One summer day in 2016, I made a spontaneous decision — I was going to start wearing a hijab.

While I was expected to generally dress modestly in my Muslim family, at that time, neither of my parents ever discussed the idea of covering with me, or expected me to cover up, so they were quite surprised when I first brought it up at 15 years old.

“Why do you want to wear a hijab?” my mom asked. “I want to make sure you take this seriously and are making this decision for the right reasons.”

I pondered this question for a long time. Why did I want to cover? As I think back to my reasons to wear the hijab over time, I feel that I have not had one solid reason.

I grew up around people who wore hijabs and I admired how grown-up it felt. I also believed it was a religious obligation and figured that if I wanted to wear it eventually, I may as well wear it then. What did I have to lose? It was not like I was a fan of how I looked as an awkward, pimply teenager, and it was not like much would change in my life. I would not dress that differently, I would only be adding a piece of fabric on my head.

That was a naïve point of view.

After the honeymoon phase of hijab wearing where I got the mashallahs and congratulations for covering, the reality started to creep in. Questions about why I decided to wear it started slowly trickling in from people around me. Why do I wear it the way I do? What does it mean? I felt that I was expected to give a profound answer to each inquiry to explain some life-changing shift within me. I change my mind every day. I wear it because it is a religious obligation. I wear it to show that I am Muslim. I wear it because… I do not know, I just do.

When I first put on the hijab, I was not aware that I would become a representation of Islam, for good and for bad. I was not concerned about being perceived as a person who was Muslim — I was proud of my faith — but I was not prepared to represent an entire religion and people’s comments about what the hijab meant certainly did not help.

Oh, I am so brave for putting a scarf on. I am so conservative. I am so backward. I am so oppressed. I am not wearing a hijab correctly. I am an embarrassment to the religion. Just take it off. It is so easy to internalize these ideas, to succumb to the questioning of my intentions and worthiness of representing my religion when, for the longest time, I could not decide on a solid basis for my reasoning to cover.

By being stripped down as a person to people’s preconceived notions of my religion, I felt alienated, judged from all sides for being too modest or not modest enough. I retreated further into my head, to my thoughts, to an inner battle over my hijab.

“Take it off,” I hear my mind whisper one morning. “It’s not like people take you seriously as a hijabi anyway.”

“No, wear it. Deen over dunya girl, don’t fall for the pressure.”

“It won’t hurt to take it off, just for a little while.”

“What if you die though?”

“But like, come on, you deserve a break. Freedom from other people’s opinions.”

“You would never hear the end of it if you took it off.”

“You never hear the end of it when you wear it either.”

I let my mind wander off to what if’s. What if I took it off? Or never wore it in the first place? What would other people think? If I had not started wearing it when I did, when would I have put it on? Would I have ever done so?

I have never voiced my inner dilemma surrounding the hijab. Not to my parents, nor my friends, nor a random stranger on the road. People look at my hijab as a glaring, one-noted statement, a strong profession of faithfulness or laxity in faith, depending on how I wear it. They take the variation of hijab — whether I wear a bandana, tied back scarf, or scarf wrapped around my head and neck — as a variation of faith. I am only a shadow of my faith.

I wondered if I even have the right to wear it at all, if I am not doing it perfectly and cannot eloquently explain why I am wearing it. I realized, however, I feel much more unsettled by the idea of taking it off.

Then it dawned on me that I have buried my true intentions for covering for so long in trying to explain myself and religion to other people, I had almost lost sight of my intentions myself. I was not wearing it for other people’s perceptions of my faith. I did not start covering just because I was a bored, self-conscious teenager — that was not the important part of my story.

I just got so caught up in the materiality of the hijab in public discourses, how public a symbol it is of faith, that it started to define my perception of it. Ultimately, I was (and still am) wearing it for my faith — because it is a part of Islam that strengthens my connection to God, a part of me that I love and never want to detach myself from. My reasoning comes through a deeply personal, private reason rather than a public, societal one. I never subscribed to living life solely as a representation of faith for other people.

My mom must have seen right through me and my intentions for wearing a hijab. I do not think she would have ever encouraged it at that time if I did it for people and not my own faith. Maybe I was not naïve in covering, but had purer intentions unmarred by other people’s opinions. When the hijab became a public symbol of my identity, it was easy for the act of hijab to become an act of materializing Islam. But I am not Islam myself. My deeds, good and bad, are not represented by the fabric. Rather, it is one of many, separate elements of my religious practice.

With time, I have learned to unmask these initial intentions, and really appreciate the beauty of hijab. Unmasking in my story is not the physical unveiling. Rather, it is the mental unveiling, the release of pressure, of caring what other people think about my clothes and my faith.