Finding Meaning Beyond Material Things Ft. Izzah Shaheen Malik

This conversation is with someone I sat down with almost three years ago, and everything is different now. Izzah Shaheen Malik, known to so many as Spectro Iza, is back on Happy Chirp. Back then she was building her photography business in Pakistan, dreaming of shooting weddings abroad. Today she is an international destination wedding photographer, with a team, a company setup in Dubai, and a life that looks like a dream from the outside. But as we talk, it becomes clear that the real story is not about the destinations or the scale. It is about what happens when life forces you to stop and ask what actually matters.

The exhaustion behind the expansion

Izzah does not pretend that scaling a business is glamorous. She tells me about shooting 30 weddings a year, managing crews in Istanbul where barely anyone speaks English, and the emotional drain of customer service. “Customer service drains my energy on another level,” she says. “If I have a thousand clients, it’s like a thousand different minds, a thousand different priorities.” Behind the beautiful images is a relentless machine. Last year, the week before her own wedding, she lost eighty percent of her hair from stress. Her immune system crashed. So now she builds intentional breaks into her calendar. She blocks entire months where no offer, no matter how lucrative, can pull her away from rest. “I am away from home for a whole month I’ll be home no matter how much money people offer me I will not take up shoots,” she explains. It is not laziness. It is survival. And it is the only way to sustain creativity.

Nobody can take your brain

For months, Izzah barely posted on social media. She felt stuck in a creative block so deep she thought her best work was behind her. The pressure to produce, to stay visible, to keep feeding the algorithm made her question everything. Then she realized something quietly powerful: trends can be copied, but a mind cannot. “Nobody can take my brain away from me,” she says. That insight became her anchor. She decided to stop consuming what the industry said she should, to stop chasing what others were doing, and to sit with her own thoughts until they made sense again. I know this feeling intimately. Creative people need silence far more than they need inspiration from a feed. The more you consume, the harder it is to hear your own voice. And when you stop scrolling long enough, something original can finally surface. Originality does not live in the crowded room. It lives in the quiet.

When life humbles you completely

Then we arrive at the part of the conversation that shifts the whole room. Izzah lost her mother. And when she speaks about it, there is no wrapping the pain in soft words. She tells me about the moment she understood that all the success, all the travel, all the money meant nothing in the face of something she could not control. “He told me that no matter how much money you make, you are nobody, you are literally a nobody and you have nothing in your control,” she says. For years she had focused on work without praying for it, believing her effort alone could carry her. Grief cracked that open. She now sees that asking and thanking are the two simplest, most profound acts that keep the heart soft and the ego in check. She shares how her mother’s passing rearranged everything inside her. The ambitions, the fears, the attachment to things: all of it got quieter. And I understand this. Losing a parent splits the world into before and after. Suddenly you know the difference between what is real and what is just noise.

The voice you cannot ignore

I have always believed intuition is the voice of the soul, not the chatter of the mind. Izzah’s story makes that undeniable. She tells me about a night in Istanbul when she woke up with an overwhelming feeling that she had to go home. It did not make logical sense. She tried to dismiss it as anxiety. But the feeling kept pressing, so strong she actually wrote down a date: the 8th. She told herself she should be back by then. Shortly after, that exact date became the day her mother passed away. I feel a chill every time I hear this. It was not a negative thought, not overthinking. It was a message from somewhere deeper. The difference, I have learned, is where the feeling starts. Anxiety usually begins in the head, racing through lists and what-ifs. Intuition starts in the body, a quiet knowing that does not need to explain itself. Izzah learned to listen the hard way. Now she trusts that inner nudge, even when it costs her money or convenience. Some things are more important than a plan.

Holding material things lightly

After loss, the temporary nature of everything becomes so clear. Izzah tells me she does not care much for material things anymore. Not because she does not enjoy them or feel grateful, but because she knows they can leave. “When I lose them I don’t care,” she says. “It’s just I understand the temporary nature of this.” She remembers a time when she gave an advance payment from a client straight to her mother. That money had a purpose beyond her own comfort. And now, even the big financial decisions are made with a certain detachment. Money comes, money goes. What stays is the peace of knowing you did not hold anything too tightly. I see this in my own life too. Some of my deepest lessons came when I lost things I thought I could not live without. They were never really mine to begin with. Gratitude is not about clinging. It is about saying thank you while your hands are still open.

The energy we leave behind

Towards the end, we talk about karmic energy. Izzah believes strongly that what you put out returns to you. Mean words, copied work, fake accounts: they all create a debt. But so does generosity. She shares how her mother-in-law never wasted food, gave constantly to those in need, and created a ripple of abundance that her children now experience. That is not superstition. It is the quiet mathematics of goodness. The world is small, and energy lingers. I leave the conversation thinking about how I want my own energy to feel to others. Izzah has gone through something that could have hardened her. Instead, she speaks with a softened urgency. She is still building, still shooting, still leading her team. But now she is doing it with her feet on the ground and her heart somewhere higher.

This episode is not a how-to. It is a reminder. Slow down. Listen to the voice that does not scream. And hold onto the things that cannot be taken from you.