Finding My Way: A Memoir

Friendship is the only type of love available to all of us, at any point in our lives; it is common, often overlooked, unmarked by major holidays. To me, friends should be embraced with the same magnitude of wonder and care that we feel for lovers and family members. When I started university, I just wanted to be less lonely. Three years later, I felt like I belonged – not simply included, but loved.

You might inherit an identity and feel obligated to carry it, even as it crushes you.

But you don't need to get the best grades, or be a perfect person to prove yourself worthy of your rights. They belong to you from the moment you were born.

To the men who ran the world, I was just a photo op, not someone worthy of their time and attention, even when I needed it most. Women on the other hand, responded immediately, answering my calls and jumping into action as soon as we hung up.

But someday when you don’t expect it, the river may rise and carry you away to a new place. You can try to fight it, swim upstream, cling to the rocks on the shore. It’s safer to stay here, you think. To hold on to what I know and who I’m supposed to be. I had those thoughts too, before I understood we are always changing, always growing into an uncertain future. Let go, I wanted to say. Trust the water to hold you, trust yourself to float.

For years, when people asked my dad about how he raised me, he’d always replied, “Don’t ask what I did. Ask what I did not do. I did not clip her wings.” He often spoke of me as a bird, but sometimes I felt more like a kite—flying high when it served him, pulled back to earth by a string when it did not.

I changed my answer to the question people always ask me. No, I wouldn’t go back to my old life. I would not trade this life for anything. Whatever I have lost or gained, the path that led me here is the one where I belong.

Trust the water to hold you, trust yourself to float.

Culture is made by people and people can change it too.

Let go, I wanted to say. Trust the water to hold you, trust yourself to float.

Friendship is the only type of love available to all of us

If people create culture, they can also change it.

A video from the scene showed a teenage boy holding on to the wing of a US military aircraft at take-off. As the plane gained altitude, he lost his grip and fell to his death.

the dreams we have when we’re young will reshape themselves as we grow.

Did you know we are the only species who can think about our thoughts?’ Evelyn asked in our next session. She told me to look at unwanted thoughts like waves on a beach. They come and they go. You can observe them. You can be curious about them. But they are not, in themselves, something to fear. Everyone has thoughts that are strange, unnerving, unkind. We all have feelings that take us by surprise. But we are judged on our actions, not what creeps around our brains.

have heard of people snapping or breaking, seeming to shift in an instant from a sister or friend into a stranger. But I lost my mind in pieces.

No man can step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.’ The idea, as I understood it, is that people and places are always changing, and that these changes are vital to our existence. Without the constant flow of water, the river cannot survive.

I thought we would go to university together. At fifteen, I hadn’t thought much past that, but I’d never imagined a life without my friends. Now I was heading to Oxford alone, carrying a bag of trendy clothes and dreams for a less lonely life.

a hopeful little ghost, trying to rejoin the land of the living.

the gulf between how I imagined my life and what it became. I can’t escape the feeling that a giant hand

That night, I opened Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, much of which is dedicated to his thoughts on friendship. Three years prior, when I had read, "The wish to be friends can come about quickly, but friendship cannot", it had made me sad. I didn't like the idea of waiting so long to feel close to someone, as if it was a skill you had to master over many years. I understood it better now. It took effort to see past differences in someone's background, beliefs, or personality. It took courage to be vulnerable. To share the embarassing and scary parts of yourself - the parts you don't even understand - with friends. It took humility to repair your connections, to forgive, and be forgiven. Friendship is the only type of love available to all of us at any point in our lives. It is common, often overlooked, unmarked by major holidays. To me, friends should be embraced with the same magnitude of wonder and care that we feel for lovers and family members.

I can tell you this, not just about relationships, but every big decision you face—there are different paths through this wonderful journey of life, and whichever one you pick will bring different problems and different rewards. When you make a choice, don’t look back and imagine that there were other better options. Make the best decision you can with what you happen to know at the time and then explore, enjoy, meet the challenges.

It took effort to see past differences in someone’s background, beliefs, or personality. It took courage to be vulnerable, to share the embarrassing and scary parts of yourself—the parts you don’t even understand—with friends. It took humility to repair your connections, to forgive and be forgiven.

That taunt would’ve hurt me a few years earlier, sending me into a spiral of trying to prove to myself and others that there was still a place for me in Pakistan. Now, though, I knew what home meant to me, what it feels like, how to recognize it. It is the first sip of chai at Frida’s House in Lahore and walks along the Birmingham canals with my mom, the mountains in Mingora, the rooftops of Oxford, the gardens of Islamabad, boats gliding along the Thames in London. It is sitting on the couch laughing with my friends. It is falling asleep in my husband’s arms anywhere in the world, and no one can take that away from me.

Friendship is the only type of love available to all of us at any point in our lives. It is common, often overlooked, unmarked by major holidays. To me, friends should be embraced with the same magnitude of wonder and care that we feel for lovers and family members.

Pakistan was not before and England was not after, but parts of an ongoing story.

I'll never know who I was supposed to be. Maybe everyone feels that way, curious about the invisible crossroads in their lives, the wrong turns and chance encounters that change everything.

My scarves reminded me of home and helped me connect to a world I had lost. No matter what the misogynists or Islamophobes said, I wanted girls in Pakistan to know that I had not forgotten them.

I wanted my community to see that men can show affection for their wives, that devotion and love are the highest forms of honour.

People had been watching me my entire life. Making sure I followed the rules, obeyed orders, stuck to the script. Sine arriving at college I felt high on independence. Every choice, even the bad ones, belong to me.