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Did We not relieve your heart for you and ease you of the burden that weighed so heavily on your back, and raised high for you your repute? So, surely with hardship comes ease. Indeed, with hardship comes more ease. So when you have finished your duties, then stand for worship, and to your Lord direct your longing.

Quran 94

These words reverberate within after a sleepless morning spent recollecting these days twenty years ago. Sometimes, I suppose, it’s useful to recall where we have been, to make sense of where we are now. To take stock of the journey as well as the destination. To remind ourselves of the hardship before the ease, to truly put the odd blips of the moment into perspective.

For twenty years ago I was working in a Turkish-owned internet cafe on Green Lanes in Harringay. Early every morning, I’d take the train from West Ealing, changing at Ealing Broadway for the Central line to Oxford Circus, Victoria to Finsbury Park and Piccadilly to Turnpike Lane, before walking the final ten-minute stretch on foot, to open the steel shutters of our shop.

The owners were a pair of mild-mannered academics with post-docs in Artificial Intelligence, who had opened the business as a side project, while spending their days writing algorithms to autonomously detect cancer tumours in MRI scans. When the job was first put to me, it was sold as a software development house, for which I would work on graphics and UX.

That never materialised, however, due a difference of opinion between the two business partners, one of whom was seeking an escape from the monotony of days spent absorbed in code. My actual job, it turned out, was to drive a stainless steel Italian espresso machine and enable internet browsing sessions to our bank of desktop computers.

By that stage, most of my peers were well into traineeships at the start of bountiful professional careers. But, for me, nothing seemed to work. After a premature redundancy from a role that could have held so much promise, I fell back into a rut.

Numerous job applications went unanswered. The few interviews I did secure would end in failure. My degrees counted for nothing, because I had no idea how to sell myself. And perhaps it was impossible then anyway, for I was running on empty, the deficiencies that would explain my weakness, lack of focus, energy and motivation, as yet undiagnosed.

So instead I spent my days manning an internet cafe in London’s Turkish quarter, pickling myself in diesel fumes, my daily vista the facade of the Salisbury Hotel, rather reminiscent of my university lodgings in the Lighthouse building on the junction of Pentonville, Grays Inn and Euston roads. Still, it taught me humility.

Weekly, I’d bring home a meagre wage. My wife — may God bless her — was exceedingly patient with me, despite my clear failings. We had gone from her waving me off from our tiny flat to make my daily journey up the M4 for a well-paid job in Maidenhead in the early days of our marriage, to me floundering around for anything I could lay my hands on, be it freelance graphics work, working in a warehouse or waiting in a café.

Those were days of humiliation, really. Humiliation as a young man in the early years of marriage, unable to bring home a living wage, nor account for his feeble nature. Friends tried to advise me, pointing me towards graduate jobs I had no confidence to approach. The gentleman who had introduced us, perhaps in despair, would give me stern talking-tos to remind me of my gross shortcomings as a newly married man.

But still none of it helped. And perhaps nothing could help until we received my diagnosis and I was finally able to begin accessing treatments that might at last address my lethargy, mental fog and low mood, not to mention my abject lack of strength and motivation. It’s no coincidence that I secured my first office job since redundancy shortly after my first injection, after a quarter of a century having no idea what was wrong with me.

So here I am now, looking back on the journey here, reminding myself to be grateful. I have a job now that generally pleases me. I have been a remote worker for over a decade. I am held in esteem by colleagues across the organisation. If others have a query, no matter how senior, they know to approach me, certain that I will provide a sensible response. I am master of my realm, trusted to do my job to the best of my ability.

So it is that those verses, intended to strengthen our Prophet, peace be upon him, reverberate in my mind this morning. Surely after hardship comes ease. Indeed, after hardship comes more ease. So it is that when this day is done, and I have fulfilled my duties, I will stand in prayer, and direct toward my Lord my longing.

I thank God for humbling experiences capable of granting me humility and gratitude. May God have mercy on my soul, and keep me steadfast and true until the end.