im not half of anything, i’m both of everything

the south asian diaspora essay™

to be a pakistani girl is to exist in a landscape where your body is less a vessel for your own story and more a repository of collective restraint. whether as a future wife or a cautionary tale, you are born into an ontology not of your choosing, long before you learn to name yourself. you carry a lineage of expectations that feel less like roots and more like chains. rarely a person, in any philosophically robust sense of the word. more often, a proxy.

i came to understand quite early that girlhood and freedom seldom coexist in places where shame is passed down as one might inherit an heirloom. it is possible to be from a place and yet feel no safety within it. pakistani girls learn early that existing in public is an act of risk management. how fast you walk. where you look. how your shirt hugs your body in certain places. whether you smile too much. it all becomes an act of vigilance. and yet, even when every rule is observed with exactitude, vulnerability persists. for the burden of shame is always placed upon the girl, never upon the man who renders her unsafe.

diaspora doesn’t free you from this completely. but it complicates the terms of your captivity. girls of the diaspora carry with them an unmistakable scent of defiance. we smell too much like freedom: too loud, too outspoken, too unmarried, and in my case: too british. our very presence attracts the attention of desi women from the older generations even when we strive to fade into the background.

i think about it every time i walk alone at night, headphones in, coat unzipped. every time i speak back to a man without fear of consequences. every time i wear what i want without worrying if it dishonours someone else’s name. when i speak openly about things that would be whispered about back home, about trauma, sex, autonomy. i think about how different my life would be if my parents had never left. about the version of me that would’ve grown up in pakistan and whether she would’ve survived the things i now take for granted. whether she would’ve learned to speak like this. to feel this entitled to space. to safety.

it haunts me knowing that i get to hold the values of my country at arm’s length, while so many girls are still there, living under the weight of expectations i barely had to carry.

there exists, in the minds of many, an expectation that the children of immigrants must live lives of visible gratitude. our achievements must be legible. we must justify our parents’ sacrifice with our excellence. look how far you’ve come! look how much you represent! there’s no room for ambivalence in that story. so when people say i should feel grateful, i do. but not in the way they mean. i don’t owe my country some performance of thankfulness just because it let me exist in the way i wanted to. i carry a nauseating awareness that i only have this life because of a random accident of geography. i didn’t earn this. i know i’m not braver or smarter or more deserving than the girls who stayed. i was just… born to parents who left. that’s it. that is arbitrary.

i think about this a lot. how the story of being an immigrant kid gets flattened into something cute or inspiring. people want it to be about food and language and family, but rarely about grief. rarely about anger. rarely about the quiet, daily humiliations you absorb so deeply you start mistaking them for your personality. like when you correct your mother’s english in public, trying to balance embarrassment with the knowledge that every mistake she makes feels like a crack in your own foundation. the glance when you can’t explain why you don’t eat certain foods at lunch. the careful practice of laughing off microaggressions just to avoid reliving the exhaustion of being different.

these moments become the lens through which you start to see yourself, until the boundary between what was done to you and who you are becomes impossible to find.

while i tried to survive the trials and tribulations of british secondary school, i grew up watching my parents actually trying to survive. in the literal, working-three-jobs, don’t-trust-the-government kind of way. it was the typical “don’t talk back” and “keep your head down” mentality. i don’t know how to reconcile the fact that my parents escaped economic precarity and state violence so i could sit across from someone complaining that their oat milk latte was too watery. no one teaches you how to live in comfort without feeling like you’ve stolen it. how to exist in a softness your parents never had access to. how to enjoy it without narrating the struggle it came from. surviving with some ease shouldn’t feel like betrayal. but sometimes it does.

you are raised by people who gave up everything for you, and you carry that debt in how you live. in how you never let yourself rest for too long. you become the dream they never got to live. and they don’t always understand you. you believe in boundaries, in therapy, in gentle parenting. to them, those things look like forgetting where you came from. they love you, and you love them, but love requires translation. not only linguistic, but cultural, emotional, generational. something always gets lost on the way.

sometimes i try to explain these things to my parents and they look at me like i’m describing a different planet. “but what do you say to the therapist?” they ask. “everything,” i reply. they nod politely, but i know they’re thinking, “hum sab kuch apne andar sambhalte hain” (we hold everything inside). maybe they had to. maybe if they had opened up, the weight of what they’d been through would’ve broken them. so they carried it instead, and i carry them.

i’ve spent so much of my life trying to prove i belonged here. to teachers, to institutions, to strangers who asked where i was really from. i didn’t realise the real question wasn’t about belonging. it was about who gets to fail without being seen as a failure of their entire culture.

and who gets to just exist.

but the thing is, identity doesn’t exist in a vacuum. you don’t just get to say “i am both” and move on. the world you live in is constantly forcing you to choose. and even when you try to opt out, it decides for you. brown in britain isn’t just a cultural category, it’s a political one. your name, your face, your family, your postcode (or zip code if you’re american), they get read as data points. you get sorted before you even speak.

there’s no word in english for the kind of alienation you feel when you’re a guest in both your homes. when your passport says one thing, your parents another, and your reflection something else entirely.

people talk about culture clash like a car crash. but for me, it was more like sediment, like layers settling into one another. qawwali and indie pop on the same playlist. nihari in a sandwich and calling it a spicy pulled beef. in the way my tongue bends to accommodate both “yaar” and “mate”. swearing in punjabi mid-english sentence because nothing feels more violent than a good old “kutta” or “haramzada”. in the way i cry to both coke studio and phoebe bridgers. in the way i miss mom’s home cooked meals while scrolling the tesco meal deal aisle.

by day, i watched the perks of being a wallflower and dreamed of boy crushes and freedom and driving alone through tunnels. and by night my dad would play abida parveen in the car on long drives across the country: full blast, windows down. my mom was an avid fan of razia butt. i’d nod, pretending to understand, then retreat to my room and post some angsty quote from tumblr (in english, of course), because nothing in urdu quite translated to the kind of loneliness i thought i was feeling. not because urdu lacked the words, but because i lacked the depth to hold them. try translating lagaav, wafa, rooh, and watch them crumble under the cold clarity of english. our words are heavy. english is too light in comparison. but when you’re thirteen and aching for belonging of some sort, sometimes light is easier to carry.

there’s a temptation to romanticise cultural contradiction. to feel like you contain multitudes. but i don’t feel like a multitude. i feel like a failed reconciliation between what i owe and what i want. being a pakistani girl here then is to live in this perpetual dialogue between what was and what could be.

it’s the awkwardness of living between two worlds that don’t fully want you. the way your name, your face, your history get read and judged before you open your mouth. the push and pull of wanting to belong but never quite fitting in.

to be both british and pakistani is to live inside contradiction. to hold two worlds in your body and be at home in neither. to mourn a place you never lived in and resent a place you were born into. to want freedom without disavowal. to speak, and be heard.

i am not half of anything. i am twice of everything. and i love both places, even when neither one may not fully love me back.

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post edit note: a fun fact that’s also semi irrelevant: my actual name is rijaa, and it’s pronounced exactly how it’s spelled (ridge-a). or at least it was, until people decided that was too difficult and started calling me ree-juh (apparently it’s easier for the british). and then even that became too much, so i ended up stuck with ri. just ri. pronounced ree, like the rihanna “riri.” and that’s what i’m known as on substack today. i don’t even respond to the original pronunciation anymore. it doesn’t feel familiar. it sounds like someone else’s name. just an example of having to accommodate to the west.

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