Burning Beneath

For the first time in years, I find myself… bored.

Not the restless kind of boredom that comes from wanting entertainment, but the quiet kind. The kind that appears only after your mind has finally stopped fighting a thousand battles at once.

My body still hurts. My health hasn’t magically improved. Those realities are still with me every single day.

But my mind has become quieter.

Sometimes that quiet sends me scrolling through Facebook simply because there isn’t much else happening in my head.

Yesterday, that quiet was interrupted.

A post appeared in front of me declaring that Muslims are pedophiles, rapists, killers, drug addicts, and that Islam is not even a religion.

Normally, I would have kept scrolling.

I’ve learned that arguing with strangers online rarely produces anything worthwhile.

But something made me pause.

What caught my attention was what came after it.

Hundreds of comments.

Hundreds of people agreeing.

No hesitation.

No questions.

No one asking whether any of it was true.

That was the part that unsettled me.

Out of everything written, one word stood out to me more than the others.

Pedophiles.

I couldn’t help thinking about Jeffrey Epstein.

About the countless victims.

About institutions, celebrities, wealthy individuals, and powerful people whose crimes have been documented for years.

None of that had anything to do with Islam.

Then I thought about the many scandals involving child abuse that have emerged from schools, churches, sports organizations, and other respected institutions across Western countries. Those stories were not rumours. They became public because victims finally spoke and investigations uncovered the truth.

So how does someone arrive at the conclusion that pedophilia somehow defines Muslims?

That wasn’t criticism.

It wasn’t even ignorance anymore.

It was choosing a conclusion first and then forcing reality to fit it.

I wrote one reply.

My aim was simply to remind anyone willing to think that if we are going to accuse an entire religion of something so monstrous, we should first have the intellectual honesty to look in the mirror.

Crime exists everywhere.

Abuse exists everywhere.

Every society has people capable of terrible things.

The moment we begin assigning those crimes to an entire religion or culture, we stop searching for truth and start searching for enemies.

After that, I blocked the page.

There was nothing more to say.

What surprised me most wasn’t the conversation.

It was myself.

Years ago, something like this would have stayed with me for hours. I would have replayed it in my head, wondering whether I should have said more or whether I should have stayed silent.

Yesterday, I didn’t.

I replied once.

Closed the page.

Went back to my day.

Perhaps that’s what peace actually looks like.

Not the absence of noise.

But the ability to walk away from it without carrying it with you.

Maybe boredom isn’t something I need to escape after all.

Maybe it’s simply the sound of a mind that has finally become quiet enough to choose which voices deserve an answer—and which ones deserve silence.