What It Means to Be a Woman Ft. Usra Murtaza

This one is just me sitting down with someone who feels more like a sister than a former colleague. Usra Murtaza was my first ever team member, the person who helped me build this studio from scratch. She was my right hand for a very long time, and then she left. I joke about her leaving me, but the truth is she moved on to challenge herself in ways that I deeply respect. In this conversation, she comes back to talk about that journey, what it really means to step into hard mode, and how life’s unexpected responsibilities have taught her what it means to be a woman.

Leaving comfort to find yourself

When Usra first told me she wanted to leave 189 Media, her reasons were not the usual ones. She was going through a difficult time with her PCOS, and the medications were affecting her mental health in a way that shook her sense of self. She told me she felt like maybe her success here was just luck, and she needed to know if she could do it again somewhere else. She said, “If I can do it once, I can do it twice.” There was a fear that staying in a protected, hand-picked culture would leave her unprepared for the harder parts of the world. She wanted to go out and prove to herself that she had real skills, that she was not just lucky.

It takes a rare kind of growth mindset to leave a soft, supportive culture and deliberately walk into a harder one. Most people cling to comfort. Usra saw comfort as a potential weakness. She told me, “Maybe for some time, let’s go out and see.” She wanted to test herself against a world that would not be so kind, so that she would never have to wonder if she could survive it. And that is exactly what she did.

The shock of a new world

Shifting to a corporate workplace was every bit as hard as she expected. It was not just about the culture being different. It was about scale, history, and a language she had to learn on the spot. In a small startup, you build things from the ground up and you know every piece of it. In a larger company, you walk into the middle of a story you did not start. People reference product roadmaps you were never part of. You have to do a lot of reading just to keep up.

She also saw how much more self-focused the environment required her to be. “Nobody is looking out for you,” she said. In a place where people come and go quickly, you cannot afford to build the same deep bonds. You have to be clear on your own goals because the pace is fast and someone else has already figured out their next move. She learned to manage bigger budgets, to navigate tech language, and to deal with many different kinds of people from very different backgrounds. It was a life experience unfolding inside one building. And through all of it, she discovered something quiet but powerful: she actually did know things. The wide range of skills she picked up in our small team, from content to admin to production, came back to her in moments of recognition. The imposter syndrome faded as she saw her own value on a much larger stage.

The weight of becoming the breadwinner

Then life threw something at her that no workplace could prepare her for. A family situation meant she had to step up and become the main breadwinner for her household. She was not ready for it. Nobody is. She described it as a moment where you lose the reckless freedom of youth. Suddenly, she did not have the liberty to quit or to slow down. Supporting a family of six in this economy meant she could not rely on one job alone. She took on multiple gigs, did content work, and even took on grant work she had no passion for because she simply needed the money.

There were months where she had nothing left for herself. Every bit of her energy and focus went to essentials. She stopped going out. She stopped meeting friends, partly to save money and partly because she did not want to become someone people pitied. She kept herself so busy that she would not have a free moment to cry. “I would just keep myself busy busy busy, because the minute I had free time I would start crying,” she told me.

This experience gave her a profound new respect for her father, who went through a financial crisis years ago and never let it touch his children. She finally understood why he just wanted to rest on Sundays. She also started looking at men on the street differently, wondering about the weight they carry as providers. She realized how rarely men are allowed to simply say, “This is hard for me.” A friend of hers once simply thanked her husband for all he does, and his reaction was shock. He had never even considered that it was something to be grateful for. He just did it because that was his role. The space to voice the stress of it had never been given to him.

The quiet work of being seen

This led us into a conversation about what partnership really needs. It is not just about dividing tasks or solving problems. It is about creating space for each other’s emotions. So often when a woman says, “I am so tired from feeding the baby all night,” a partner hears it as an attack or a call for a solution. But it is neither. It is just a need to be seen. To hear, “I see you. I see that you are doing all of this.”

Usra and I talked about how this is true in all relationships, not just romantic ones. Sometimes a conversation is just for the sake of the conversation. It is processing out loud. If we always jump to solutions, we skip the part where a human being simply needs to be held in their experience. A marriage is never 50/50, as one reel said. Some days your partner has 20, and you give 80. Some days you both have 20 and you have to sit down together and figure out the remaining 60. But you cannot even begin that math if you have not first acknowledged that you are both struggling.

Embracing being a woman without the bitterness

Usra shared something that had been softly unfolding inside her. She is beginning to truly understand and embrace what it means to be a woman. Not the social performance of it, but the lived experience. The realization that some things happen to you because you are a woman. The discrimination, the being taken less seriously than a male counterpart, the glass ceiling she saw with her own eyes. She saw how organizations keep women around for representation, celebrating them on Women’s Day while ignoring their voices in meetings.

She also saw how this pushes women toward bitterness. To be heard, many women develop a hard shell, an aggressive tone, a resting face that leaves no room for softness. Usra decided she does not want to become that person. She looked at her own nature and realized her compassion, her maternal energy, her softer pitch, these are not weaknesses. She can be authoritative without being hard. She can say what she wants without stacking her emails with “please” and “kindly.” It was a conversation with her husband that made her notice how often she sought his approval for decisions that were hers to make. She is unlearning that need for external validation and learning to hold her own power from a place of security, not bitterness.

We talked about how women are not designed on a 24-hour clock like men. Our bodies move through seasons in a monthly cycle, times of high energy and charisma, and times of inwardness and brain fog. When you try to perform the same way every single day, you fight your own biology. But when you embrace it, you can plan your life around your rhythm. You can do outward, high-energy work in your spring and summer, and turn inward for creative, restful work in your autumn and winter. This is not an excuse to do less. It is a way to do more by flowing with your own tide.

A conversation long overdue

Near the end, Usra said something that sat with me. Because of the roles she had to step into, because of everything she was carrying in her personal and professional life, there were very few moments where she could actually speak her mind. She did not have the right people around, or she was not at the liberty to be vulnerable. Sitting down to talk like this, after a year, felt amazing. It was a chance to zoom out and finally name what she has been through.

I think that is what this conversation is really about. It is about the soft relief of being able to say, “This was hard,” without needing it to be fixed. It is about honoring the woman who steps into hard mode willingly, and the woman who has no choice but to carry an entire family. It is about finding your way back to your own voice when life has kept you too busy to use it.