The Trials of Financial Stability and Womanhood

Very recently, I spoke with a good friend of mine about financial stability. We had an interesting conversation about how much money we make vs how much we want to make, investments, inheritance – things that I had never thought about in such detail before he brought attention to them. On the way back home, I took a hard look at where I currently am in my life and became cognizant of the fact that I could technically stay in this position forever. That I could easily continue working for the same company and take advantage of the 401k, the medical coverage (dental and vision included of course), and the generous compensation package. That I could get promotion after promotion and watch my compensation swell. Buy a house for myself, a couple more for investment purposes. Maybe settle down with one person, pop out a few kids and live the rest of my life watching them grow – nurturing them, rejoicing in their success. 

It’s a beautiful image, organic to think about, but one that makes me feel inherently stifled. At 23, I’m lucky enough to have that strong foundation where I could very easily build a modern traditional life. But I currently have no interest in settling down with one person, and I’ve never had an interest in raising children. I can pinpoint exactly what I don’t want, but I’m finding it more and more difficult to recognize what I’m looking for in each realm of my life – work, education, relationship(s), money. Maybe because as a woman, questions about my life post-grad have long revolved around my marital status, or my plans to have children. 

I remember when someone close to me living in the US asked me what I do for work. I walked her through it, throwing out a keyword or two to make it easier to latch onto the concept. I could see her eyes gloss over, as if the work that I dedicated the majority of my day to wasn’t worth discussing. “Get married soon,” she said, “so then you won’t have to work as hard.” It reminded me of when I go back to Pakistan. Of course, I have those key people in my extended family that love to hear about what I’m doing. But then there’s the sheer number that barely remember my name, and yet will ask for updates on my marital status without fail. Which activates an automatic line of questioning about when I’m planning on getting married, and why I’m not looking, and how I can get a PhD later in life, and what’s the purpose of a PhD anyhow? How time is running out for me because my biological clock is ticking, and how could I not want kids? And I’ll change my mind about kids when I get older, when I meet someone, when I’m 27 and my friends start having babies. How finding a man will somehow ease parental concerns about my safety, and how it’s my duty to give my parents some grandkids, and don’t I recognize what my responsibility to my family is, and how could I be so selfish?

I never put stock into it, but as I age and move farther away from desiring a traditional type of life, I can’t help but take these questions as a personal attack. An attack on my identity as a woman. As if not wanting a relationship and marriage or not wanting children makes me any less of a woman. As if my identity is defined by everyone other than myself and the choices that I make solely for myself. It got me thinking about how many people who approach me to ask about my marriage timeline are in unhappy marriages. How many people who want me to have kids are completely unfit to raise their own children. Or how so many of the mothers I see look like having children was something they had to do rather than something they wanted to do. And finally, how women perpetuate this mentality within each other. How they feed it to their girls with a spoon disguised as love, and how they inject it into their boys with the needle of expectation. It got me thinking about the time I told this man I was seeing that I had no interest in birthing and raising children. And how in subsequent arguments about the future, he blatantly said that he was waiting for me to “change my mind” about having kids with him. As if what I wanted was invalid, as if he knew me enough to know that my desires would ultimately change. Because how could a woman not want children? And more importantly, how could a man respect the desires of a woman who doesn’t want children?

I wonder why we would continue to force young women into these endless cycles of what they “should do,” rather than encouraging them to think critically about who they are and what they want. Why we wouldn’t allow or want women in our communities to sculpt lives suited for their own personalities. I wonder what it would mean to be a woman once we extend our narrow understandings of how women must behave. 

We women can do what men cannot. We can grow life inside ourselves, we can shape the foundation of an entire generation and birth it into the world. We can raise that life, nurture it, and sculpt it into its own being. But we are builders by nature. Like we build life within ourselves, we build life outside simultaneously – and with just as much precision. We can erect businesses just as easily as we can work our way to the top of institutions hostile towards us. We can educate ourselves, grasping knowledge that captivates crowds and inspires movements. And in the end, our physiology only adds to the capabilities that make us unique, multi-faceted, and powerful.

The Parallels of Human Connectivity

I met a good friend of mine on the West Coast. The type of person who listens as if craving to satisfy an undying curiosity, as if exploring a hidden thirst for the very words you happen to be speaking. We connected quickly, starting with the basic “where are you from” and then diving into the “do you think you deserve the life you have” type topics. During that first conversation, he said something that struck me. That while we were in our respective countries – he in Mexico and I in Pakistan, and while we were speaking different languages, practicing different religions, and socializing with different people, the core of our personalities was running parallel. He said that we are similar in essence, as if we are the same people only born in different circumstances.

I met one of the most important people in my life on the East Coast. The type of person whose very presence can add value to a substance-less room, can add a sense of grounding and stability that the room felt it did not need until he so willingly presented it. When I think back to lives running parallel, I think about how we went to a coffee shop the second time we met and discussed our college personal statements. How we realized that while one of us sat in Hong Kong and the other in Saudi Arabia, we had managed to write the same personal statement – same topic, same inspiration, same conclusion. I think about all our agreements that day. How we agreed on charity not being a moral obligation but a moral choice, on the dominance of contemporary and performance art over renaissance, on the ease with which we enjoy the finer and more delicate things in life. And I remember thinking that it was as if a part of me had been placed on the other side of the world. A part of me that grew and blossomed in isolation until I reunited with it in the coffee shop that day.

But with the similarities came a plethora of disparities. Mainly, it was the way we expressed our thoughts that was different – expressions inspired by the books we read for school and pleasure, the metaphors our parents used on one too many occasions, the words we stumbled upon to explain how we were feeling. It was in that space where we could live, discovering the things that made us different. The nuances that shaped us as individuals, and the parallels that bound us together. Each step in our lives brought us to a moment when we were in the same place at the same time. In this way, our paths collided, and we discovered pieces of ourselves in the other.

That reminds me of the time my best friend and I sat on the fire escape the day before we moved out of our apartment. We sat in silence, my legs swinging and hers solid like statues, taking long drags of Marlboro reds and looking at nothing in particular. There was so much depth, so much wisdom in the silence we built together. The same depth that drove her to write works of art, works of raw emotion sculpted on a page with an honesty that only few are endowed with. We were similar in our silence, but I found love that I had never seen before in the way she expressed her silence on the page. I found knowledge in the sea that she carries within her. 

How many other parallels must be out there that circumstance blocks me from meeting? How many other fragments of myself have been scattered, waiting to be discovered? The people that I have met, the personalities that make up my life, share a piece of me. And in their desire to connect, these pieces brought us to where we are now. It is these people with their many parts that I live my life for, that I build myself with, and that I find my solace within. And it is these parts that I will look for in the individuals I encounter for the rest of my life – an endless search for my many soulmates sprinkled across the world. 

Zameen w Zamaan – A Muslim Guide to Self-Actualization

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how various theological and philosophical traditions overlap when it comes to self-actualization. Mainly, what it means to become self-actualized and what must be done to attain that state of being. The main consistency across all of these traditions is that achieving a higher state of self is by no means a passive process. It is a process that must first be learned, and must then be steered until the desired state is achieved. Whether an individual has ever been able to achieve this higher sense of self without some kind of divine providence is largely unknown and to a certain extent, insignificant. What is important here is that self-actualization is synonymous with peace – peace that there is no further knowledge to be attained, that everything is clear, understandable, and unobstructed. There are no longer any constraints and as a result, the physical world unravels.  

This is discussed in detail in both Sufi philosophy and Shia tradition. In these two areas, there is a strong emphasis on the concept of nafs. An individual’s nafs is the equivalent of the Freudian “ego” or in other words, the inner self. The Quran speaks of nafs many times – not as something with good or bad qualities on its own, but as something that must be regulated and nurtured in order to be constructive to the individual’s personal development. 

Sufi philosophy splits the nafs into three separate stages: al-ammarah, al-luwwamah, and al-mutma’innah. 

An-nafs al-ammarah is the most primitive and animalistic stage of the nafs, the lowest version of the inner self. This stage is limited to the base instincts of the human being that are hedonistic in nature – that seek to hoard for survival, that chase material possession, and that pursue overt physical pleasure over spirituality. An-nafs al-luwwamah is accusatory in nature and is characterized by inner guilt. In this stage, the acquisition of knowledge and self-reflection develops aql or intellect and awakens the conscience. The individual becomes highly self-critical – they begin to uncover their weaknesses and attempt to abolish those weaknesses to achieve perfection. An-nafs al-mutma’innah is the final stage, where the individual experiences peace, self-actualization, and a dispersion of all material obsessions. They become content with themselves and ultimately, with their spiritual experience. 

This Sufi discussion of nafs goes deeper into each stage, establishing transitions to get from one stage to the next and providing a clear list of the characteristics that must be eliminated to achieve nafs luwwamah. Shia tradition takes this a step further and dives into the notion of Irfan, or Islamic gnosis. 

Irfan represents knowledge and wisdom of the self. It is the philosophical idea that an understanding of the self is a process that brings one closer to understanding the divine. By understanding the self, we understand human nature and what binds us and as a result, we uncover a component of the divine that is collectively within us. What is noteworthy is that Irfan focuses on releasing the individual from all earthly constraints, not just material preoccupations like wealth and comfort. Earthly constraints can be expanded to include even the physical form of a person – a body that limits the ability to experience connectivity with the divine. Therefore, Irfan is not just an acquisition of knowledge or achieving a level of understanding – it is a constant process of releasing oneself from constraints both mental and physical, until a final release of the nafs from the body in death. Only in death is there peace, and only in death the possibility for divine exploration. 

Within this conversation around nafs and Irfan, I think about the roadmap drawn by Sufi mystics and Shia philosophers to achieve self-actualization. How this roadmap focuses on practicing self-awareness, exercising self-restraint, and ultimately unearthing the divine. More so, how self-actualization is uncovering an element of the divine within the self. And therefore, by theological principle, how self-actualization can never truly be achieved. Our bodies are too constricted and our minds too shallow to comprehend the magnanimity of what we share our inner existence with. We are too limited in nature to grasp something so vast.  

It reminds me of a phrase I heard a scholar use once about the state of human intellect: Na zameen ka ilm hai, na zamaan ka. We have neither knowledge of the earth nor knowledge of what comes after the earth. To live is to acquire knowledge. And to seek knowledge is to know that no amount of comprehension will ever be enough to attain self-actualization. 

At least not in this life. 

Brown and White: A Tale of Exclusion

Racial politics are woven into the fabric of every social structure. The main distinction between varying racial interactions is the chain of historical events that build particular racial dynamics. In more homogenous societies like Karachi for example, racial politics are a constant undertone rather than an overt conversation – an undertone established by years of colonization, and a culture of elitism built with pride around that colonization. 

The interesting interaction here is how these racial politics play out in the children of immigrants – immigrants from countries once colonized, giving birth in the country of their colonizers. In this case, how the “colonized mentality” manifests itself once lifted out of Pakistan and dropped into the United States.

I remember speaking to an acquaintance of mine once – one with an identity similar to mine yet fully raised in the United States. I remember her telling me about her sexual escapades with a variety of different men from all over the racial and ethnic spectrum. As the conversation moved into topics of permanence, she told me quite innocently that she wanted to find a light skinned man to compliment her fair genes and ultimately, bring out her future child’s fair skin. I paused, slightly taken aback. How is it that you can fuck dark men but be averse to a dark-skinned child? That you can be attracted to a dark-skinned man, but think that dark children are less physically desirable? 

As two brown women, I noticed our arms laying side by side during this conversation and couldn’t help but think about our two shades of brown – one more caramel and one slightly more bronze. I think about what would happen if we mixed our two shades together. If we threw in the color of milk chocolate, added a sprinkle of the way desert sand looks during sunset. I pictured the merging of browns from every corner of the world and noticed that it would do little to change aesthetic categorization. Regardless of how dark or light, we end exactly where we started: with the color brown.

But the same cannot be said for white. White does not absorb color, it repels it. With the pure white, even the smallest dots of pigment would change the basic physical properties of the color. If we were to mix the lightest of desert sand with A4 paper white, the white would get lost in a depth of brown – almost inconceivable, and barely living. Any splash of inclusivity is a stain on a white canvas, because white by nature is tailored to be exclusionary.  

These properties of the color white are not unknown. Quite the opposite. They’re the foundations upon which many of the colonized attempt to find partners and ultimately reproduce. They’re the distinction between a good proposal and an unsuitable partner, of a desirable person and an unwelcome suitor. Parents and children alike will go out of their way to find light-skinned partners to wash out the “stain” of brown skin, to drown out the centuries of history in our pigment. And these mentalities filter down from generation to generation, from country to country, first settling in minds too closed to question, and then unconsciously guiding life decisions. This makes me wonder – if we were somehow able to genetically engineer the appearance of our own children, how many brown babies would our world have? Has our oppressor settled so deep within us that we would wipe ourselves out to feel more at ease?

Shades of brown, no matter how light, stand stark on a backdrop of white. No matter how hard the colonized fight to be like the colonizer, no matter how light-skinned our partners are, our children will have bronze painted on their skin and coursing through their veins. And that to me, is the overwhelming resilience of our identity. 

Liberation Long in the Making

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about ease, the ease with which people can direct their worlds. The ease with which many of us were awarded our flashy educations and our excessive lifestyles, our periodic vacations and our seasonal clothing. The comfort and security with which we choose to exist in our worlds. And I’ve been thinking about how the definition of ease changes as we get older – it morphs and contorts and complexifies to the point of being impossible to direct in one course. I like to think I’ve lived a life of significant ease. That is, until I began to navigate my world as a young woman. 

I remember clearly, the comfort of my life before a bookseller felt me up in some rancid corner of a Karachi market on Chaand raat, while my 7-year-old cousin browsed his books a few feet away. His hands piercing my body like infected needles, his heavy breathing like poison dripping down the side of my face. Keep quiet, I remember thinking, don’t let the child see. I remember when, by some miracle of god, it was over. When I readjusted my dupatta, walked to my cousin, and helped her pick out a Junie B Jones book to devour in the car on our way home. When I handed him 100 rupees and he smirked and told me “for you, 75”, and I went home and threw up my insides. And I remember the time when I realized, years later, that it was only fitting for me to hope to slice off every part of his body that touched mine. So that another woman doesn’t feel like she has to rip off her skin to cleanse herself of him.

I remember clearly the next day, when a distant family member put my hand on his dick at an Eid gathering because he knew that he’d get away with it. When the men sitting next to us looked at me and then looked away to comment on the hall decorations. When the women saw his hand piercing mine and continued to whisper about how Maria was wearing Sana Safinaz’s collection from last year. And how I also wished that in that moment, I could be just as vacant as they were – maybe then I could drown out the feeling of ants crawling their way into my veins and chewing my insides. I remember the time when I realized, years later, that it was only fitting for me to hope to chop his hands off. So that another woman doesn’t feel like she has to burn her hands over an open flame to erase the memory of his. 

Is it really immoral to want to inflict violence upon those who are so carelessly brutal? 

These are men. Men who took so much from their mothers in the womb that they made them complicit in the oppression they raged against their kind. These are the men who are handed comfort and ease on a platinum platter, who toss the crumbs to women and expect them to be satisfied. The same men who butcher intellect to maintain their positions of authority, and massacre generations of free will to make themselves feel powerful. The men who impale the bodies of women with their unwanted touch, leaving remnants of violence trapped in muscle memory. The men who look at themselves in the mirror and feel power in their violence, who feel masculinity in their aggression, who have grown used to walking a world sculpted perfectly for them. 

But we are women. Women who do not need to silence others to be known. We are the women who do not need to oppress to feel strong, or violate to feel superior. Without us, these men have no source from which to draw their power. Even when they take advantage of us, they are a derivative of us – because they depend upon our exploitation to exist, to feel masculine and strong, to feel at ease. And imagine if we were fully cognizant of the power we possessed – imagine how it would feel to crush these men, to subject upon them the beauty of accountability. Imagine how we’d conquer the world. 

I recognize that my very existence as a woman is threatening to men who believe I should stay indoors, men who believe they should be able to control what I say and what I wear, where I go, who I interact with, what I take interest in. The men who crave to take from me by force the right to my own mind and body. And even after my dealings with men, or rather as a result of them, I savor every minute of my choices. I find joy in speaking my mind with men who wish they could sew my mouth shut. I find gratification in using my intellect to make them feel small. We share a common understanding, an understanding that if I made it this far with the shackles of misogyny around my ankles, I would’ve built heaven on earth with the privileges that they’ve been fed. 

The Cardinality of Grief

How are we meant to quantify grief? 

I think about how we all sat in silence at dadi’s house after dada’s burial – silence heavy with the magnanimity that can only come from pondering death. A permanent loss in countless ways – loss of presence, of soul, of existence. A loss of conversation awkward and pleasant, of interest feigned and genuine, of a memory sharp and a mind astute. A loss of love for food consumption. And overly sweet chai. And clothing perfectly pressed. And dentures meticulously clean. And a loss of hellos and goodbyes, of bending down for a kiss on both cheeks, of “jite raho, salamat raho”-type routines.  

But even though we were brought together under the umbrella of grief from dada’s passing, that was not the only type of death heavy in the air. Death is a permanent loss but is not purely defined by someone being deceased. Substantial death is a loss of love, and it was the loss of love that struck me in that room. In one corner, resentment from a sickness destroying a unifying love between two people. In another, pieces of a broken marriage left stagnant for so long that the heart outgrew them. In the third, the possibility of love kept alive by will but desecrated by the cool edge of rationalism. And in the fourth, an endless search for a love non-existent. We were brought together by one grief, and we stayed for a multitude. 

I realized then that such silence can’t be pregnant with only one kind of loss, because lives are never limited to a singular loss. The quantity of loss is plentiful, and the grief from it compounding. And when there is so much compounded loss in one room, with it comes the silence from thousands of unspoken words, from unexpressed emotions, from griefs shoved aside in hopes of one day being less jarring. 

Maybe that’s why we come together in collective grief, as if our presence as a unit can somehow ease burdens and alleviate individual suffering. For a moment, I can allow the losses littering my existence that are so substantial in their isolation, to become negligible within the larger context of dada’s passing. I can let go of the pains that we drag around heavily in our veins, and I can allow myself to mourn for the departed – for my grandfather, and for others that are alive but that I continue to yearn for.   

In death, there is loss. But in death, there is also unity – a comforting legacy to leave behind for a life so wholly lived.     

An Ode to New York – 2015-2019

Cities are easily stained with the remnants of past lives. 

There’s a certain level of familiarity that envelops you when you navigate highly frequented streets. As if an imbedded language of intimacy anonymously clears the path for you to unearth parts of yourself that may be lost. I notice this when I roam New York as a new woman. Each crevice shares with me a memory of the multitudes of people I have been over the years. The people that I continue to harbor but attempt to constrict in the name of progress. I’ve grown since then, grown far past the reckless young-person behavior that made my back sore and my knees weak the second I got my diploma in the mail. But as I continue to walk around the city, I can’t help feeling a sense of admiration for the perseverance of the college soul. 

No one in the world has the endurance of the NYU first year trekking to the LES in the dead of winter to grind on some “papi from the Bronx” at Pianos. Or of the sophomore stumbling in stilettos across the cobblestone streets of the Meatpacking District in hopes of catching a B-list celebrity at 1OAK. Of course, we would become more refined with age. We become the Bushwick crew chugging beer and listening to indie music in the apartment of some dude we met on the subway. Or the bougie brunch crew that breathes for bottomless mimosas and still thinks Le Bain is the place to be. The city makes me nostalgic for these lives that I once lived so wholly, and I often wonder how it would’ve been had I stayed in a past version of myself. 

Nostalgia for a past self is an interesting concept. In theory, it would be easy for me to digress into the familiarity of who I once was and continue to exist within that familiarity. But lives are rarely defined only by the individual living them – they are defined by the colorful cornucopia of relationships that made the life worth living. And therein lies the essence of my nostalgia. I don’t miss the state of the world from a particular point in my past. Rather, I miss the way I felt navigating the world with certain people that are no longer in my life. 

I don’t yearn for these people anymore – it is difficult to ache for personalities that have aged into unfamiliarity over the years. I yearn for the comfort, the anxiety, the pain, and the excitement, of past relationships that built my foundations, sculpted my behaviors, and lead by example. 

Like my party friends, who taught me that cis-women are more disadvantaged than cis-men until it comes to getting into clubs for free. And then my acquaintances from psychology class, who taught me that the only reason cis-women can even get into clubs for free is because they’re the commodity that men are buying. A brief introduction to the objectification of women, you could say. 

Like my friend’s ex-boyfriend, who taught me about what I deserve in a relationship vs what men might try to sell me as an alternative. Who taught me that there are many forms of abuse, and that friendships can be just as abusive as relationships can. A manual for identifying toxicity. 

Like my first romantic interest, who taught me that having a strong emotional connection doesn’t necessarily stabilize a relationship. And then my second romantic interest, who taught me that while fulfilling criteria is deeply satisfying, it is by no means more important than an emotional connection. A lesson in prioritization, and in finding fulfillment in a partner. 

I feel an infinite attachment to the people who gave me the experiences that helped me grow from infancy into my next lives. And I feel nostalgic for this process of learning, of defining and re-defining what I didn’t know and what I thought I knew. I think about the volume of people I must’ve interacted with during my tenure in New York City, and how their existence may have impacted me for better or for worse. When I walk those streets now, I see streets painted with the growth and knowledge of people I once knew and feel a sense of purpose and solidarity. I feel a cycle of growth churning within myself, propelling me into the next series of knowledge-bearing relationships that will adorn my city with the depth of a life lived in connectivity.