What the Fast Returned to Me

I started fasting when I was fourteen, old enough to perform devotion before I understood what devotion was. Back then, the Fast felt like something to check off a list. Something that proved I was a good Bahá’í. A good daughter. A good girl. I didn’t understand faith—I understood belonging. I wanted to be part of my family, and this was part of how we did that. Even when I walked away from the Faith—when I was drinking, having sex, doing all the things I thought I wasn’t supposed to do—I never stopped fasting. Every year, I came back to it. I didn’t always call myself a Bahá’í. I still don’t feel attached to that label in a rigid way. But the Fast? The Fast has always been mine. And this year, the Fast did what it has always done for me: It pulled the truth to the surface. This year I am fasting while grieving my mother. I am fasting while on my period. I am fasting while running my company. I am fasting while becoming someone new. And somehow, none of those things feel separate. Because the Fast has never just been about food or water. It has always been about learning the difference between wanting and needing. I might want water. But what does it mean to actually be thirsty? I might want to eat. But what does my body truly need? The Fast strips everything down to the essentials. It teaches me that I am a being made mostly of water. That I am alive in a very real, physical, finite way. That my body is not something abstract or aesthetic—it is an asset, a vessel, something I am responsible for. And this year, in my grief, that understanding has deepened. My mother’s body failed her. Her heart. Her kidneys. Her systems, one by one. And being with her as that happened changed the way I understand my own body. Now, taking care of myself feels urgent. Intentional. Sacred. Now, I want everything I give my body to be additive. Now, I understand that my spiritual, emotional, and physical bodies are not separate—they are the same conversation. I was with my mother when she died last month. I flew into North Carolina from California on a red-eye, landed in Charlotte, got a rental car, drove to my aunt’s house in Oak Ridge, and sat by her side. I held her hand. I laid next to her. I was with her until the end. When I say I go nowhere without my mother now, I don’t mean that in some abstract way. I mean that I am constantly aware of her. I think about her all the time. I feel her in the way I move through the world. I feel her in the way I am becoming more myself. She carried our lineage—our family stories, our history, our memory. Now I carry that. And there are things about her that only I will ever know. She was not as nice as people thought she was. She was spicy. Erotic. Mystical. A real Black weirdo. She gave me Anaïs Nin when I was a kid. She introduced me to kink, to vampires, to the idea that life is bigger and stranger than what people admit out loud. She believed in spirit. In the universe. In things beyond what we can prove. And she also taught me discipline. She taught me how to believe. The first time I told her the truth about who I was, we were sitting at the kitchen table during the Fast the year I turned 19. It was early. Before sunrise. The light just starting to come in. We had our tea. Our water. Our prayer books. The same setup we had every morning. And I told her I was queer. I had been lying to her about it for years. I had a girlfriend in high school—someone my parents knew—and I had twisted the truth so many times to avoid saying what was real. The Fast made that impossible to carry anymore. That’s what the Fast does. It pulls the truth out of you. She cried immediately. “Are you lying?” she asked. “Are you acting? Is this a monologue?” She thought I was performing. But I wasn’t. I was telling the truth for the first time. And it hurt. It hurt both of us. But I wouldn’t change that moment for anything. Because it was real. Decades later, a few months before she died, she apologized to me. She told me she was sorry for how she reacted when I came out. And in that moment, it felt like something in both of us shifted. Like we were shedding a skin. Time slowed down. It felt prophetic. Huge. I told her I wasn’t holding anything against her—and I wasn’t. I never felt unloved by her. Even in that moment at the kitchen table, she was giving me something I didn’t understand yet: the conditions to learn how to love myself. Her apology didn’t erase what happened. It deepened it. It showed me that we had both grown. That our relationship had room for truth, even when it was hard. That we were good. We cleared the air. There is nothing left unsaid between us. And that is one of the greatest gifts of my life. After she died, I spent some time driving around my homeland in both North and South Carolina. I hadn’t been home in years. Part of me was afraid that going back would make me smaller. That I would slip into an older version of myself. But that didn’t happen. I went home more fully myself than I had ever been. The air smelled like trees. Fried chicken. A little bit of weed. The land was soft. The people were soft. Everything felt gentler. And I needed that. I needed to grieve her in the place that made both of us. Planning her service required me to stand fully in who I am now. There was no shrinking. No going backward. Every moment of my life had prepared me for that responsibility. I stepped into being the head of my family. And I felt it. I also felt my grandmother. The Bahá’í Center in Greensboro—where I spent so much of my childhood—still lives in my body. It felt like someone’s living room. Folding chairs, a kitchenette, a coffee pot always on. My grandmother would always say we were about to leave—and then get pulled into another deep conversation about faith, about life, about someone’s childhood, someone’s pain. I would wait in the car. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. An hour. And she would still be inside, pouring another cup of coffee, deep in it. At the time, I was so annoyed. Now I understand. She wasn’t holding onto anything in this life. She was open. Light. Devoted to connection. I am becoming her. I am becoming my mother. And I am still becoming myself. This is what the Fast has become for me. Not a performance. Not a rule. Not even just a religious practice. It’s a way of clearing. A way of releasing everything I have carried over the past year that is no longer mine. A way of telling the truth—to myself, first. A way of remembering that I don’t need most of what I think I need. A way of coming back to myself. People ask if fasting while grieving is too much. But for me, this is the only way. I need intensity. I need to feel it all. Grief is not something I want to escape. It is where my power is. It is where my connection is—to myself, to my mother, to my ancestors, to God, to whatever you want to call it. The Fast doesn’t take me away from that. It brings me closer. I don’t feel angry. I feel grateful. I feel like I am in the middle of an alchemical process—turning something I thought was loss into something else entirely. Something deeper. Something freer. Something more true. This is what the Fast has returned to me: Not certainty. Not answers. But clarity. Freedom. And the courage to keep becoming.