There's Goodness In Everything ?

You know how there are some people who are just annoyingly positive? The ones who respond to every little mishap with "everything happens for a reason" and somehow manage to find rainbows in literal storms? Yeah, that's me. Or at least, that was me until Friday evening when the universe decided to drag me off my high horse and show me what it feels like to have your own words taste like ash in your mouth.

I'm the friend who preaches gratitude like it's going out of style. I'm the one who genuinely believes there's goodness hiding in every disaster, who tells people "Allah has destined this" with the confidence of someone who's never really had their faith tested in the messiest, most inconvenient ways possible. I don't beat myself up when things go sideways, I just shrug and say it's all part of some cosmic plan I'm too small to understand.

This philosophy has carried me through life like a warm blanket on a rainy evening. Until two days ago, when that blanket got ripped away and I found myself shivering in the cold reality of my own hypocrisy.

Picture this: I'm dragging myself back from school, bone-tired and ready to melt into my bed like butter on hot toast. Every muscle in my body is screaming for rest. But then I remember, there's our da'awah week opening program happening.My exhausted brain is begging, "Please just go to your hostel and sleep. You've earned it." But my overachiever brain starts its usual lecture: "Stop being lazy. You might learn something. Stop making excuses and show up."

Guess which brain won? (Spoiler alert: it was the wrong one.)

So I drag my tired self to this program, sit through it, and when it ends, I face another choice. My intuition ,that one voice that's usually right about these things, whispers, "Go back now. Right now. Don't think, just leave." But no, my brilliant self decides to stay back and read because apparently I'm committed to making every wrong decision possible that evening.

Here's the kicker though , I didn't even end up reading. I just... talked. Had conversations. Wasted the very time I'd convinced myself was too precious to spend unconscious in my bed.

Now, let me paint you the backdrop of why this matters. A week before this disaster, my phone screen had committed suicide against some unforgiving surface, and I'd bled money I didn't really have to resurrect it. You know those expenses that just ambush you out of nowhere? The kind that make you stare at your account balance and question all your life choices? Yeah, that was me, nursing a lighter wallet and a phone with a pristine new screen.

So there I am on Friday, walking around campus with my week-old screen repair, when some random person approaches me with questions. Whatever they said triggered a memory I'd been trying to keep buried, and suddenly my mood did a complete nosedive. I'm standing there mentally flagellating myself: "You absolute fool, you're supposed to be reading right now, but instead you're out here having pointless conversations. You're wasting your life one meaningless interaction at a time."

The anger wasn't explosive,it was that slow-burning, soul-corroding frustration that makes everything feel wrong. It clouded my judgment, made me careless, turned me into exactly the kind of person who would do something catastrophically stupid.

Which is exactly what happened next.

My phone , my beautiful, newly-repaired, week-old phone ,slipped from my distracted hands like it was trying to escape my stupidity. It fell in what felt like slow motion, spinning through the air before kissing the concrete face-first with a sound that probably registered on some seismic scale somewhere. Typical romantic scene from an Indian movie.

The screen exploded into a spider web of destruction, displaying nothing but chaotic digital vomit. I stood there like a statue, staring at this expensive mistake, genuinely unsure whether I was supposed to cry, scream, or just lie down on the pavement and become one with the ground.

I walked back to my hostel in a trance, each step driving home the absurd reality: the screen I'd just paid to fix was now more broken than it had been before the first repair. And I had bills waiting for me like hungry vultures, circling overhead, ready to feast on whatever was left of my financial dignity.

The frustration was unlike anything I'd ever experienced,to be very honest. I've never been this furious with myself, never felt this suffocated by a situation that seemed so preventable yet felt so inevitable.

That's when my reading companion , tried to offer comfort with my own philosophical ammunition: "Everything has a reason. There is goodness in everything” note coupled with a juice.

I did take the juice because in my moments of frustration, I had forgotten to get dinner. But the note? It hit me like a slap. Here she was, feeding me my own medicine, and it tasted absolutely horrible. I'm the one who says these exact words to people all the time, who dispenses this wisdom like candy, who genuinely believes it. But in that moment, standing there with my broken phone and my broken pride, those words felt like mockery.

For the first time in my optimistic little life, I asked the question I'd never had to ask: "What exactly is the goodness in this?" And I came up empty. Completely, embarrassingly empty.

The regret was eating me alive. Why didn't I just stay in my warm bed like a sensible human being? Why didn't I trust my intuition when it was practically screaming at me to go back to the hostel? Why did I make a chain of small, seemingly innocent decisions that led to this moment of expensive stupidity? I'd never hated the popular butterfly effect more than that moment.

But here's the thing that really got me: I realized how insufferably easy it is to be positive when you're not drowning in the actual crisis.

All those times I'd watched people beat themselves up over accidents, setbacks, mistakes , I'd thought with such smug certainty, "If that were me, I'd just be positive. I'd see the silver lining immediately. I'd trust the process." I'd mentally awarded myself gold stars for my superior emotional intelligence, my unshakeable resolve, my ability to find meaning in utter chaos.

Until I was the one standing there with shattered glass and a shattered sense of my own philosophical superiority.

The truth is brutal and simple here: some moments are just awful. Some frustrations are just pure, undiluted frustration. Some setbacks hurt like hell, and no amount of positive thinking can immediately alchemize that pain into wisdom or Shukr and Tawakkul.

This doesn't mean I'm throwing my entire belief system out the window. I still think there's goodness hidden in most situations. I still believe Allah has a plan that's bigger than my understanding. I still think gratitude is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.

I'm just adding a massive dose of humility to the mix now.

Maybe the goodness in my broken phone disaster isn't some profound lesson about divine timing or cosmic justice. Maybe it's just this: a long-overdue reminder that other people's struggles are real and raw and legitimate, even when the solutions seem obvious from my comfortable position on the sidelines.

Maybe the goodness is in getting knocked off my high horse before I became completely insufferable. Maybe it's in learning that my positivity, while genuine, sometimes comes from the privilege of not having been tested in exactly the right way yet.

Maybe the goodness is in understanding that when I tell someone "everything happens for a reason," I need to hold space for the possibility that they might not be ready to hear that reason yet. And that their not being ready doesn't make them weak or faithless, it makes them human.

So here's what I'm taking from this whole humbling experience: May Allah grant us all the patience to survive whatever chaos we're currently swimming through. May He give us the Hikmah to know when to offer advice and when to just sit in the mess with someone without trying to fix it. And may He grant us the ability to see goodness in life and in everything ,not as a way to bypass pain, but as a way to find hope on the other side of it.

Sometimes the most honest thing you can do is admit that you can't see the bright side yet.

Also, maybe I should start listening to my intuition more. Just saying.