lining?

What if the dawn never breaks?

What are you supposed to do then?

Those are the hopeless whispers that leave you with nothing to anticipate but that your last breathe may be near. You can only wholeheartedly pray that God is on your side and that there will be better days to come, but what if God isn't listening to your prayers and all your supplications are in vain? What if God doesn't have time for you? What if you are not truly deserving of God's help? What if God has already answered your prayers, but the answer is an unequivocal “No."

The truth is, you may never know…so when you find yourself in a position where you just simply don't know what to do, then all you can really do is “Let Go and Let God." You have to find a way to somehow let go of your feelings and let God in to take over and ask Him to guide your way and enlighten your path.

If you have never experienced this feeling then I hope that you never do; if you have, then every word that I have written will resonate with you at the deepest level of your consciousness and will reverberate throughout your heart, mind and soul.

You have to trust that what lies ahead will be greater than what you left behind.

The best is yet to come.

xo,

Anan Abdullatif

Dear Queen is a weekly series dedicated to letters from women written for themselves and other women. Have a “Dear Queen" letter? We want to read it! E-mail your letters to submissions@xonecole.com with the subject: Dear Queen.

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