On shame, and being human

I’ve followed Amena Khan, a UK based social media content creator and presenter, on Instagram for years and I appreciate her openness in talking about some of the hard issues that our community doesn’t open up about sufficiently. I knew I could ask her one of the more intimate questions in the 30 Days Journal—so I asked, what life lesson she learned the hard way.

"The biggest lesson I learned the hard way was to stop carrying other people’s shame. Just give it back to them; it’s not yours to carry. We inherit so much of the shame that our parents carried. We are also born into a culture that hands us all this shame that we are too innocent to understand—shame around what it means to be a woman, so much shame around sexuality, mental health, and complex relationships. There are just so many things that we slowly incorporate into our sense of self as we come out of the innocence of childhood; it’s like carrying a rucksack that keeps getting heavier and heavier.

I learned the hard way that the more I carried other people’s shame, the more I was hurting myself. I needed to let that go and just be honest about the fact that we each have our own stories and I’m not helping anybody else by carrying their shame for them—I’m really just hurting myself. Normalizing these feelings and understanding that we *all* have parts of ourselves that cause us to feel not good enough is part of being human. Instead of being bound by shame, learning to love those parts, despite their apparent imperfections, is a newfound empowerment that I learnt in my 30s."

Of course I had to ask Amena my favorite question about a wisdom from an elder that guides her. It’s amazing to me that every time I ask this question, first the wisdom is completely top of mind, no one has to think about it; and second, the wisdom people share is such a reflection on how they’ve lived their life. It’s been the case with Mehdi Hasan, Farhan Latif, and now Amena.

“I immediately think about a lesson I’ve learned from my grandmother, my dad’s mom. She didn’t necessarily advise us to pursue this, because despite her rebellious nature she was still bound by the traditional cultural norms of being Indian. But I think her own life story is testament to what I believe she stood for: never be afraid to carve your own path, no matter how crazy it may seem to others.

While this may not seem like novel advice, when you look at it through the lens of her life, it’s radical. She was a newly divorced, single, Indian woman with five children to support. She left her hometown of Hyderabad, India to come to the UK and settle in London to sell Indian artefacts at a market stall to earn money. She truly carved her own path, despite cultural norms and taboos. Her example has inspired me my whole life.

Unfortunately she lost her life to Covid. Never in a million years did I think she would pass away alone, in a sterile hospital. I expected her passing to be much more grand and theatrical, because that was her character and the way her life went.”