I was writing a completely different piece, it was about how it feels like to be in a group of interesting people and feeling like you don’t know anything. Then, I switched to Instagram, scrolled some reels and stumbled upon this one reel where an elderly man is recording a wedding through his phone. The way he’s holding his phone is how dads in Pakistan record videos, and it made me cry uncontrollably, because I am reminded of my dad at Rakaposhi viewpoint in 2024, which was the last time I travelled with him.

Just in case you’ve never visited northern areas in Pakistan, Rakaposhi viewpoint has a suspension bridge on which you can stand and look at the mighty mountain. Baba and I were obsessed with it. My reason of obsession was Nemrah Ahmad’s Karakoram Ka Taj Mahal and how she describes the mountain in it. His obsession was because he loved mountains and climbing them. He was around 57-58 years old when we went for the last ever family trip, and he was the only one who would never get tired. To this day I grieve the fact that we didn’t see Nanga Parbat together. Hiking to Fairy Meadows would have been an experience with him.

Back to Rakaposhi. Early 2025, we decided that we’d trek Rakaposhi. Amma laughed and said how is he going to do it at this age. He laughed back and told her he’d do anything he sets his mind on. He couldn’t. Life did not let him.

And this year, when I saw Rakaposhi viewpoint again with my friends, I saw my father. Dressed in his brown and grey sweater, with a cap over his head, his gray pants, holding his Q-Mobile android in one hand and pressing the camera shutter with index finger of other hand. I used to laugh at the way he’d take pictures from his phone, telling him that the ones I take from my iPhone 7+ are much better, but he’d always prefer recording from his own phone. He kept taking pictures of the mountain while I stood at one side of the suspension bridge, which I am really scared of, laughing at it. I did not know this was the last time he saw it. Maybe Rakaposhi did know, because this time when I saw her, she looked like she wanted to say ‘I am sorry for your loss’, ‘I miss him too, he always looked at me like I was his companion’, and most importantly, ‘I am still here, so that you can talk to me about the man he was.’

Since the day of his funeral, I haven’t been able to look at his phone. Amma uses it and like every other desi parent, she also sends texts from his phone to me and on our family WhatsApp group, which makes me want to jump out of my skin, but I still haven’t been able to look at the pictures he took from his phone. I really want to. I want to remember my father as someone who loved looking at the mountains more than I do. I want to look at all the pictures he took, think of him in the mountains, how we walked all the way to the second glacier at Saif-ul-Mulook while Amma was super angry, because while she loves mountains, she is also equally scared of being there.

But Baba always looked at mountains like he was friends with them. I am so sure if he’d have gone to Fairy Meadows with me, he’d have talked to Nanga Parbat more than I did. I constantly thought of him when I looked at him (Nanga Parbat is a dude, you cannot argue with me over it), what he’d have said, how he’d have recited a couple of verses by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, how he’d have been listening to sitamgar and talking to strangers, learning words from their language just so he could tease all of us later about how he gets dialect and languages faster than all of us.

There’ll be no one like my Baba, ever.

Note: My Baba went to Hunza in 2019, and he met a man who introduced him to this Shina (local language) song called Sitamgaar, and when he came back to Karachi he’d often play and hum along the song while cooking, painting or simply sipping his chai. My Amma would tease him that he’s thinking of some woman while listening to this song, but I know he was thinking of the mountains.

Link to the song

Most of my life, I have always been the kid who was excited about new things. Changing schools and surroundings was never an issue for me. I studied at the school in my neighbourhood until Grade 4, and then my mom got me admitted to this comparatively big school, and I was very excited about it. I still remember roaming around the big ground with a smile on my face, a water bottle on my shoulder, and being so certain that my life would be good here. Social anxiety had anxiety from me, I’d say.

Now, I am not saying I didn’t have problems adjusting. I sure had my fair share of issues. I am super sensitive and was also very conscious of how I looked, majorly because I was bullied for it. But what I am trying to say here is that I never thought twice before interacting with people. Making conversations was always easy, and making friends was even easier. I felt lonely, and I also felt out of place, but I was never alone. That is a big fact.

Which is why post high school, I got inspired by a couple of book reading accounts on my Instagram, and I decided to make a public account too which was initially limited to book reviews, but then it was also the time when a lot of conversations were happening and apparently everyone was an ‘activist’. So, I also started writing, sharing my opinions, and slowly it became a community. I don’t have a lot of people who have seen me growing through phases, but my public account has seen me growing. Its a digital account of my growth, and I am very proud of it.

Now, we’d dive into the real point of this article. So, when I started out, I was very confident with what I posted. I have never made a fuss about my pictures, yes, I want to follow aesthetics, but I was always very vocal and did not think twice before I posted anything. I loved being there. I loved interacting with people there. My sole intention was to make it a safe space for people like me i.e who’re struggling with mental health and failures, but somehow it ended up becoming my safe space.

Then came 2024. The year which changed how I looked at my online presence.

Since the day I decided to put myself out there, I genuinely did not care what people will think. I also think a big part of me was freed from the fear of being judged because of my online presence. Because let’s just be honest, owning a public account as a woman in Pakistan? it just makes you thick-skinned. I started out when I was literally 17, and I have received r*pe and d**th threats. So, nothing scared me.

Until someone, who I was a very good friend to, and considered my safe space gave me a horrible, horrible insecurity about being online, and that is how I discovered that I was never ever scared of how strangers perceive me but how I am perceived by the people I am close to. She out of nowhere one day, accused me of lying to her about my career, judged me for having male friends and posting them every now and then on my stories, told me that strangers over the internet make fun of my content and I need to ‘stop acting as if nobody cares because everyone cares and people like me are a topic of gossip sessions.’

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I am not a very good person, but I have gone through insane mental transformations. I went from someone who couldn’t take criticism to a person who would sit down and listen to you for hours if you have a problem with me in any way. So, my insecurity didn’t come from a place of being an ignorant person, who did not want to listen to her friend. It came from how I was being judged by someone I was close to. Right now as I am writing this piece, I can feel what I felt two years ago in the cafe we met for the very last time and that speaks volumes about how it affected me. I get enraged to this day when I think about it.

And, of course, it has affected the way I am present online now. It has also affected the way I interact with people offline as well. I was recently on a trip with someone I shared a working space with, and I was constantly worried with how is she going to perceive me. I am also often worried about my friends and family’s lens of me. Which is so funny because every single person I am close to, has seen me through phases. I have ugly cried in front of them. I have laughed like a maniac in front of them. They have seen me through the best and the worst. They really have no reason to judge me for anything and if they’ll, they would tell me.

So, why do I think way too much before I post a story now? Suddenly, why is it a big deal to me if I am pairing something I worked on with a gratitude note? Why posting a photo dump is making me so conscious that I end up closing my app and throwing my phone away? Why talking about grief of losing a parent feels like an attempt at seeking attention when I am honestly just trying to process what happened? Why am I suddenly hyper aware of how I am being perceived by people who see me often that I decode each word of each text?

It is because my subconscious keeps playing a picture in my head every time I am about to post something, and in that picture, there is a room, full of people I know and love with all my heart, with phones in their hands and they’re all laughing at me for being an idiot on the internet. I picture screenshots being sent to each other in WhatsApp chats with ‘what is wrong with her?’ messages and it makes me paralysed, I kid you not.

It took me two years to finally understand what made me feel so unsafe that I stopped doing something I loved: writing and posting on my Instagram. I am now constantly worried that how people who I am close to, who’re my safe space, who’d clap the loudest for me, will perceive me after the content I decide to post. I have been planning to post content on my account for a while now. Last year, I even made a content calendar, but every time I decide I want to do it, her words start to replay in my head and I just decide to be invisible.

Now, I did not write this piece to shame her, or publicly call her out. Yes, I am so angry at her that sometimes I just want to unblock and tell her what she did, but I don’t want to be this person. I want to grow out of it and go back to the person I was: someone who decided to post online without any fear and then ended up creating a community which saw her growing through phases. As I said, my presence on the internet is footprint of my existence. That is how I have coped with things in my life. And it has helped me feel much less alone and isolated because very recently, someone told me that I have a very vibrant online presence and they like having me in their space.

Similarly, I was super unsure about making this substack, to a point that for first nine months, my only follower was my partner, but then I decided to make it public. Started writing about grief and loss. Weeks later, someone I am in a book club with told me that whatever I write is like a ‘soothing balm’ for her and all this time I was judging myself for being vulnerable.

In conclusion: I am a big believer of keeping your intentions clear, so even after invasion of my safe space, I know for a fact that I will end up creating safe spaces everywhere I go, not because I am some kind of epitome of empathy, I am not, but I am super passionate about building communities where people feel welcome and homely. But, it is also very important to choose wisely, especially when it comes to people in your personal life. I have friends who have no digital footprint, and they have always appreciated the way I hyper posted. Similarly, I have friends who’d post a thousand stories from a single night out, turn everything into content and we all appreciate it.

Internet is a scary space, and it is very important that your personal space is protected and uncontaminated, or else save enough to pay bills of your therapy.

A year ago, I became aware of the presence of my partner in the universe, and he spelled my name wrong. But, safe to say, everything else he does is right, and that everything is basically loving someone who’s chronically sad.

I have loved love. I have loved it to a point that I romanticise everything in my life, or at least, I used to. Heartbreaks were a source of art. Crushes were excuses to curate a new playlist. I would walk around the glass table in my drawing room for hours listening to love songs. I wrote 12 letters for 12 months for the first boy I ever dated, and we broke up before his next birthday. I did not learn my lesson. For my last ex, I wrote a poem and recited it at a recital. We broke up. The recital has a digital footprint.

I just wish I met my partner, the love of my life, at a better time in my life. I wish I wasn’t so sad when I met him. He deserved the version I gave to other people because he has loved me the way I love, and he loves the person I am at the moment, the grieving, sad, devoid of colours and life. Most days, my conversations with him are about how I don’t want to live anymore, and he is the reason why I feel like I should.

In a year of being with him, I have learned a whole new meaning of being loved. He does give me flowers, he brings me books, he writes for me, he watches movies I ask him to watch, he listens to songs I make him listen to, he sends me good morning texts, and tells me where he is. But if you ask me to define it on a deeper level:

I will tell you that he sits with me through the grief of losing my parent. When I got to know about my ex getting engaged, the first call I made was to him. When I cancel my plans with my friends because I don’t feel like being around people, even when I love them. When I tell him the same thing over and over again, but he doesn’t make me feel like a burden. My pain is not separate from him. He doesn’t treat me like I am another person and my hurt is a foreign object that he sees from a third person’s point of view. He handles it like his own, even when he doesn’t get it.

I will tell you that I tell him almost every day about my urge to stop existing, and he doesn’t make it about himself. I tell him about how draining it is to be a grieving person, and he says he understands. I tell him every little thing that annoys me, and he fixes it. I fight with him like a maniac and am always ready to turn around and leave, but not only does he let me fight, he also closes the door so I don’t get to leave.

He doesn’t even know my father, but he listens to me talking about him as if he has known him forever. I tell him over and over again about how I hate Chan Mahiya by Abdullah Marhavi, despite it being a beautiful song, because I heard it the night my father breathed his last, and he tells me it’s okay.

I will tell you that I want to build a home with him where I light candles every day and make him meals, but I also don’t want to marry him with a grief-ridden self because I would be in bed all day, weighed down by sadness, and he tells me he’d love me the same.

I will tell you it is very easy to make someone laugh when they’re their best selves, because I have been there. I had the loudest laugh in the room, and my eyes sparkled, and I wrote beautiful things and made my lovers speechless, but he loves me when tears are rolling down my face and I am sitting in the corner of my parents’ room like I am five again, and he tells me to get up and come to him.

He hugs me and takes me to the sea wall and watches boats pass by as I yap about how Baba used to bring me here and tell me everything I know about fishing and communism. He listens to everything and then takes me to Mr Burger and gets me the burger I love and never forgets to order my mayo garlic with fries, and we watch India’s Got Latent together in his car as we eat, and somehow, I feel like existing for that night.

I don’t know if you have watched Laila Majnu or heard the song Aahista, but whenever I think of him, I think of that song, particularly the part where Arijit sings ‘tera pyaar khushi ki tehni hai’ [Your love is a branch of happiness], because he is exactly that to me.

It is very easy to love someone when circumstances are right, when their eyes shine, their heart is in the right place, their laugh echoes the hope they have in their heart, and they’re ready to do everything in their power to keep you. I am not saying you’re not loved until you’ve been loved the way I am loved, but you truly don’t know a person until you have grieved with them.

I have always wished for a love greater than my own being. I have written poems and stories about how I want it to consume me, and I had it figured out all wrong until I met him. His love is greater than everything, and he thinks he is just a boy.

But he does not know that he has become the safest place I have ever known. He does not know that every time he chooses me, especially on the days when I cannot choose myself, he is giving me pieces of life back.

He does not know that love is not always in grand gestures or perfect moments. Sometimes, it is in sitting beside someone in their darkest hour and refusing to leave. Sometimes, it is in learning the shape of someone’s grief and holding it gently, even when you cannot take it away.

I spent years believing that love would arrive like a storm, something loud enough to shake my entire existence. But he arrived like a quiet morning, like a hand reaching out when I was drowning, like a reminder that even the saddest versions of us deserve to be held.

And maybe that is the greatest love of all: not the kind that saves you from yourself, but the kind that sits beside you while you find your way back.

Him in a song

I am starting to write this piece in the middle of a very serious meeting, and this is a true example of how grief keeps visiting me out of nowhere on random days. I am sorry if this account has become all about grief, but I am also very firm in the fact that if I come out alive after these long, long periods of gut-wrenching, life-sucking darkness, it'll only be because I chose to channel whatever was going on inside of me through this account.

There’s so much I can write about from when baba died. I remember everything except the funeral. But today’s piece is about chai, and how, even after a year of his passing, my heart physically clenches whenever I make my evening tea.

Ever since I learned to make tea, evening chai was my responsibility. In the beginning, everyone drank it. Then, with time, amma reduced her caffeine intake, and Bhaiya started working evenings. So it was just me and baba. Eventually, I started working alongside university too, but every time I was home, I made two cups of tea after Maghrib: one for him and one for myself.

Exactly a week after baba passed away, I had a strong craving for tea. It was a Tuesday, and amma’s old workmates had come over to offer their condolences. I stepped out of the room and screamed when I spotted a rat, then burst into sobs because I didn’t know how to get rid of one. It was baba who always made sure there were no lizards or rats in the house, and now I had no idea what to do.

My relationship with baba is very strange, and I genuinely feel I will never be able to make anyone understand why his passing hurts me more than it should. On some days, I fail to understand why it hurts so much because, for most of my life, I shared a very complicated bond with him.

He is the reason I know everything about Faiz Ahmed Faiz. He is also the reason I have such a horrible dating life. I have looked for the emotional warmth he should have given me in men who weren’t capable of giving me anything. I have longed for his reassurance more than anyone else’s in my life, and I have spent at least 20 years trying to heal that wound.

But one thing that was always constant, and always brought us back to the same page, was the chai I’d make for him. We both like our tea strong. It has to be a very specific colour, and until it reaches that shade, neither of us would touch it.

Chai was probably the glue that kept me and him together. Amma and I are more like fire and fire. We are both enraged, and we both take it out on each other. Baba and I were more like fire and water. He’d be deeply hurt, and I’d be calm. Then I’d be deeply hurt, and he’d be calm.

He liked his tea mildly sweet, and I liked mine very sweet in the beginning. But I realised that adding more sugar to my tea was making me sleepier, so I switched to his way of making it.

After he passed away, my muscle memory would make me forget the measurements, and I’d make two cups of chai. Amma would scold me because I don’t drink more than one cup, and the other would go to waste. Like my father, I am a fan of freshly made food, so I wouldn’t drink it later either.

But I am unable to tell amma to this date that I am not doing this deliberately. I have a habit I have built over the years, and I have tried really hard to unlearn it.

So when death arrived, it did not take just the man who was a core part of my existence, but also the second cup of chai. And yes, I know, there’ll be so many people who’d willingly sit next to me for a cup of chai, in fact, they have, but,

none of them would be my baba.

Note for readers: I wrote this while listening to ‘Mere Humnafas, Mere Humnava’ [my companion, my confidant], a beautiful poem by Shakeel Badayuni, and there’s a line which defines grief and the pain which comes with it for me.

میں ہوں درد عشق سے جاں بہ لب مجھے زندگی کی دعا نہ دے

[I am at the brink of death from the pain of love; do not pray for my life.]

On some days while I am mourning my father, this is how I feel like. I don’t want to k*ll myself, but I’d also not mind if I stop existing. I also wish grief was tangible, so I could take it out of my body, or get a surgery done to remove it.

Ever since I was a kid, I have been told that I have a sparkle in my eyes. The very first person to tell me this was my mother. She has a story about holding me in her arms as I opened my eyes: shiny, dark brown eyes that sparkled. Nobody saw me smile, but they all saw the shine in my eyes.

The light, as I like to call it.

Which I have lost.

And of course, it did not happen in a single day. I lost it bit by bit, without ever realising I was losing it.

Until a couple of mornings ago.

I woke up exhausted, angry that my bladder no longer seemed to have a mind of its own. I went to the bathroom, and while washing my hands, I glanced at my reflection.

Empty. Meaningless eyes.

There was so much emptiness in them that I couldn’t hold my own gaze for more than two seconds. Veerana (Vee-raaaa-na) is an Urdu word for a place devoid of life, abandoned and desolate. In that moment, that was all I could see in my eyes.

I haven’t looked into them since.

I know that when my partner reads this, he is going to insist that I need to see myself through his eyes. And yes, I agree. On most days, I borrow his lens because mine is so clouded with hatred for myself.

But I have never hated my eyes.

Because no matter what happened, even in the basement of my rock bottom (yes, I love this expression), they always sparkled.

Until they didn’t.

Eyes have always been a source of poetic inspiration, and I completely understand why.

The way I have romanticised eye contact for most of my life is almost absurd. To me, eyes are the most passionate part of a person’s being. You can hide behind words. You can rehearse a smile. But your eyes almost always tell on you.

I don’t think you can truly know love until you have looked straight into the eyes of someone who loves you back.

I grew up reading that the eyes are the windows to the soul. I don’t entirely agree with the phrase, but I think there is some truth to it. Maybe not because our souls live behind our eyes, but because our eyes betray what we spend so much of our lives trying to conceal.

I don’t know if my eyes were ever the subject of someone else’s poetry, but I know they were the reason for much of my own survival.

I have lived through some of the most painful moments of my life. I have lost myself over and over again, and I know that is, in many ways, what being human is. We spend our lives becoming ourselves, only to watch certain seasons undo us before we begin again.

And yes, I am romanticising pain. Frankly, what other choice do we have?

How else do we survive it?

Perhaps that is what we have always done. We give our suffering metaphors. We write poems about it. We turn it into paintings, songs, prayers and stories. We rename devastation until it becomes something we can carry.

Maybe romanticising pain isn’t denial.

Maybe it is survival.

I got sidetracked again, but, yes, coming back to our initial topic, my eyes, and the light in them. And how I lost it, and if I am trying to get it back?

If eyes are poetry, then the light in them is hope. As I mentioned earlier, mine always symbolised hope.

I have never been particularly fond of living. So I have spent most of my life finding reasons to stay.

Sometimes, those reasons were as small as a packet of Maggi waiting for me in the evening. Other times, they were much bigger. Journalism became one of them. The chance to tell stories, to bear witness, to keep writing even when I felt dead inside.

As long as I kept finding reasons to stay, the light in my eyes stayed too.

I don’t think it was happiness.

I think it was hope.

I don’t know if I have lost my hope, because I still wake up every day and try to live. I still keep finding little reasons to feed my dopamine. Even when I am trapped inside a loneliness so deep that my mind convinces me everyone hates me, including the people I know don’t. Somehow, I still manage to find a little whimsy in the day.

But there hasn’t been a single day since May 6, 2025, when I haven’t wished, even if only for a moment, that I could stop existing.

Something in me did stop existing that day.

Ever since then, every time I step outside, I feel a little more disconnected from everyone I have ever known. I don’t recognise the person I have become. I don’t crack the jokes that make people laugh anymore. I don’t have the emotionally intelligent things to say that once came so naturally. I no longer feel like the person people looked to for direction. Somewhere along the way, I forgot who I was beyond the external validation I kept surviving on.

And it shows.

So yes, it turns out that losing someone to death can also make you lose the light in your eyes.

Maybe grief doesn’t just take the people we love.

Maybe, if we aren’t careful, it takes the versions of ourselves they loved too.

And perhaps that is the cruellest part of all.

Because I spent my whole life believing the light in my eyes would outlive everything.

I never imagined grief would find a way to extinguish it.

It has been a year. More than a year.

I have been trying. Believe me when I say that. I wake up every day. Sometimes late, sometimes early. It doesn’t matter if I got a good night’s sleep. It doesn’t matter if I remember what I ate the night before. I get up. I brush my teeth. I put on my PJs. I speak to people. I text some of them. I make myself breakfast. Mostly an egg sandwich. I also make myself a cup of tea. I still haven’t learned the right measurements because I always end up making two cups. One for me, one for baba.

Then comes the time for Asr prayer. And I remember exactly who lifted the coffin. I remember which side of the alley his body was kept on. I remember what the call to prayer sounded like that evening. I remember the sunset. What I don’t remember is what my father’s lifeless face looked like.

I want to tell the readers that I am best friends with my grief. We live together. We share everything. We have made peace with each other’s existence. We sit in the same room without wanting to kill each other.

But the truth is, we’re as estranged from each other as we were on day one. Sure, we sit together. We sometimes even share a drink. However, both of us know this relationship is just an obligation.

I still remember the first time I met my grief. It was standing beside me in the ICU. Actually, right next to me. It held me together when I covered Baba’s face with a white cloth. It stayed with me as I accompanied my brother to the morgue. And then, somehow, it made me forget what I saw on the day of the funeral.

I don’t remember sitting in the corner beside his coffin. I only remember two of my closest friends lifting it. I suppose that was my companion’s doing. Grief has always had a peculiar way of deciding which memories I get to keep.

This is the part of the piece where I don’t know what comes next.

Maybe because grief doesn’t follow a structure. It doesn’t care that every essay is supposed to have a middle.

I know people say to write about what grief feels like on an ordinary Tuesday.

But there are no ordinary Tuesdays anymore.

My Tuesdays changed forever on May 6.

It was a Tuesday when I watched my father take his last breath. When the ECG became a straight line. When I spent three and a half hours standing outside the ICU, my forehead pressed against the glass, bargaining with God for a miracle that never came. When I called my mother at 4:20 in the morning to tell her she was a widow.

Every Tuesday since then has been measured against that one.

Twelve hours before he died, I was filming a video with a colleague.

My last Instagram story before my father’s death wasn’t of him. It was a behind-the-scenes clip from work. I remember worrying about the lighting. I remember laughing between takes. I remember thinking tomorrow would be another day.

Twelve hours later, I was choosing a white cloth to cover his face.

I don’t know if people talk enough about how offensive ordinary life feels after loss. How the world allows you to worry about captions and deadlines one evening, and asks you to identify your father’s body the next morning.

I have been mad at the universe ever since I walked out of that funeral. I still haven’t been able to comprehend the fact that the world kept moving while mine ended.

Three days later, I went back to work as though nothing had happened. Everything inside me had changed, yet I was still curating war headlines. I was still writing scripts. I was still replying to emails, attending meetings, and pretending I knew what day it was.

I still don’t know how I did it.

How could I keep going when a part of my very existence disappeared on a random Tuesday? How could I continue to laugh, drink tea, eat, work, pray, and live when I no longer saw him in the kitchen making food for all of us?

Nothing feels the same anymore. The food I cook. The friends I meet. The work I do. The thoughts I have. The new relationships I have made. The people I have fallen in love with. The books I read. The words I write. Nothing feels like me. And maybe it never will.

So, I am not sure if me and my grief are ‘friends’. We’re familiar like two strangers who see each other often in the cafe, exchange occasional pleasantries, but, we will never be friends.

Song I heard the morning my father died

And none of them belong to me.

I am a medicine graduate, and I have learned that your subconscious is shaped by what you hear. Your belief system is built on repetition, and what is it that you hear most often while growing up?

“What will people say?”

“You can’t succeed if your parents are unhappy.”

“We fed you, clothed you, educated you, so whatever we say to you, you have to listen and endure, no matter what it is.”

These are just some of the sentences South Asian women hear while growing up. Keyword: some.

So naturally, when we grow up under the strict scrutiny of not just our parents but also an extended community where everyone monitors everything from what we wear to what we post on social media, our nervous systems learn only one mode: survival.

Brown daughters, particularly middle-class South Asian women, live in a constant state of fight or flight. They either sacrifice their entire lives trying to please others, or they rebel. And in both cases, they pay a price. They either spend years in therapy unpacking the damage, or suppress their anger until it manifests elsewhere in the body, usually in the form of an autoimmune disease.

And again, in both situations, the voices in their heads remain the same. Their relationship with God, with other people, and with the world around them is shaped by how they see themselves.

They become deeply obsessed with achievement because, in many cases, it is the only route to freedom and validation they have ever been shown. They begin to base their worth on how successful they are and how much they can give before they receive. They feel compelled to justify everything they earn, every opportunity they get, and every space they occupy, while constantly downplaying their own abilities and accomplishments.

This is exactly what has happened to me.

I have lived my entire life in fear. Fear of being caught for what I am doing on Instagram. Fear of being seen with men I am friends with. Fear of wearing what I want to wear. Fear of upsetting someone and then convincing myself it is karma every time something goes wrong. Fear of being abandoned if I do not do what I am asked to do, or if my tone offends someone. Fear of being isolated if I dare to talk back. Fear of being painted as a villain when all I have done is exercise my basic right to make my own choices. Fear of bringing shame to my family. Fear of not being enough. Fear of not doing enough.

So the voices in my head have changed as I have grown older, but they have not disappeared. This is what they sound like now:

“You’re not doing enough. You need to do more. You need to be more consistent, more disciplined, more worthy.”

“You don’t deserve love until you’ve earned it.”

“You’re not enough. Everyone is with you out of obligation. They talk about you in group chats you are not a part of, and sooner or later, they will abandon you. You will end up alone.”

“Don’t have a child. They will treat you horribly.”

“You’re a failure. A loser. Nothing is ever going to change for you.”

“I wish I was dead.”

“God hates me.”

For years, I have joked that I need to be fucked louder than the voices in my head. Because believe me when I say this: I am one Instagram story away from bringing shame to my family.

None of my achievements or hard work matter unless the people in my house are happy. It does not matter what I have accomplished, what I have survived, or how much I have built for myself. No amount of self-work can fully prepare you for the emotional and psychological abuse that often comes with being a brown daughter.

Especially the brown daughter who makes her own choices and is somehow happy with those choices.

Because that is perhaps the greatest offence of all.

Not that she failed. Not that she brought harm to anyone. Not that she became a bad person.

But that she chose for herself, and found happiness there.

Now, here’s the catch. When you do not believe your mind belongs to you, you also stop believing your body belongs to you. There is a deep-rooted shame and guilt in simply carrying your own weight.

You do not look at yourself in the mirror when you are being given the silent treatment. If you have ever had the unfortunate experience of wearing something you liked, something that did not align with the household you live in, and posted a picture that was later “caught,” you probably never looked at it again. And when you did, you likely judged the way you look as well.

Even your own reflection begins to feel like something you have to apologise for.

Hence, you start to hate your body.

Which, of course, by now, you can probably guess, I do.

I do not think you really look at your body as a child. You are too innocent to have formed opinions about yourself. So other people do it for you.

In my case, it was the bullies at school.

I was a dark-skinned little girl. What was I thinking?

I was supposed to endure it.

After all, it was character development.

So, if you have made it this far, perhaps you understand why I said I do not think my mind belongs to me.

Because none of these voices were born inside me. They were handed to me, one sentence at a time, one warning at a time, one silence at a time, until I stopped being able to tell where they ended and where I began.

The frightening part is not that I hear them.

The frightening part is that I have spent years mistaking them for my own.

Maybe that is what growing up as a brown daughter does. It convinces you that fear is instinct, guilt is love, and obedience is identity.

I have spent twenty-six years learning those voices.

The next question is whether I can unlearn them.

And if I can...

Who am I without them?

(To be continued)

What does that mean?

It means you cannot trigger my sensitivity until I have developed some kind of attachment to you. Not just any kind of attachment, it has to build over time.

Which basically means that even if I see you seven days a week, but we don’t connect or, for some reason, fail to form a bond that goes deeper than the surface of the sea, I won’t be bothered.

Unless you’re my boss and I want validation from you, but that has more to do with my daddy issues than hypersensitivity.

Being a child who felt too much, but was repeatedly told that whatever they felt was bullshit and never acknowledged, I now feel pretty stupid most of the time.

In therapy, I’ve been told over and over again that the kindness I extend to other people is something I need too. However, I’ve never been able to actually practice it.

To me, kindness feels very performative when I try to extend it to myself.

A very common example of this behavior shows up when I try to deal with the grief of losing a parent. If I talk about it with my friends, I constantly feel like I’m bothering them or seeking attention. When I try to share it online, it feels like I’m using my grief as content, which is absolutely not true.

However, these are the thoughts I can’t seem to shake.

But of course when a friend reaches out to me, I keep telling them to go easy on themselves, because how’re you going to live if you’re not kind to your own self?

Right now, as I write this, I’m trying to shut up the voice in my head that keeps telling me I suck and that this piece is just word vomit, which it probably is.

I’m not trying to be one of those writers who force a false sense of brightness onto their readers, because there really is no green grass on this side. It sucks to be this person.

It sucks to be surrounded by all these feelings you’ve been taught to call “stupid,” and then eat them away with junk, because that’s what I do. I don’t address my feelings, I just order junk and watch brain rot, swallowing everything one bite at a time.

And at this point, it genuinely has nothing to do with other people. This is ingrained shame around having feelings. I don’t feel unwanted, unworthy, or stupid because of the people around me, which is often the case with hypersensitive people.

With me, it’s different. I have a very complicated relationship with shame. I feel like I’m a cup overflowing with emotions, and I can never seem to hold them together.

Hence, when I develop attachments, they also come with shame. No matter how big of an advocate I am of effortful relationships, I always feel weird when the effort is made for me. I always feel awkward. I always feel as if I need to constantly perform to ‘earn’ the effort that is being made for me.

Which is a trait of an overachieving eldest child who has unlearned many toxic patterns. The most important one was learning to disappoint my elders and stop being a “good girl,” which did make me happy to some extent.

However, the shame still resides somewhere deep inside me and rears its ugly head whenever I try to connect with my feelings.

And it is a curse I am forced to live with.

I am writing this half-dead from sleep deprivation and the cramps that come with the first day of my period. My brain hasn’t shut up for the last three days, and I haven’t been able to process anything, except the fact that love makes you weak, vulnerable, a helpless child who doesn’t know what to do when a lover is in trouble, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I don’t know about how you perceive love, but for me, it goes hand in hand with fear. And hear me out before you jump in to correct me.

I have been a brave person most of my life. I have handled things very appropriately and I am proud of it. I lost my dad to death and I did not budge. I did not lose it.

I always have believed in love and going miles for the one you love but initially, I thought you do while you’re brave, you keep a mask on and you pretend you’re not scared at all, even if your heart is trembling like a dried autumn leaf, your lover cannot know you’re scared. They cannot know you’re putting up a show for them. You have to be wrapped in a shiny wrapper so they can never see what you feel, because what is the point of love if you cannot keep them happy? What is the point if they get to know you’re scared? Love makes you brave, no?

Bullshit.

No matter how much of a rational person you’re, if your lover is in pain, all you want is to open your palms, and keep it on their chest, and take their suffering in your bare hands, kiss their forehead and tell them, ‘here, I take this away, you’re free’.

However, almost all the time, you can’t do that, because one of the most bitter truths of life is we are all responsible for our own sufferings, there’s no way we can take it away from each other, so while you do reach out to your lovers with your bare hands and your best intentions, you cannot take their pain away.

Is there anything you can do?

Yes.

It sounds so cliche and meaningless when you hear ‘just be there for them’, because what difference does it make? Is it going to reduce their pain? Is it making them feel any lighter?

The answer is yes. It does make them feel seen and heard, and what do humans want? someone who understands. Half the battle is won when you’ve someone who hears and sees you, someone who says ‘I am here’ and actually means it, because let’s just be real, are we all not capable of fighting our own wars? What are we, if not soldiers of life?

So when we can actually fight everything on our own, why do we need love?

To carry us through those wars. To feel like we mean something to someone. To sustain in life.

So, maybe the point is not to be brave in love, it is just to be in love. Just to exist in love. Just to have good and bad days in love. Just to ‘be there’.

And trust me when I say this, it is enough. Sometimes, it is more than enough. What is love if not to just exist and feel the warmth of your lover’s presence. What is love if not finding solace in each other.

What is love if not an endless string of good and bad days but coming home to each other, always.

A year ago, on this day, I found out my ex was cheating on me.

Now, you might wonder why I am writing about this. This is an experience people, and especially women, are not encouraged to talk about. It brings shame, guilt, a lack of self-worth, self-respect, and so much more into the conversation. At least for me, cheating used to feel like something about me, rather than a reflection of the other person’s character.

I still remember the day it happened. In 2024, I was working two jobs, and toward the end of the year, I managed to secure one stable role and resigned from both of my previous ones. Since both had mentally and physically exhausted me, I decided to take a week off after completing my notice period. The end of 2024 ended up being some of the best days I have ever lived.

I went to my favourite band’s concert with my friends. I sat in the winter sun, sipping chai while reading a brand-new book. I went to Liberty, a bookstore in Karachi, and bought more books than I needed. I spent time with my family. On December 31, I told my ex that I was glad he happened to me.

And then came January 1.

That was the day I found out he was calling me a “situationship.” We had been dating for a year. While he was doing this, he was completely normal with me. He spoke to me the same way. He behaved the same way. My brain felt fried. It was the first time I truly understood what that phrase meant.

For context, I have worked hard my entire life. I have been working since I was 16. Finding this out during the one week I was supposed to rest and shut my brain off wreaked havoc on me. I am not someone who goes quiet easily, but the hurt was so deep that I went nonverbal for days. It was bad enough that my mother noticed.

I do not think I had ever gone nonverbal before. Bigger things happened to me later, like losing my father. I had spent years mending my relationship with him, and when I finally did, he passed away. Even then, I did not go nonverbal.

Long story short, I eventually broke up with him, which felt like a big win because I am 25 and had never broken up with anyone before. Letting go is not something I am good at. I struggle to leave places, people, and things behind. I am scared of attachments because the fear of “how will I move on from this?” is always lingering in the air.

But I did. Because I knew this was the end. I could not stay through this. I still have that breakup text starred, as a reminder that I chose myself.

However, I always knew that as romantic and freeing as choosing yourself sounds, it is not easy. In fact, it is not easy at all. The very next day after the breakup, I went to work and then met my friends. For a week, I did not feel a thing.

It was during a cycling plan with a friend that I realised I did not know how to cycle. Nobody cared, but I cared too much. I kept thinking of myself as a loser. I kept imagining that people were pitying me or laughing at me. I was not very close to that friend either, which made it feel even worse.

That was the first time I realised that grief often arrives through small frustrations. I cried over my relationship and the way it made me question my very concept of self-worth, all because I did not know how to cycle. I was 24, a successful journalist, working with the biggest media group in my country, yet I cried my organs out because I could not cycle.

In the first few months, I did everything people usually do to get over a breakup. I worked far more than I should have. I jumped from situationship to situationship, one of which landed me with a sexual harasser, though I managed to escape before he could harm me. I got a haircut. I coloured my hair again. I spent more and more time with my friends to escape the loneliness.

I also downloaded a dating app and deleted it within two weeks, because a rush of dopamine does not last, and neither does a right swipe. One thing I did get right was volunteering at a public library, which later became something I put my whole heart into. But safe to say, none of this worked much.

Every month, I would think I was okay, that I was finally over it, only to fall apart again. After my dad passed away and my ex never sent a condolence text, I told myself I was done, that I would not cry over him again. But I did.

Not because I missed him, but because I kept thinking about how much I had disrespected myself in that relationship. In the process of trying to move on, I took sleeping pills just so I could sleep, but even that did not work. I went to places I did not want to go, simply to escape the pain. I immersed myself in work to the point where I got sick multiple times.

My life did get better after that rock bottom. I went on my first international journalism fellowship. I made friends. I also met a man who treats me like God personally handed me to him.

But I do not think any of this convinced me that I had more time and more life to live. What convinced me was the fact that I chose to walk away from something that was not serving me right. That decision gave me an understanding of my own strength.

As someone who has never given up on anything or anyone, this was a big milestone. After I ended that relationship, I also let go of a lot of dead weight in the form of people who no longer belonged in my life.

I did not write this blog post to inspire anyone. I do not have anything inspirational to say or write. I wrote this to acknowledge that leaving is one of the most difficult things in the world to do, and that it does not get easier no matter how much we romanticise it.

You bleed in the process. It leaves you wounded. There are days when you feel like you are dying, like your life is over and you will not survive the pain. But one thing I can tell you is this: you do survive it. You might feel like you are dying, but the truth is, you are defeating death every single day you continue to live through it.

So no, my life is not over. I might lose everything again, but I have been to multiple rock bottoms and come out alive each time. Bleeding. Wounded. But alive.

I want to talk to you about all the fears I’ve been feeling lately. I’m 25 now, and it’s insane to think that when I was 5, I used to look at my aunt, who was 27, and think that when I reached her age, I’d be fearless and do everything I ever dreamed of as a kid. I never knew that as I’d grow, my fears would grow with me, because the world is either destined to fail me, or I am destined to fail myself in it.

I woke up in the middle of the night again today. I looked at my phone, there was a text from the boy I’m slowly learning to write poetry about, poetry that isn’t rooted in my fear of abandonment or how attachment makes me want to throw up and work myself to death. The text mentioned my name, and my heart sank into the pit of my stomach. I don’t know how to explain that feeling to anyone, but it really did sink, I could feel it beating from there. I sat on the floor, just sat there, thinking, this is it. He’s about to leave me.

And am I wrong in my assumptions? Saturday night, I fell asleep on his shoulder. Before that, I sat in his car outside the hospital, my head on his chest, asking him over and over again if he was going to leave. He always said no. He told me how beautiful I am, how he’s in love with me. And I kept looking at him, because he’s gorgeous, and he has the kind of eyes I’d want to immortalise in art. But I’m so scared of letting him in. What if he breaks my heart? What if he becomes another reason why I have to stay distracted, work myself to death, and achieve all these things that only make me feel hollow and empty?

There are so many questions, and I have no answers, I just have to move through, because I literally have to attack my fear on head, there’s no other way.

Dil Ki Khair - Ali Sethi

But that’s not true. So much is wrong with the world, my world. I see my home, covered in a maroon-brown shade, the one my father chose at the start of the year. I see his silhouette standing there, and I hear a million voices in my head, all his, but from different ages. Then I see myself, 25 again, sitting at the corner of my father’s corpse. His face is white, everyone keeps saying, but it looks yellow to me. Because that’s my dad, his face can’t be white.

I have a pretty simple routine. I wake up at the same time every day, wear the same old clothes, order the same coffee, talk to the same friends, and work on the same things. I have the same conversations, about what’s happening in the city over the weekend, what poem I’ve been reading, what book I picked this month, what I’m writing, what’s going on in the news, and then I meet the man I’m slowly falling in love with. But everything feels so hollow. Suddenly, I just want to go to the graveyard, to hug the tree sheltering my father’s grave, and hold it until this feeling goes away.

But will it? The permanence of death is horrifying. I know he is not coming back, and this feeling is not going to leave.

So I’ll keep looking at the sunsets at jail road with my friend yapping about how the world is shrinking and how artificial intelligence is going to kill us all and how no one writes long-form anymore and I will look at her with nothing but pure adoration and love and think of my dad, and how he is in barzakh, smiling every time I think of him.

Because October is ending, autumn will end too, but my grief, all this grief, will stay, because it is love unexpressed.