For the past 60 days or so, I’ve been thinking deeply about one word: Fitra. We often hear that we need to “return to our fitra.” But what does that actually mean? How do you return to something that was already placed inside of you?

The more I think about it, the more I believe returning to fitra is not about becoming something new. It is about removing everything that has buried what was already there. The ego. The arrogance. The distractions. The need to be seen. The need to be praised. The need to perform.

So much of what we become in this world is performance. We build identities around how we want people to see us. We protect images of ourselves. We collect habits, wounds, pride, fears, and desires until eventually we can barely hear what is underneath all of it. And maybe fitra is what begins to appear when the nafs gets quiet. When it becomes weak enough that your real self can finally breathe.

I have always looked for challenges. Something to fight. Something to overcome. And lately I have started to see this as one of the greatest battles a man can enter: The battle to remove everything false from himself. Not to create a new identity. To uncover the one Allah gave him before the world taught him how to perform.

Because when a person begins to live closer to his fitra, so many things that once seemed important start to look ridiculous. Status. Ego. Winning every argument. Being admired. Proving yourself. Being seen as strong. Being seen as righteous. They begin to lose their grip. And some of the characteristics we spent years protecting suddenly look unnecessary, even harmful.

I think sometimes about our father and mother, Adam and Hawa. What was it like to exist before generations of human insecurity, social conditioning, image, status, culture, competition, and performance piled themselves onto the human heart? I imagine something incredibly simple.

They were human beings standing before Allah. No audience. No brand. No reputation to protect. No need to convince anyone of who they were. Just creation standing before its Creator. There is something powerful about that thought.

Maybe returning to fitra is a lifelong process of removing the distance between who Allah created us to be and who the world convinced us we needed to become. And I have decided I want to enter that battle fully. To weaken the nafs. To question my ego. To remove the performance. To stop protecting versions of myself that no longer serve any purpose. And to see what remains when all of that becomes quiet.

Maybe the journey back to fitra is not a journey outward at all. Maybe it is the deepest journey inward. Not becoming more. Removing more. Until eventually, by the permission of Allah, the man underneath all of it finally appears.