Issue No. 17: Love In The Time of Hardship
A raw, personal story
Before I start today, I wanted to very humbly ask for your help. I am doing a fundraiser for underprivileged kids in Pakistan that will help them get their education and break a very brutal cycle of poverty for their families. These kids belong to some very disadvantaged communities and slum areas of the country. I do this fundraiser every year and last year we were able to fund ten schools for over 1500 students. It’s as low as USD14 / PKR 3600 to fund a month’s education for a child and only USD 168 / PKR 43,200 to fund for a whole year. And if you’re feeling extra generous, you can donate USD 4000 / PKR 1,120,000 to donate a whole classroom for an entire year for 30 kids (you can get together with someone to do this and you get a plaque in your name outside it too). I do this with TCF who are one of the most trusted organizations in Pakistan with 1800+ school units across the country. Please contribute if you can.
There are some phone calls that you always remember, and this was one of them. It was a very regular weekday afternoon, sometime in August last year. I was sitting in the living room with Nabeel; he was reading a book, I was recording for a work thing on my phone. It was then that his phone rang, and it was a call that we’d been waiting for nearly 10 months.
“We’d like to offer you the role”.
Nabeel’s last contract had finished the year before that, and we’d spent the last many months waiting for something new to come along, in a job market that had dried up. Job listings were few and scattered, interview calls even more so.
On my own work front, the situation was different but still similar. Projects existed in the market but because of my public content around Gaza, I’d been blocked out of pretty much all work here in Australia. Whatever would come, would almost always happen to be on a boycott list. I’d been getting by on some work from Pakistan, but it was a reality that financially things were very different.
I remember Nabeel was still on the phone and hadn’t said anything yet, but I knew he’d got the offer. I think the tone of your voice, how your body relaxes in a subtle way, these are things that can often speak for you before your words. He got off the phone a couple of minutes later, sweetly smiled and said “yes”. It’s funny how things happen because I still have my gasping reaction at his “yes” caught on camera because I’d been recording myself for an instastory at that very time.
We hugged each other, thanked God, hugged some more. It was a good day.
With just Nabeel and myself, we can do okay. But the both of us have always had our individual dependents that we take care of and there are no two ways about it. And so, over these ten months, we watched our savings slowly dissolve away. Savings that we’d been doing for buying our own home and so we also watched our dream of having our own place slide away some more.
But over the many conversations that we had during this time, the most gratifying realization for the both of us was that, through all of it, our hearts always felt okay. You know, the both of us weren’t actually strangers to long unemployment and the life that comes with that. I don’t think it’s my place to share Nabeel’s story, but I can share bits of mine.
When I was younger, I remember one evening my father, my Abbu, coming back home from work and us discovering that he no longer had a job.
This scene feels really dramatic when I play it back in my memory, but he’d been working on a big project where he was asked to “tweak” some numbers to show a particular outcome. A man with a very movie-like, black, intimidating briefcase had shown up at our home a few days prior and offered him a handsome reward for his “service”.
You know, some people live their life in ways that seem almost unreal and impossible to others. Their choices, their decisions, seem so detached from societal expectations, and they live, what feels like, as being truly free.
My Abbu lived life that way.
His choices were grounded in so much integrity and often the price was very high to pay. But he lived free. He was unemployed for several years and I won’t lie, it wasn’t a breeze. Many things, like my university education for example, only happened because of the generosity of some of our relatives.
But that evening, my father had said no. He lost his source of work the next day, and being the sole earner at the time, and a parent to four kids, I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision for him.
But he wrote my future with that choice.
I like to believe that I’m someone with a lot of integrity. And I learnt that integrity from him. I also learnt the grace of accepting your life as it unfolds for you, and living it with ownership, never hiding.
I don’t remember a single day, through those many years of not having work, where Abbu ever felt shame or tried to hide any part of his life.
He believed in the power of destiny, and so I believed in the same.
I’ve wanted to write this issue since a very long time now and I actually didn’t have any reservations with talking about it even while Nabeel and I were in the thick of it. But I am Shehzeen first, and a writer or a content creator later, and I didn’t want those who depend on me financially to feel uncomfortable about my contribution for them through a phase like that.
But I knew I wanted to write it at some point.
Because I know that in today’s times, our worth, our value is tied even more to the jobs we do, the homes we live in, the size of our bank accounts. People are even more “successful” and when we don’t fit those ideals of success, there are feelings of failure, worthlessness, isolation.
Nabeel and I talked a lot about why we could walk through this without any discomfort socially, any form of embarrassment, and with just an overall feeling that things will be okay. We had checked in with each other frequently, about the sense of loss relating to home ownership and how it seemed now a very distant reality, about the worry of depleting funds, our sense of worth within all of this. We also never really shied away from telling anyone of our friends about it. It was a reality of our current life, and it was alright.
I think age, life experience and maturity have a lot to do with how we interact with the world. And I think I’ll credit all of that for how we were able to navigate this. But I also think there were some things that helped us through.
This entire conversation that I’ll have, still