Ella Al-Shamahi

You don't need to learn about evolution.

You just stay where you are.

This is awful.

It was truly awful time.

I had no idea how to exist in a secular world.

Suddenly, every single thing did not have a rule attached to it, which you might think is freeing, except if that's the only thing you've ever known, that's terrifying.

It was like you went into the bathroom with a left foot, you left it with a right foot, you wrote with your right hand, you went to the toilet with your left hand.

It's like every single thing is prescribed and suddenly it was like, good luck.

i didn't make eye contact with men yeah i literally never made eye contact with men i i i took my headscarf off and um i basically i turned up to the to like a gas station yeah and it was the most anticlimactic

And has probably informed a huge part of my personality since, because no man cared.

I had been told my whole life that my hair was like, and you've got to cover up because it's a fitna, it corrupts the earth.

It's a bad translation, but it's all these things you've got to do to not...

I don't know what it was, because let me tell you, nobody cared.

Like, nobody cared.

Nobody cared.

I cannot express this enough.

There were no men dropping from my sheer beauty.

Nobody was fainting.

Nobody was doing anything.

Like, nobody cared.