You know how some people are called resilient? Or maybe you are one of those people. I know I am. If I were a superhero, I would totally symbolize that. I mean, Superman symbolizes hope, right?

[ Addressing someone off-camera ] I know there’s something wrong with that reference somewhere, but… I’m a Marvel fan, so it doesn’t really matter.

Anyway, we are the people who have suffered a lot at the hands of fate, or circumstances, or people. And yet, here we are, still standing, still fighting – strong, powerful, broken, yes, but not fragile, never fragile.

When you feel lost and helpless, it is natural, it is actually quite common as well, to look externally for someone to save you. I’ve actually mentioned this in one of my previous videos as well. But check out the irony here. We are a generation that struggles to ask for help. And yet we expect someone, we wish for someone, to rescue us whole. There is so much wrong here on so many levels! Firstly, you’re not even expressing your need for help verbally and just expecting someone else to magically understand that you need it. Secondly, you want someone else, you’re expecting them, you’re relying on someone else, to fight your fight for you. That is not how it works.

Listen, I get it. Shit happens. And when it does happen, you have every right to feel every emotion that comes associated with it. You have the right to feel lost, helpless, hopeless, and you have the right to need a bit of help as well. But you actually have to ask for it. And maintain boundaries while doing it so you can protect the one who’s actually helping you and yourself as well. That’s how the process works, you know. You feel, you deal, you heal, and you let go.

Because the alternative is letting yourself be defined by your trauma. We as a society have this problem, this habit of putting people in boxes, of using certain tags to identify people. For example, you know, I’ve been carrying a walking stick for the past several months, so it’s not exactly nice to hear myself being referred to as the “walking stick girl”. And it’s not nice either when someone labels me as the sick one because they now know of my medical condition. I define who I am. Not my trauma, not my issues, and the words I would use range from passionate, loyal, protective, stubborn, defiant, rebellious, resilient… I am not a victim, but a survivor.

There is a lot of discussion, you know, about the difference between victim and survivor mentality; where they stem from, how to deal with them… If you’re someone with a victim mentality, you know, anyone who has a victim mentality, they basically lost their sense of self a long time ago, because of the helplessness and the hopelessness that they fell into. And it’s very common to see them feel sorry for themselves, to feel like nothing’s ever in their control, to feel like bad things always keep happening to them and nothing is their fault. And they need sympathy, they need attention, they need comfort. It’s a life with less accountability, more sensitivity, more need for external validation…

I know I’m being a bit blunt here, but…I don’t quite like it. So, I like to think that feeling as a victim is just a stepping stone to actually becoming a survivor. I mean, this is you feeling your emotions, right? This is you feeling everything that comes along with your trauma, be it despair or whatever. This is you feeling it. And until and unless you feel the emotions associated with it, you cannot actually heal from them. We’ve said this before, right? That is how the process works!

But it doesn’t always work… I have seen people who have been stuck in this mindset for so long that they didn’t even realize when it became a part of their personality. Listen, I’m recognizing my own patterns every day. I am working out what I do, why I do it, and how to make it better. But that’s the thing, I’m doing it on my own. If you’re a victim, when you’re a victim, you’re the damsel in distress waiting for a knight in shining armor, a hero, someone who is not going to come.

People do try to help, you know. People do genuinely try to help, but if you’re someone who’s helping a victim personality, there’s only so much that you can do. You can give and you can give and it will never be enough, because you cannot save anyone who does not want to be saved. You cannot pull them from a life of helpless, passive behavior into a life of empowerment, without them putting in the necessary work and energy. I’m not saying they’re a lost cause. I’m just saying that it is their journey. You can be there with them, but you cannot walk that path for them. It takes a lot to recognize your bullshit and deal with it. And that’s their work, not yours.

And if you’re someone who identifies as a victim… Listen, enough is enough. Take control of your own life. Don’t get me wrong, trauma takes a lot out of you. You might be someone who has dealt with something in the past, you might be someone who’s dealing with it right now, or someone who’s aware of what the future holds for them and they do not like it. Trauma sucks. But think of it like this – you are who you are, not because of what happened to you, but despite everything that has happened to you. You are not a victim, you are a survivor, a warrior even, to have lived like this, survived despite everything! You can do this, you can. You’re more powerful than you think you are. This is your story. How can you let something else, someone else, control or dictate your actions? How can you let someone else take charge of the narrative? Get angry, be defiant, be rebellious, but take charge! You’re not a victim.

You know, there’s this thing we do as a society, in general. Whenever someone opens up, whenever they’re vulnerable, and whenever they ask for help, we judge them without a second thought. We think that they’re posing off as a victim and need attention or something and we shut them off. It’s not that difficult to identify who is a victim and who is a survivor. It’s not that difficult to distinguish between people who just need a helping hand and someone who actually seeks comfort in your attention, someone who wants to get better and someone who just can’t seem to. That is something that we need to fix as well. Anyway, the point is, life is tough. It is, but so are we. Take charge, take control, be your own hero. You got this.

On that note, I will see you all next week. Have a good week.

I recently found myself in a situation where I could not hold back my tears, and that too, in public. And not the kind of public that doesn’t actually know you, and they’re just these strangers giving you weird looks or maybe a few concerned taps on the shoulder asking if you’re okay; but the kind of public that sees you almost every other day. So basically, I hid my face and I cried as quietly as I could, knowing full well that they knew I was crying. And when I was asked if everything was okay, being the emotionally mature adult that I am, I just stormed off. I just left as if it was their fault that I was crying, as if how dare they ask me if everything was okay? How dare they feel the need to check up on me? How could they think that I needed help? I’m Tooba freaking Arshad, I don’t need help!

[ Laughing hysterically ] I know I sound like an idiot right now. But believe me, you all would have reacted the exact same way in this particular situation. I’m not that different.

My main goal has been to get people to be more vulnerable, right? And I think it’s safe to say that I’m still learning that myself. I’m learning to accept myself, to accept that I also need help sometimes, to accept that it’s okay to need help sometimes, and to actually accept the help that comes along my way.

A lot has happened in the past couple of months. My life has changed…again. And I’m used to it. A couple of people have been relating it to the fact, you know, about how I opened up about my issues and that’s why all of this happened. Honestly, at this point, I don’t even know what to think anymore. You know that feeling, when it’s not about not trusting anyone, it’s about not trusting yourself enough to make that decision. And you just feel lost. I’m officially lost.

It is in situations like these that we feel the need to look externally, to look for someone to come and save us, a knight in shining armor to rescue us from the darkness that consumes our soul. No one’s coming, honey. No one’s coming. And that’s okay.

We talk about how it’s not healthy to rely completely on someone else for your needs, for your protection, to cater to everything, to save you from anything. It’s not. You have to learn to be your own hero, you have to learn to be your own savior, you have to learn to help yourself.

But, sometimes, it’s okay. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to accept that you’re struggling and you need a little bit of help. But we don’t do that. It’s like we can’t even do that, you know? It’s like, there’s so many reasons. Off the top of my head… Maybe you have a perfectionist view of yourself and you feel like asking for help would be weak. Maybe you are so used to being the helper that it almost feels unnatural to ask for help. Maybe you have a little bit of, you know, pride associated with that. Or maybe you feel you’re unworthy. Or you don’t trust others. Or you feel that you’re not as bad in a situation as they are, and they probably need the help more than you do. Or maybe you could just push through and you don’t actually need the help!

And there’s so many traumatic events that each and every one of these insecurities, these feelings, could stem from, and they’re so overlapping that it becomes hard to identify which one’s coming from where, so you can fix it. I mean, for me, each and every one of these reasons holds true. Each and every one of these reasons is why I don’t ask for help. That’s a problem, right? That’s so many. My point is, there’s a reason I don’t ask for help – I didn’t ask for help, I do ask for help now, just a little bit. Because I found a simple solution.

See, I imagine that a person, let’s say XYZ…whenever I’m struggling, I imagine there’s a person with the same issues that I’m facing. They come to me for help, and they have all of these reasons, all of these thingies going on in their head, and if I’m able to find some compassion for them, brush off all their insecurities and help them, then maybe I deserve the same too. If I can help them in a heartbeat and think of it as not that big of a deal, if I can actually give so much, then maybe it’s okay to be on the receiving end sometimes too. It is not that big a deal.

See, asking for help is not an external process. It takes a lot of work internally too. You need to be self aware. You need to accept your needs, identify them, understand them, and have a level of comfort with your own self. And asking for help, that’s just the first step. Accepting help that comes along your way with or without you asking for it, that is another ordeal entirely. Sometimes it takes you swallowing your pride, sometimes it requires you to trust others again, sometimes it needs you to heal your trauma, to deal with your insecurities.

It is true, you know, no one’s coming to save you. At the end of the day, you’re at your own mercy. You have to pick yourself up. But, maybe, just sometimes…a friend, a neighbor, a coworker, a colleague, or a kind-hearted stranger, they could just give you a tiny bit of help, a little bit of push along the way. Maybe that’s all you need. And, you know, that could be enough for you.

Don’t get me wrong, people do weird shit. But, I have to believe that life can still surprise you. Keep opening up. Keep being vulnerable. Keep accepting things the way they are. And maybe, you know…you can make sense of the chaos that is life.

On that note, I will see you all next week. Have a good week.

I have been talking to a lot of people over the past few weeks and I get asked a lot as to why I am sharing my personal, “private”, issues with the general public. And while I am a hundred percent behind privacy as a concept, there is still a difference between being private and being secretive. Today, I would like us to explore that difference a bit.

Let’s start with an example, shall we? We know that I’m open about my struggles, I have been open about my struggles on this particular platform. But if I meet someone in real life, I am probably not going to lead a conversation with this. I won’t even mention it to them unless I become super comfortable with them and decide to share my issues with them. You see what I did here? I made a conscious decision about whether or not I wanted to share, whether or not I wanted to be open. I can if I want, but it’s my decision. That is privacy.

Another situation, I know someone, I am super comfortable with them. They want me to be open, I want to be open with them. They want me to share, I want to share. But I don’t. I can’t. I hold it in, I pull my guard up, I, you know, just don’t open up. Did you notice the absence of a choice here? I am keeping it in. I want to open up, but I can’t because of whatever reason. Now, that is secrecy.

When I was young, younger than I am right now, I thought I was being quiet because I was private. It’s true for the most part, I am private. But…it took me a while to understand that I was keeping secrets as well. I was encouraged to be quiet because of how it may affect my personal and professional life, my career, and my relationships, both platonic and romantic. The worst part is…that wasn’t even impractical advice, that was very much practical based on the world that we live in, the society that we live in.

Consider relationships, for example. How many times have we seen a relationship fall apart because one person was too crazy or sad all the time, when in fact they were clinically depressed and discouraged from seeking medication? How many times have you seen a marriage fail because the spouse was too clingy or did not trust, when in fact they had abandonment issues and were asked to push past them, because, you know, let bygones be bygones? We see people push each other away all the time. Heck, I push people away all the time because I am too afraid of getting hurt or trusting people…

[ Addressing someone off-camera ] Don’t look at me like that.

I am in no way invalidating the circumstances under which certain relationships end, nor am I in any way against starting new ones. For some reason, when I talk about this, you know, talk on this particular topic, people jump to that conclusion. In their defense, I can talk on this for ages and still not be done, but it’s not like I have stopped people from, you know, getting married or something.

[ Addressing someone off-camera ] Oh my God. I gave you a list of items to discuss. It’s not my fault you guys got scared. How is it my fault?

My point is, we expect partners to go on a treasure hunt and be like, “Oh yay, we discovered another life-shattering, marriage-ending, relationship-blasting, whatever, issue. Whoops.” I mean, is that how you want to lay the foundation of a relationship?

We are all broken, walking around, held together by false pretenses. What we need is therapy. What we have is a whole lot of unhealthy coping mechanisms and stereotypes passed on from one generation to the next, destroying any chance of a peaceful life.

Because, you know, if we don’t have peace in our personal life, we’re fucked, right? Because professional life, oh, that’s a competition. We are told that it’s a race. And we’re running, we’re running, we’re running straight to the deathbed. How many times have we subjected our coworkers and colleagues to judgment and unfair comparison? For example, if someone doesn’t show up for two days in a row because of a migraine, or someone doesn’t show up early in the morning because they stayed up late with their kids or something, or someone had COVID and they were unable to attend a meeting – how many times have we gone ahead and been like, “Oh, they had this, but we had this, and we were still able to do that”? And there goes the comparison…

On the other hand, if someone is “stupid” enough to explain their issues at work, they are denied opportunities that they have earned and opportunities that they deserve because of the assumption that they might not be able to do their job properly. It has happened to me as well, and it may not have been a big deal at that point, but looking back at it now, I see how it shattered my ability to trust anyone in power. Now that I am leading a team, now that I am working with a lot of people, I try my little best to make sure that my people don’t ever feel that way.

[ Smiling at someone off-camera ] At least I try.

And this is not just in the corporate world or, you know, it’s not just one sector, one industry – it’s every sector, every profession, every professional who is facing this issue. Sure, it’s a race, but is it the same race? Are we all running the same course? Why, why, why is it that to win, someone has to lose? Our race, our competition isn’t against each other. It’s against ourselves, our old past versions. So we can be better, we can improve, we can learn.

The truth is, be it personal or professional, we fucked up the foundations. We can’t fix anything for anyone, for everyone, in a day, not even in a decade. We can fix it for ourselves, for each other, the people around us maybe, one tiny step at a time…by being more open, being less judgy, being more understanding, communicative, you know. I feel like I come down to the same conclusion in every single video – empathy. It’s true, that is all it takes, anywhere.

And when it comes to being private. It’s good. Secretive? Not so much. Being private means that you have healthy boundaries. You are deciding who gets to be a part of your life. You have a rich inner life. You’re taking care of yourself. You’re making sure that you’re not depleting your energy. Being secretive takes a lot out of you. It’s exhausting. It’s frustrating. It makes you feel alone. It makes this world seem smaller than it has to be. It’s a burden on your mental health, a burden that I hope you can let go off…someday. Hopefully.

On that note, I will see you all next week. Have a good week.