shedding the shoulds

reclaiming my life & running my own race

freedom <3

One of the most insidious blockers to our happiness is those pesky beliefs I call “shoulds.” Once I made the decision to leave the company I had founded and get on a one-way ticket to Bali, I was amazed to find just how much of my life was run by scripts written by some unknown deity. Scripts I never agreed to or even knew about. They were just there, in the background, running my life.

Up until college, the big should was to get into a top American college. In my life even in Pakistan, getting into a brand name American college was the be-all-end-all and I, like many kids, cared about that. So I contorted myself into shapes that didn’t always fit me in order to fit what I hoped would be, well, Stanford.

Once I got to Stanford I had little idea what I wanted to do, because I hadn’t been writing my own script. So I took on the Stanford script: work in tech, make a bunch of money, start a company, go through YC, pretend that being a woman has absolutely no impact on the way I think or act or aspire to things differently than men. Oh, pretend that gender is like, not even a real thing, it’s just a social construct. Cool. Let’s go with that.

So I found myself at 29, building a YC-backed startup, having raised millions of dollars, running a team, etc, but quite unhappy, some would say. And what I’ve learned the hard way is that we can’t lie to ourselves; the truth will always catch up. Living out of alignment is unsustainable; sooner or later the bill comes due. And the longer you wait, the bigger and uglier it will be.

I was lucky that my spiritual awakening came relatively early; I was only 29 when I could no longer deny that I was on the wrong path. The Stanford script had little room for quitting and taking a one-way ticket to Bali, and at that crossroads, I jumped from their script to mine, which I am still writing today.

Contrast this with my friend K. K grew up under much less pressure to pursue prestige; few scripts written for her. So she knew, at a young age, that she wanted to pursue acting, and she loved clothes, and wanted to start a clothing business. Now in our 30s, she is doing exactly that; a famous actress with 1.6M followers on Instagram and a thriving clothing business, I can barely walk with her in Hunza or Karachi without her getting stopped for an autograph. K’s life may not be perfect — is anyone’s? — but it is true to her, and free of many of the anxieties that plague my Stanford classmates and myself.

For those of us who did lose our way, all is not lost. The antidote to shoulds is knowing that we are all lovable exactly as we are. We don’t need to earn our worth in achievements or money or Forbes nominations. I am not worth more than you because I went to Stanford and you, community college. You are not worth more than me because you make a lot more money. You just are, and I just am, and everyone is fine, and the world keeps turning.

Knowing this frees us to experiment, to try and fail, to pursue things we love even when they don’t give us immediate validation. We do them because we want to, we are lovable because we just are. And if we love something enough to keep doing it even when nobody else cares, that is how true greatness is born.

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