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