The Most Dangerous Sentence in the World
Six words you’ve heard before. Six words that keep you small.
It’s Just the Way Things Are.
Six words of poisonous disempowerment.
Concede to them, and you’ve already destroyed your chance of changing your world.
Every single thing you experience today was once an idea—an act of defiance against “the way things were.”
Do not accept reality as fixed.
Stay delusional in the direction of the world you want to live in.
Delusional people actually change the world
Not the passive conceders.
The Pull of Reality
Of course, there will be days you collapse into what’s being pushed at you. Days when you feel defeated. When you mutter, “This is reality” as if it’s final.
That’s fine. Give yourself 48 hours to feel it—but then find a way out. Otherwise your mind and body will get addicted to sorrow.
And here’s where psychology helps.
The illusory truth effect is the brain’s tendency to believe something the more often it’s repeated.
Familiarity gets confused with truth — so the more often you hear or say something, the more believable it becomes.
Think news media, cult leaders, politicians…they use this phenomenon copiously to get others to believe in things that aren’t real.
Then what happens?
Eventually with enough buy in, those unreal things tend to become realities.
People start unconsciously behaving and acting in ways that create the new reality.
But the tool itself isn’t evil. It’s neutral.
So why not use it for your own good? State the truth you want until it takes root.
My Own Breaking Point
This isn’t just theory.
I was raised in an ideology that quietly, consistently taught: things were harder for girls.
Not because we were weaker but because our reputations were more fragile.
More watched.
More judged.
More punishable.
Girls had to accept the double standards because “that’s just the way things are.”
I watched families in my community—especially in religious spaces—hold their daughters to tighter rules than their sons.
Letting their sons do things they would not allow their daughters from a place of protection.
Boys could go out late.
Wear what they wanted.
Date.
Drink.
Dance.
Girls? We were told to sit still, stay small, stay safe.
I heard parents admit they didn’t think it was fair but it’s just the way things are.
Here’s a simple example that stuck:
My mom told me never to dance in public.
Not at weddings.
Not at parties.
Not at all.
Because in our community, a girl who danced was seen as shameful.
Boys dancing? It’s all good and entertaining. Maybe even good exercise.
Girls? It was a scandal. A reason to be exiled.
Literally.
I remember community announcements calling girls out by name for dancing at weddings.
Yes—full-blown spiritual shaming with a public ban attached.
“Jane Doe was seen shaking her hips at the wedding of Jack and Jill.
Please pray for her soul. She is no longer welcome at our gatherings.”
Shakira was right—those hips don’t lie.
And apparently, they get you kicked out.
As a little girl, I wanted to dance so badly.
When bhangra came on, my soul lit up—but I stayed still.
My body followed the rules even when my spirit didn’t want to.
That changed around age 15.
I finally let myself move and I was willing to face whatever came with it.
Then I did all the other “good girl” things too.
I got an arranged married.
Had kids.
Played the role.
And then I started to hear women from my generation—mothers now—repeat the same words their parents said:
“We don’t like the double standards. But that’s just the way things are.”
Shut the front door.
This is how well-meaning people carry forward painful cycles.
And yes, I fell into it too.
Not outwardly—I would never say I agreed with the double standard.
But I did in action.
I accepted less.
I tolerated more bs.
I swallowed my sorrow to stay in alignment with cultural expectations of what a woman should endure.
Did it lead me to happiness?
Not even close.
It was a slow erosion of my soul.
What I Know Now
You see, the further we drift from our soul’s original imprint—from God’s grace, from truth, from love—the more our light dims.
And it doesn’t stop at the spirit. It leaks into the body.
When the soul is in pain, the body eventually breaks.
We get sick.
We feel heavy.
We spiral into apathy, anxiety, depression.
We lose trust in life.
We start to expect betrayal instead of beauty.
We become hypervigilant, reactive, shut down.
Until one day—something forces us to stop.
For me, it was two blows at once:
A near-death experience…
And the loss of my daughter in the eighth month of pregnancy.
That day ripped open the illusion.
The dark room I’d been trapped in…suddenly flooded with light.
I saw clearly, maybe for the first time:
There is no set way.
There is only what we believe to be true.
And the phrase that once held power over me: “It’s just the way things are”—
suddenly meant nothing.
Because that might be your way.
It doesn’t have to be mine.
And my truth is this:
Girls are not here to be silenced.
Or punished.
Or groomed for sacrifice.
They are here to be powerful.
To be free.
To say no.
To say yes.
To dance, to cry, to fail, to lead, to be seen.
If someone says their reputation will suffer?
Ask: Reputation tarnished by who?
The same people who delight in shaming others while hiding their own shadows?
Let them stew in their projections.
That’s their work.
Not mine.
Not yours.
Your only job is to claim your truth.
To live it loudly.
To speak it into the air like a spell that rewrites the rules.
Because it is a spell.
Beliefs are living things.
Say them often enough, and your nervous system adapts.
Your reality bends to fit them.
Your children absorb them.
So be careful what you concede to.
Be careful what you repeat.
Never say something you don’t want to program into your future—or your lineage.
Choose your truth with intention.
Speak it with love.
And repeat it until it replaces the lie.
For me, my daughter, the one I never got to hold, was the one who handed me back my voice.
Her exit cracked something open in me that no ideology could close again.
She left me a truth that lives inside me now:
Girls don’t need to shrink to survive.
We were never meant to.
So here I am.
Speaking it into my life.
So it can ripple into yours.
And maybe into hers—wherever she is.
Speak your truth.
Let the world rise to meet it.
All the best,
—Sirah
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I LOVE this post! It was so insightful. Feel free to check out my work about the law of assumption and consciousness as well! xoxo
We are what we believe, so to respond to those six debilitating words: I am the way things are.