The Trap I Didn't Find Out Earlier
In my motherland, Pakistan:
Every night, I wrote by candlelight.
A ghazal on the radio. My own room. My own pages. It was the one part of the day that belonged entirely to me.
It was not connected to a schedule, not to an expectation, not to anyone’s idea of what a good girl should be doing at that hour.
One night, my journals were put in a fire.
I stood there and watched. I didn’t stop. I didn’t say anything.
I was a good girl. Good girls absorb things quietly and move on. So I told myself I had probably deserved it. That I was too busy anyway. Those notebooks were a luxury I didn’t have time for.
Where I was trapped: I stopped writing for more than a decade.
…
I didn’t understand then that the mind can reason its way out of a memory.
My mind moved on. My body could not.
A feeling stayed with me. It was a feeling of low and persistent resistance every time I picked up a pen. It was neither grief nor sadness.
I didn’t connect it to the fire. Why would I?
Years passed.
…
I left for America:
I left home at the age of 23, carrying every boundary someone else had drawn for me. A marriage timeline I had already missed. A definition of perfect life that had nothing to do with what I actually wanted.
On my first day on campus, I borrowed a camera from the library and walked. Alone. I took photographs of nothing in particular.
It felt like I had found a hole in a wall and slipped through. I didn’t know what was on the other side. I didn’t know I had been on the wrong side to begin with. The mind was too busy adjusting to grieve the past.
That is the thing about traps. They don’t announce themselves. They don’t feel like cages while you’re inside them. They feel like a structure, like protection.
There was a voice in my head telling me, “You are behind. You are wrong. You do not have permission for this.”
Where I was trapped: I believed that voice for so long that it stopped sounding like someone else’s.
…
Enrolled in a retreat:
15 years after the fire, I enrolled in a program called Sleepawake.
It’s an immersive program that works through the body, embodied practice, genuine interaction, and the kind of slow attention that Western productivity culture has no patience for.
I went in thinking I was working on one thing.
I found something else entirely. I was still in the fire.
Where I was trapped: The resistance I had spent 15 years calling writer’s block, or busyness, or not the right time. It was a 15-year-old fire I had never let myself be sad about.
…
How the trap moves on:
I am taking it slowly now.
Not because the insight fixed it, but because I understand something now that I didn’t before.
The trap is rarely the thing in front of you. It is a part of you that still believes, long after the evidence has changed.
The trap doesn’t stay in one place. It travels with you into new jobs, new friendships, and new opportunities and dictates whose advice you take.
You are rarely stuck because of your external circumstances. You are stuck because a part of you still believes the trap is keeping you safe.
One day, my friend bought me a sketchbook, drove me to a park, handed me a brush, and stepped away. My creative self came out; I painted after 15 years and felt free.
I started crying.
I felt relieved from the trap.
“Trapped” was the word I never gave it. Once someone gave it to me, I couldn’t return it.
I’m still finding my way out...
If you have liked this newsletter, you will like the lessons I shared on my 33rd birthday, which I wish I had known at 23:
