Unwavering Strength Ft. Sana Maqbool

This one is a conversation I have wanted to share with you for a while. I sit down with Sana Maqbool, a friend of my husband and brother, and she walks me through a story that is equal parts brutal and hopeful. It is about domestic violence, leaving everything behind with no plan, and then spending a decade stitching a life back together. But the thing that stays with me is not the hardship. It is Sana’s absolute refusal to see herself as a victim, and the quiet, daily work of learning to like herself again.

Her mother’s bones and her father’s temper

Sana’s family moved from Kuwait during the Gulf War. Her mother was nine months pregnant, and people took photographs of her because they couldn’t believe she was about to give birth in the middle of that chaos. Sana was born twelve days after they reached Pakistan. From the outside, the family looked like any other urban household in Pindi and Islamabad. Inside, the reality was something else entirely.

Her father had grown up with his own trauma. He left for Kuwait at seventeen with nothing, trying to support his family. He lost his own father young. Sana can trace the reasons, but she refuses to use them as an excuse. “I don’t think that justifies putting everyone else’s lives in so much trouble, especially my mom’s,” she tells me. The violence started shortly after the marriage and never stopped. He threw furniture. He broke her bones. The children woke up to their mother’s screams, and then watched her come out of the bedroom smiling because she had been told to. “She was so good at hiding it that I thought nothing had actually happened,” Sana says. When she was small, she believed the smiles. Later, she understood that her mother had been conditioned to believe that a husband is superior, and that touching his feet and apologizing was just part of being a good wife. Once, after a fight, her own uncle told her mother to go back and compromise. Her mother, who swore she would never tolerate even a hand on her arm, spent thirty years having her spirit broken piece by piece.

Sana grew up with a very specific kind of awareness. She started hating any form of escape because it felt dishonest. “I just stopped reading books, stopped listening to music. I would put the earphones in and enjoy, and then I’d take them out and everything was still there. There is no escape. You have to face the music.” She was a child trying to be the emotional parent, because nobody else was available to do it.

The night they left with nothing but a few clothes

In 2010, when Sana was in university, a fight broke out. It was over something ridiculously small, maybe even a math problem, but it escalated the way these fights always did. Her father threw plates. There was salan on the walls. Then he said something about Sana’s nana, the gentlest man imaginable. That was the line. Her mother finally said “bus, I’m done.”

Sana remembers waking up from a nap, a completely ordinary day, and within hours they were packing whatever they could grab. They called two taxis and drove to her nana’s house. Her mother lied and told the family that her husband had already given her a divorce, just so no one would pressure her to go back. “I remember not feeling too bad about the future,” Sana says. “I was hopeful. I thought, at least we’re going to build something. It won’t be a joke.”

Within a week, they moved into a flat in G-11. It was January. The flat was empty. No furniture, no blankets. All four of them slept on the carpet. Sana got so cold she fell sick. Her mother sold the little gold she had. Her sister was teaching at a school and earning fifteen thousand rupees. That was the entire household income. For Sana, university suddenly looked impossible. Her brother and sister had finished their education, but Sana was in the middle of hers. She decided to find a job and support the house, and for a while, that meant leaving studies behind.

Then something quietly extraordinary happened. Her friend Arham, along with another friend Osman, pushed her to continue. Arham took her to open a bank account, and together they collected enough money from friends to cover her first semester’s fees. To this day, Sana doesn’t know everyone who contributed. “Because of them, I had money for the first semester. I told mama, let me try and continue this.” She found a job within two months, and that tiny seed of help carried her through her bachelor’s and later her MPhil, all while working and running a household.

The jobs, the gold, and the beads

Sana’s work ethic began long before that flat in G-11. When they were still living with their father and there was no money, her sister made bead bracelets and Sana sold them in class. She charged kids five rupees to stand in line for their lunch so she could afford her own. She worked at the school canteen. “I think a surprising thing for us was to actually have to wake up and look for real jobs and work,” she says, but looking back, the instinct was already there.

Her first proper job was at a radio station. She auditioned, got a three-hour show, and started commuting from G-11 to F-5 for a very small amount. A few months later, she became a VJ on a music show. Then she taught at a school, Treehouse, while still doing radio and TV. She also worked with Red Bull in marketing. Her routine was punishing: up early, home after midnight. But through it all, she paid for her education, contributed at home, and slowly, the family’s life began to shift.

By September 2010, they discovered that her father had remarried someone he had an affair with before his marriage. It happened on Sana’s birthday. Her mother was shattered. Sana felt something else. “I was happy. Because at that point I realized my mother still thought there was room to go back. This door has been closed for my mother.” She laughs a little, remembering how her mother called her stupid for being so cheerful. But for Sana, that remarriage was the last lock clicking shut.

When the chaos ended and the inside chaos began

A few years in, the external struggles eased. Sana’s siblings got married. They moved into a better house, got a car. Sana completed her education, had a sustainable job at PTV, started teaching at NUST. The family’s problems were no longer the extreme, abnormal ones. They were the ordinary struggles of a family trying to progress. And that’s when Sana broke down.

“I was running on adrenaline. I needed to fix things. Now that it was fixed, there was nothing left for me to do. No role to play.” The chaos outside was gone, but inside she was turbulent, negative, and resentful. She would park outside her house after work and just stare at it, not wanting to go in. Her mother, meanwhile, was going through her own depression. After multiple deaths in the family and a hernia surgery she had avoided for 28 years, she became deeply depressed. She would beg Sana not to leave for work, stand in front of her room holding the door and crying. Sana, who had always been the positive fixer, felt crushed. She felt guilty for every moment she took for herself.

A psychologist finally pointed out what nobody had seen: Sana’s relationship with her mother was too enmeshed, and she was carrying a load that wasn’t hers alone. The therapist said, “This is not for you, it’s for her. It’s not good for her.” Sana didn’t understand it at nineteen. Much later, when she started secretly going to therapy herself, it began to click.

Saying one kind thing about yourself when you don’t believe it

For two and a half years, Sana went to therapy. It was expensive and slow, and there were plenty of times she thought it wasn’t working. But she kept going, partly from a stubborn belief that dialogue, no matter how exhausting, leads somewhere. “My therapist told me to say one kind thing about myself. He said, don’t mean it, just lie. And I couldn’t say it. It didn’t come out of my mouth. I was so surprised that I thought so poorly of myself.”

That moment captures so much of what she had internalized: the idea that self-care is selfish, that sacrificing yourself completely is the only way to be good, that her worth was measured by how much she could fix. She had accepted “crumbs” from people, especially in romantic relationships, because toxicity felt familiar. “For me, that toxicity was what I had always known. It was familiar. It’s so strange why a person would do that, but you run toward it because it’s what you understand.” Slowly, she learned to recognise the pattern, and then to expect more. “Now I can’t respect a person who wouldn’t be respectful towards me. I deserve a certain level of respect.”

A car, a girls’ trip, and a decade that finally feels hers

Today, Sana’s life looks different. She still works multiple jobs: teaching at a school in the mornings, a lecture at NUST once a week, and her PTV commitments. She acknowledges the financial pressures, especially with inflation and a household to support. But she also just bought her own car. Last year, she travelled to Thailand with her friends, something she never imagined she could do. “I always used to feel very alien in those conversations about travel. And then after one of my trips, telling my stories, I was so happy that I’m there now.”

She turned thirty two months before this recording, and it feels nothing like the dread she expected. “I’m so excited about my thirties. All the crap is out of your system. You’re still young, you’re ambitious, and you’ve figured stuff out.” She still has to push back against guilt when she takes time for herself, but she does it anyway. That, maybe, is the quietest and most important victory.

Sana’s story is not a sob story. She does not ask “why me.” She is very clear about that. “If you keep looking at yourself as a victim, you can’t get out of it. The onus is on you. You take control when you stop feeling entitled for someone to come and fix it.” This conversation is a testament to all the small, unglamorous decisions that turn a life around: selling bracelets in class, sleeping on a cold floor, accepting help from friends, going to therapy even when it feels pointless. It’s not a tidy narrative. But it’s real, and it’s hers.