“I listened to your lecture twice,” I said hesitantly. “And when you talked about validation and childhood… I kept thinking about myself. No one pressured me as a child. No one told me I had to compete. Yet inside, I constantly feel that I must prove myself. When I don’t quickly understand something, I criticize myself. I tell myself I’m not good enough. I get angry at myself for being slow.”
He listened quietly, without interrupting.
“It feels like,” I continued, “everything should be perfect. My learning should be perfect. When I don’t understand a concept—even your lecture—I feel irritated. Angry. As if something is wrong with me.”
He smiled gently. “Let me tell you something,” he said jokingly, “There are times when even I don’t fully understand my own lectures afterward.”
I looked at him in surprise.
“So don’t use my lectures as a standard of comparison,” he continued. “Your real task is something else. When you are in a discussion and feel you’re not understanding, say it openly: I think I’m a little slow in this—can you please help me? Try saying that.”
I hesitated. “I do say it in my practical life.”
“Then that means the irrational belief is not dominating you,” he replied. “Because if you truly believed that you must always be competent, it would be very hard for you to admit that you don’t know.”
He paused, then added, “Wanting to improve is not a problem at all. In fact, that desire to learn better is what elevates a person. The problem begins only when someone feels the need to pretend that they already know everything.”
I reflected silently.
He continued, “Even after learning so much, believing that you can still learn more—that is a healthy attitude. And from what you’re describing, it seems you have understood the real issue. Improvement will always remain possible. And we should make full use of that space.”
I nodded slowly, but another thought troubled me.
“Still,” I said, “when I read a paragraph—especially from the Qur’an—I sometimes read it again and again. I write points. I try to grasp it. Yet I fail to make the connections. And then when I discuss the same thing with my husband, he grasps it very quickly. I don’t feel he belittles me. But inside, I become angry at myself. I overthink. I feel like giving up. I start blaming myself.”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “You think this is a language issue?” he asked.
“No,” I replied. “It’s more about understanding and connection.”
He nodded. “You should know this clearly: making deep connections in the Qur’an is one of the most difficult intellectual tasks. There is absolutely no need to panic about it. If you keep practicing, this ability will develop—slowly, over time.”
I listened closely as he continued.
“Many times, you will struggle to link one idea with another. And that is completely normal. You can even bring examples from your Qur’an class that feel hardest. As we keep working at it, the ability grows. This is not a weekly goal. This is a lifelong journey.”
He smiled slightly. “You may have just learned in the last session that this kind of connection-making is required. It hasn’t even been a full week yet. And here I am—after twenty-five years of struggle—still consulting references, still checking how others have understood.”
That stunned me.
“You set a very big goal for yourself,” he said gently. “And then you expect to achieve it in a few days. That’s not how deep learning works.”
I tried to explain that I only gave that example because it was fresh in my mind. In other areas, I usually understand faster.
He nodded and said, “Some things are naturally harder to understand than others. Let me normalize this for you.”
Then he shared something that stayed with me.
“There’s a theory I often speak about—developmental constructivist theory. The first time I read the book on it, which was four to five hundred pages, I finished it and felt like I understood absolutely nothing. I had to read that book four to five times. And even then, there were huge gaps in my understanding.”
He smiled softly. “At one point, I even felt I had lost confidence. I wondered if I would ever understand it properly.”
I leaned in, absorbed.
“Later,” he continued, “the author wrote in the preface of another book that when he told his father his first book had been translated into French, his father replied, ‘When will it be translated into English?’ And for the first time, he realized this struggle was not just his own. Difficulty in understanding deep ideas is universal.”
That made me smile.
“You see,” he said, “the real satisfaction is not in showing people that you know something. The real satisfaction is in slowly understanding it yourself. And that requires repeated effort—again and again.”
He looked at me gently.
“If in most areas you feel you need to struggle a lot, it may simply mean that you have chosen a field that is intellectually demanding. And that is not a problem. That is the path.”
He paused and said with quiet conviction, “We are not here to ‘arrive’ somewhere. The development is in the journey itself. The traveling is the development.”
I felt something heavy lift from my chest.
“When you find yourself in such situations,” he continued, “don’t say, ‘I know nothing.’ Instead, say: These are the things I have understood. These are the possibilities. Now I will explore further. Discuss these with your husband. Ask questions. But never stop your own effort to determine meaning independently. This is a very important ability we must build.”
The room grew quiet after that.
For the first time, I realized something clearly: My struggle was not proof of incompetence. It was proof that I was standing at the edge of real learning.
And that day, I walked away not with instant clarity—but with something far more valuable:
Permission to be slow. Permission to be imperfect. Permission to keep learning without hating myself for it.
