Just like white privilege, there is male privilege. It's when you think something is not a problem because it does not affect you personally. It's easy to ignore sexism when it works in your favour! Your feminism isn't valid if it only applies to your mothers, sisters, and daughters.

Please stop dividing women. Modern or traditional, female is a female. In Pakistan, we all are suffering in our known and unknown ways. Living in a context where tradition wins over common sense or science, the transfer of intergenerational trauma becomes a part of the DNA of our society. Expressed or unexpressed, we all carry this silent mutation.

I know so many girls in my country who want to wear jeans but are not allowed to do so because you see “decent girls need to dress a certain way”. Your jeans are too tight, your shirt is too short, lower your dupatta and cover your face, if someone touches you it’s probably because you dressed a certain way.

Why do you underrate me?
Why do you tell me what I am
Or what I could ever be?
Why do you not tell that to your boys?
Why do I have to earn your trust,
walking a hundred miles more?

In such a healthy environment, you learn, grow, experience, and gain recognition in unprecedented ways. We take pride to uplift each other in many ways. Rankings and accolades of colleges are temporary, but the values we imbibe like teamwork, leadership, self love, compassion, growth, sensitivity, and empathy are everlasting.

I live in a country where people do talk about feminism and girl's rights but only in ideas, because they fail to apply their ideas in reality. For them, women are the idol of greatness, the idol of purity, and perfectness. But that's what the problem is!

Forget the negative press feminists have always faced. We are always deemed as angry, single and lonely women with 10 cats who hate men and are working very hard to challenge the position of men in today's society. When in fact, we are just a bunch of bomb-ass intelligent women and girls who are breaking boundaries and pushing for the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.

Later in the evening, she sits on a chair in her kitchen facing the window, looking at the tree swaying just as a bird sits on top of it. It moves and shakes from the core of its roots, as if jolted by an earthquake, but she notices, it's still standing tall, with a bark so strong that no matter how rough the weather is, no matter how many birds sit on it, it will stay where it is. ‘I am this tree’, she tells herself.