The People Who Judged My Life Weren't Living It

The People Judging My Life Weren't Living It

There was a time in my life when I spent far too much energy explaining myself. I explained my choices, my decisions, my struggles, and sometimes even my survival. What I didn't realise then was that the people demanding explanations were not living my life—they were merely observing it from a comfortable distance. It's easy to tell someone what they should do when you don't have to live with the consequences. I learned this most painfully when I found myself choosing between preserving a relationship and preserving myself. People had plenty of advice. "Marriages are made in heaven," they reminded me. Perhaps they are. But some people forget that while a marriage may be made in heaven, it can feel like hell on earth for the person trying to survive it. The people offering opinions didn't wake up to my reality every day. They weren't carrying the loneliness, the emotional exhaustion, or the burden of responsibilities that should never have belonged to one person alone.

Raising a child with special needs taught me this lesson even more deeply. People often underestimate what it takes—not just financially, but emotionally, physically, and mentally. What hurt most was watching one parent slowly walk away from responsibilities that should have been shared, while everyone around me continued reminding me of my duties. My duty to adjust. My duty to compromise. My duty to forgive. My duty to endure. Rarely did anyone stop to ask what duties others had towards me. Who was supporting me? Who was sharing the worries, the appointments, the decisions, and the sleepless nights? It often felt as though responsibility flowed in only one direction. The expectation was that I should keep giving, keep sacrificing, and keep carrying more, no matter how heavy the load became.

For years, I tried to live up to those expectations. I tried to be patient, understanding, and accommodating. The harder I tried, the more invisible I became. Somewhere along the way, I realised something important: the people judging my choices did not have to live with the outcome of those choices. When they went home, they returned to their own lives. I returned to mine. They were not raising my daughter. They were not managing my challenges. They were not dealing with the consequences of staying, leaving, sacrificing, or rebuilding. I was. That realisation helped me draw a line between judgement and being judgmental. Legal judgement exists because society needs rules. Being judgmental is something entirely different—it is forming opinions about battles you have never had to fight.

The day I stopped seeking permission from spectators was the day I began reclaiming my peace. I stopped treating other people's opinions as more important than my lived experience. I stopped believing that every difficult decision required public approval. Most importantly, I stopped explaining myself to people who had never carried even a fraction of the weight I was carrying. The older I get, the more I understand that every person's life contains chapters invisible to outsiders. We see decisions and assume we know the story. We rarely see the heartbreak, fear, courage, sacrifice, and resilience that came before them.

Today, I no longer measure my choices against other people's expectations. I measure them against my values, my responsibilities, and my peace of mind. Because the truth is simple: the people judging my life weren't living it. I was. And at the end of the day, I am the one who has to live with my decisions, make peace with them, and look at myself in the mirror. Fortunately, after all these years, I have learned that my own understanding matters far more than anyone else's judgement.

Happy Father's Day Dear Dad

 My dad never just told me I could do anything—he made me believe it.

He celebrated every achievement, no matter how small. He trusted me with his accounts even before I reached high school. He asked for my opinion on important decisions and made me feel that my thoughts mattered.

He never expected me to serve anyone—before or after marriage. Instead, he taught me self-respect, confidence, and independence. In his eyes, I was the smartest person he knew, and being compared to me was the highest compliment he could give.

When I moved to Byndoor, he didn't just encourage me from afar. He came there, helped me understand village life, and stood beside me as I learned to build a new life. He cared for Rayyan and Farheena with a love and dedication that only a grandfather like him could give.

When I started selling soft toys, he was right there with me—setting up stalls before anyone else arrived, welcoming early visitors, and proudly making the first few sales. He never stood behind me. He stood beside me.

No matter where life took me, my dad was always there.

I don't need Father's Day to remember him. The values he gave me, the confidence he built in me, and the principles he lived by are present in everything I do, every single day.

Today and every day, I carry a part of him with me.

Forever grateful. Forever your daughter.

Everyone Is a Human Being. But Only Some Are Being Human.

 

Mastering the Art of Disappointing People Gracefully

The Art of Disappointing People Gracefully

If I had a talent that consistently showed up throughout my life, it would be this: I have mastered the art of disappointing people gracefully.

Not by being rude or rebellious. Not by deliberately defying expectations. Quite the opposite. I have generally tried to be kind, responsible, hardworking, and dependable. Yet, despite my best efforts, I have repeatedly disappointed people simply because I refused to become the version of me they had already decided was inevitable.

It began with my club foot. The moment people notice a visible difference, they often start writing your story for you. They imagine limitations before they imagine possibilities. I suspect many people looked at my foot and quietly concluded that sports would never be my thing. Unfortunately for them, nobody had informed me of this arrangement. I loved running. I played kho-kho and throwball with enthusiasm, competed fiercely, and ended up winning medals at school and district-level competitions. The foot that was expected to slow me down carried me across playing fields and finishing lines with remarkable determination.

Meanwhile, I was doing rather well academically too. Looking back, I must have been a particularly inconvenient child: a girl with a club foot who enjoyed sports, won medals, and brought home good grades. It was a deadly combination for anyone invested in low expectations. I had the unfortunate habit of ruining perfectly reasonable assumptions.

The same foot carried me through college, through long walks, through life's ordinary demands, and eventually through motherhood. When my daughter Farheena was born, I carried her too. Raising a child changes every parent. Raising a child with special needs reshapes your understanding of love, patience, advocacy, and endurance. It teaches you to celebrate milestones that others take for granted and to develop reserves of strength you never knew existed.

Then, at twenty-nine, came another chapter people were eager to predict: Stage 3 breast cancer. I was a young mother with an eleven-month-old daughter. Survival statistics entered conversations, sometimes spoken aloud and sometimes hidden in sympathetic glances. There seemed to be an unspoken expectation that my story had reached its tragic climax.

Thirty years later, I remain deeply apologetic for disappointing that narrative.

I have now spent three decades surviving breast cancer. More importantly, I have spent those decades living. Each year has brought its own struggles and joys, but also growth, learning, laughter, and the stubborn insistence that survival is not merely the absence of death. Survival is participation. It is choosing to engage with life even when life has not been particularly gentle with you.

The years after cancer were not easy. I was raising my daughter, navigating financial uncertainty, and receiving virtually no financial support from anyone. It would have been understandable to place my own ambitions on hold indefinitely. Yet I wanted an education, and wanting something deeply enough has a way of making you resourceful. I stitched clothes, wrote articles, gave tuitions, and took on whatever odd jobs came my way to fund my studies. Progress rarely arrives in dramatic fashion. More often, it comes disguised as persistence repeated over and over again.

Eventually, those efforts led me to complete my Master's degree in Counselling and Psychotherapy. I attended interviews, secured a good job, and built a meaningful career. Once again, expectations suffered another graceful disappointment. The woman many assumed would spend her life simply coping with circumstances was now helping others navigate theirs.

One of the greatest privileges of my professional life was helping other women start—or restart—their careers. Many had lost confidence in themselves. Some believed it was too late. Others had spent years placing everyone else's dreams ahead of their own. I recognised those fears because I had wrestled with them too. Through my work and later through My Giggle Garden, I found immense satisfaction in reminding women that pauses are not endings and that reinvention remains possible at every stage of life.

By then, I had developed a habit of learning new things simply because I could. I learned to swim. I learned to ride a scooter. I became comfortable using computers and, when required, fixing them too. I kept up with technology, explored new applications, adapted to changing times, and refused to surrender to the idea that certain skills belonged only to younger generations. Most recently, I earned my driving licence. Apparently, I have reached an age when society expects women to become spectators, while I remain rather interested in participating.

Then there is the stand-up comedy.

This perhaps disappoints expectations most delightfully of all.

People rarely anticipate that a breast cancer survivor might choose humour as part of her healing. Yet I stand on stages and make people laugh about my cancer journey because they removed my tumour, not my sense of humour. Laughter has carried me through some of the darkest chapters of my life. It has softened fear, built connection, and reminded me that joy and suffering are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes they sit side by side, holding hands.

When I look back across the decades, I realise that my life has not been defined by tragedy, resilience, achievement, or survival alone. It has been shaped by my repeated refusal to accept other people's assumptions as my destiny.

The assumption that a child with a club foot would be physically limited.

The assumption that illness would define the rest of my life.

The assumption that caregiving would extinguish ambition.

The assumption that financial hardship would end educational aspirations.

The assumption that age should bring surrender instead of curiosity.

Time and again, those assumptions have been proven wrong.

Perhaps that is the lesson I have earned through experience: other people's expectations are not prophecies. They are merely opinions dressed up as certainty. They reveal more about the limits of another person's imagination than they do about your actual potential.

As for me, I intend to continue disappointing people for as long as I can.

I will keep learning new skills. I will continue laughing at inappropriate moments. I will celebrate milestones that nobody expected me to reach. I will cheer for women discovering their own strength. I will love fiercely, work wholeheartedly, and remain curious about what life still has to offer.

I have lived and laughed my way through a life that was repeatedly underestimated.

And if that disappoints expectations, so be it.

After all, I have become rather good at disappointing people gracefully.

— Farida

Dear Sister - You are More Than a Memory

 Today, a quiet but heavy realization hit me.

My sister passed away in 1996. I was blessed to have her in my life for 29 years, but as of this year, I have now lived without her for 30. For the very first time, the years of missing her outnumber the years we shared.

Yet, numbers lie. The math of grief doesn't match the math of the heart.

Even after three decades, I still feel her so vividly around me. I can still hear her laughter, picture her innocence, and honestly, even recall her quick anger. Her emotions were always on the extremes—there was no middle ground with her—and that raw, unfiltered authenticity is exactly what endeared her to absolutely everyone.

It made me think about how weird and beautiful human connection is. If you love deeply enough, a person you haven't seen in 30 years can remain fiercely alive, loved, and close to your heart. Meanwhile, if you fall out of love or a relationship sours, you could be living under the exact same roof with someone and constantly forget their presence altogether. Physical proximity means nothing; love is the only thing that anchors someone to your life.

Time keeps moving, but love stays completely still.

Miss you, my dear sister... Your memories are, and will always be, my greatest treasure. ✨❤️

I Need Approval as Much as a Crow Needs a Car

 

There was a time when I cared far too much about what people thought. Not because they were wiser, or because they knew me better than I knew myself, but because, like many women of my generation, I was raised to believe that approval mattered. Approval from family. Approval from relatives. Approval from society. Approval of teachers. Approval from complete strangers who somehow felt qualified to comment on how I should live my life.

Then life happened.

Cancer happened.

Motherhood happened.

Challenges happened.

And somewhere along the way, I realised something important: the people who had opinions about my life were rarely the ones living it.

After cancer, I slowly began rebuilding myself. Not with grand declarations or dramatic transformations, but through small acts of courage that accumulated over time. I started making choices based on what felt right to me rather than what looked acceptable to everyone else.

I began wearing clothes because I liked them. Not because they fit somebody else's expectations of how a woman my age should dress. It sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet many women spend years dressing for approval rather than comfort, confidence, or joy.

Then I started earning my own money. Not because I wanted to prove anything to anyone, but because earning gave me something precious—a stronger voice in my own life. Financial independence didn't just change my bank balance; it changed the way I saw myself. It gave me choices. And choices are a form of freedom.

I started travelling alone when necessary. I made decisions without consulting a committee of critics. I stopped seeking permission for things that required only my own consent. The world didn't collapse. The sky didn't fall. The neighbours survived.

In fact, life became lighter.

Some people approved. Some didn't. And that's when I discovered one of adulthood's best-kept secrets: other people's approval is optional. Helpful sometimes. Necessary almost never.

Think about a crow for a moment.

If you offered a crow the keys to a luxury car, what would happen? Absolutely nothing. The crow wouldn't be impressed. It wouldn't suddenly feel more successful. It wouldn't compare itself to other crows. It would simply fly away and continue being a crow because the car has no value in its world.

These days, that's how I feel about unnecessary approval.

If advice comes from people who genuinely care about me, I'll listen. If criticism helps me grow, I'll consider it. But random judgement, unsolicited opinions, and endless commentary about how women should dress, earn, travel, age, or dream? No, thank you.

Life has taught me that there is a difference between seeking guidance and seeking validation. Guidance can help us grow. Validation can become a cage if we depend on it too much.

I spent too many years worrying about fitting into someone else's idea of who I should be. These days, I am far more interested in becoming who I am.

The older I get, the more freedom I feel. Not because life has become easier, but because I have stopped handing other people the power to decide whether my choices are acceptable.

So wear the outfit.

Take the trip.

Learn the skill.

Earn the money.

Change direction.

Start over if you need to.

The people who disapprove will think about it for a few minutes. You will live with the consequences—or the rewards—for years.

Choose the life that feels right to you.

After all, a crow doesn't need a car.

And neither you, nor I, nor anyone else needs everyone's approval to live life fully.

— Farida