I was 22. I had graduated from business school. I had an MBA from what was at the time, the top business school in Pakistan–perhaps the only one. I had started my first job at multinational bank. Life was good. I was well paid. I had married a schoolmate. I could afford to eat in any restaurant and my husband and I would often frequent the five star hotels, where the ghosts of my past still play songs on an old piano, the last time I visited Karachi. I would buy the coolest outfits. I could afford to travel anywhere. But, something was missing. My husband didn’t love me. He couldn’t. Being a covert narcissist, for him I was a female body and a bank account.

The clock ticks forward.

I was a VP at a leasing company in Pakistan. I was the mother of a beautiful child. People thought I was attractive and lovable. I was divorced, but re-marriage was the last thing on my mind. Attractive, intelligent men were around. Something was missing. I couldn’t feel anything except numbness. There was no name for it.

The clock slows down.

I was 32. I was in love with a soulmate. He actually cared about how I felt. He wasn’t from Pakistan. He was 8 years younger. Commitment was the last thing on my mind. Apart from school and a job, I was the Editor of a very left of centre thinking Internet rag. Something felt right but something was still missing. Opportunities to retrain in journalism or psychology beckoned. At last, I thought, I’d be able to speak. But, I wasn’t allowed to do something so irresponsible as to change fields. You see, the patriarchy dictated that I had to live the life of a stigmatized single woman with a kid, invisible, never socializing.

I was 34. I had gotten another MBA from a top University in Canada. I had a great job at an up and coming software tech company, that I knew in my gut would succeed. I was part of a great team. Something was missing. I was emotionally abused and put-down. You see, the stigma of being divorced was being grafted into my soul, like a bionic limb, where a healthy normal limb used to be. The normal ones couldn’t accept me anymore as anything except a burden. The successful patriarchy of my family was ashamed of my single-dom. Their wives would whisper to the men about my true worth as a single woman. I was told to become normal, more like a man. And if I marry, don’t tell them about it.

The clock freezes.

When women cross their 20s, everyone looks at them through a lens with a series of time stamps on it. The lens zooms in on their reproductive parts. A silver hair is a loss in value. An extra 10lbs tells the world that the woman is not a virgin ripe for the picking. I was no longer seen as fruit in the prime of its life and over ripe fruit is destined for the blender or the birds. In other words, life had sent me a boat in the form of a few young men, and since I had picked a boat with holes in it, I had to recognize that there were no more boats, at least in the conservative worldview of my family’s most conventional members. Plan B was to look after my parents and face the constant bickering and fighting with my other sibling who wanted to control everyone and have everything that I or my parents had. I realized that my siblings would rather walk over me, not with me. So, I walked away with my son. Inside there were silent tears. The envy of narcissists blinds them to others’ pain. For them everyone is competition.

By age 40 I had broken several family traditions, except one. I continued to be a responsible and committed mother.

By this time, I realized that life had to have a different meaning than trying to get along with people who would never like me, not because of my character or good nature, but because I didn’t meet their checklist of ‘great’. I was actually told that I can never be a winner, whatever that meant.

The something that was missing throughout had now become a giant black hole in the centre of my soul. Narcissists bite in such a way, that the poison enters the bones. The funny thing about the survival instinct is that when some animals see a sick animal, they don’t take care of it, instead, a strange beastly character comes over them, and they annihilate the dying animal. Charles Darwin called it, ‘the law of natural selection.’ My siblings would tell me often about how there is something wrong with me. When people are bullied, they are often blamed for the bullying.

When glass breaks there is a big noise. When souls break there is no sound. A soul breaking is a scream that travels billions of miles, looking for resonance. When sound doesn’t touch anything, nobody can’t hear it. Nobody heard my scream. They told me there is nothing wrong with me, and I should be more positive.

I couldn’t pretend anymore that I fitted in. I took to the yoga mat. Sold all my possessions. It was either that or suicide. My only hope for salvation was to train seriously as a Buddhist nun.

Something felt better. Something changed.

Hope

When I was a child, my mother read the fairytale of the pied piper of Hamlin to me. The sound of the pied piper was so compelling that children and mice followed him, leaving their homes, into the mountain caves, where who knows what awaited them?

I had no choice but to follow the pied piper. Perhaps it was a delusion that things could change. My life was a shattered mirror in which I saw my deformed face. I was broken. When I tried to tell people, they would dismiss it because I looked fine. I was calm. Steady. Smiling and even Funny. You see, I had the delusion of hope firmly planted in me.

In my journey, there was one constant companion. My little son, who had somehow committed before birth to walk with me. I learnt that he was meant to walk with me even when there was no path. All the textbook definitions such as goals, outcomes, savings plans had evaporated. I lived in an alternative world, where I sought help from those who said that they can heal souls. Following the pied piper, I searched for answers in every spiritual tradition that I could find. I knocked on door after door. Where is God? who is in charge of my life? where are the answers that I desperately seek. From Homeopaths, to psychic mediums, to family– I talked to them all. Everyone either lied or betrayed. Until I started to talk to spirit of life itself, there were no answers.

When I was a child and it rained in Pakistan, hundreds of earth worms would come out. Sometimes people’s footsteps would cut them. But each piece would writhe, seeking for the other piece of itself. I shook and yearned for those parts of me that had been smashed into pieces. Each piece yearning to come back to itself while it feels like it is dying. My biggest fear in life had become people who appeared to love me. Behind that supportive face, lay hidden a scorpion, who would inject its poison at my most vulnerable.

My answers didn’t lie in survival or material success. A human being cannot think about work, after their world is destroyed by everything they trusted in. Titles weren’t big enough to wrap around the huge void in my heart. I was luckily surrounded by self-absorbed narcissistic people who underestimated my pain and overestimated their intelligence. People who never believed me. Instead they simply pointed out my flaws. “You are broken!!”. “People like you are weird!”. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Or they’d tell me that I am making it up. I learnt that most people can’t see past their insecurity. We are limited by our fear.

I learnt that in front of extreme gaslighting, one has to still find the courage to believe oneself. It is like blind faith in one’s own truth. One has to have it in order to survive.

I think narcissists have an important message to give us. The message is that as long as you have a big bandage, then being broken doesn’t matter.

I just didn’t agree that the bandage would work. It seems to work for them, but it doesn’t seem to do anything for me. Hope and idealism are my drugs of choice instead of the band aid. Hope numbed the pain of being broken. Perhaps just enough, to ask, “Why?” and “How?’.

As a result of self-inquiry and reflection, something is no longer missing. When narcissists go after me, I don’t really care. I think healing means not letting insanity graft onto my “brokenness”. I think ‘not good enough’ is the collective illness of our times. We all have it, except that some of us question it. When we face our shadows, our inner broken-ness, it frees us from others’ brokenness also. We stop letting them project their demons on to us. That’s our choice.

Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung say that when people embark on their hero’s journey, they listen to their unique call for adventure. Their spirit compels them to seek the answers to their dilemmas and when they return they teach the answers. My hero’s journey was with a little kid, who saw a lot of reality at a very young age. Abandonment had driven a real physical hole in his heart. His support system was a rock that often shook with sobs.

What was stable in my life? Nature. Poetry. Buddha. Meditation. My deep soul connection to my parents has often surprised me. I wonder what would have happened if promises had been kept and my story was not as wretched as it really was. What if people who had said, “I love you”, ‘I will help you’, ‘I will give you this’, ‘I am committing to you’, really meant it?. What would have happened if they had not betrayed me? What would have happened if instead of kicking me when I was down, those who loved me had treated with me with respect and dignity? or even support? What would have happened if the father of my son had showed up for my son’s needs? What would have happened if my siblings hadn’t believed that they had a right to abuse me for my own good?.

I might have been far more settled and far less exhausted. But, I wouldn’t have realized what I now know. My path would have been the path of many courageous and brave single parents. It wouldn’t have been spiritual. I would never have looked for meaning and hope in divine love. I would never have been this vulnerable. I wouldn’t have awakened spiritually. I think our psychic eyes open when we can no longer bear to look at life the way it is. Life has to deeply revolt us for us to look elsewhere. Revulsion petty competitiveness that surrounded me made me look away into the distance for another sunrise.

Every heartbreak is an opportunity to expand the heart and accept what humans are really like. It is like staring into the mouth of a raging volcano while hanging on the rope of God. It changes you. It teaches you that your every moment is a gift and nothing else matters.

I watch how people live for their image. I wonder if they have ever actually practiced the advice they give others?. Like the religious teacher who talks about celibacy and self restraint, but has never practiced it. Like the parent who talks about how to raise children on stage, but actually the grandparents raise them. I marvel at normal families. Where nobody crows over another member, or shames them, but actually reaches out with support and kindness. I wonder how it is that when people learn that you are interested in a certain field, they actually encourage you, instead of cutting you down. The idea that there are normal people thrills me.

When I was growing up, it used to be very very hot in summer. In Karachi water is a scarcity. Karachiites develop a reverence for water that nobody who has not been deprived of it can appreciate. Water is like a god who only likes some people. Each blade of green fights with a billion other mouths for a drop of water. Everywhere there is concrete, because rich countries donated old cement plants to Pakistan and concrete covers the ground, strangling Mother Earth to remain silent about the abuse or else.

I would marvel in surprise, when a stubborn leaf or two of greenery would push itself through cracked concrete slabs and tar covered roads. Just like that, the metallic, dull grey would get dotted with green. All it got was a few drops of smog filled moisture, yet something would push to grow, despite all the conditions against it.

Crouched, wearing a frock that my mother sewed for me, I’d watch that stubborn alive, bright greenery, that insisted that it too shall live, pushing the concrete aside. It told me a miraculous story about the power of life, versus the strength of power.

Rich people protect their wealth and send their children to the best schools, move in the right circles, wear upper class outfits, buy the best toys and save for their education. Secretly they are afraid of nature, where a blade of grass can push concrete aside. Secretly they are afraid that their children may struggle. So they do everything to make sure their children are entitled and never face hardship. Like concrete, the entitled oppress the Earth.

But a stubborn weed who insists that it matters, can break through the barriers that the entitled construct.