Why Our Inner Voice Is Important? Ft. Sonya Rehman

This one is a conversation I had with Sonya Rehman, an arts and culture journalist, and it went to places I really didn’t expect. We started with her mixed heritage and that feeling of never quite belonging, and somehow we ended up talking about the dark night of the soul, the identity crisis of motherhood, and why we need to stop romanticizing self-awareness. It is one of those talks that feels like a warm, deep exhale.

The chip on the shoulder

Sonya describes her family background as a bit of a mixed breed, with roots in India, Iran, and Afghanistan. Growing up in Lahore, she always felt like an outsider. She tells me, “I always had this chip on my shoulder. I’m not really Lahori, I’m not really Pakistani enough.” Even at home, they spoke English more than Urdu, which made connecting with kids at school during her O levels at Bloomfield Hall really hard.

That feeling of not belonging followed her for decades. She traveled, did a master’s abroad, tried working in Dubai, but something kept pulling her back. She says, “The older I get, I will never leave Pakistan.” It was only post-COVID, at the age of 39, that she finally felt she had every right to belong to this country. Her work became her anchor. Through writing about overlooked people and overlooked artists in Pakistan, she found herself. “Through other people’s stories, interviewing them, reporting on them, I found myself,” she says. I get that so deeply. I told her how my own podcast has healed parts of me I didn’t even know were still broken, twelve years after losing my father. When you connect with others, you find pieces of yourself.

Growing up with a single mother in an unforgiving society

Sonya’s mother was a single parent, a divorcee, a working woman in the Pakistan of the 90s. The labels were cruel. She remembers a birthday during her O levels when a very dear friend wasn’t allowed to come to her house because the friend’s mother said, “Sonia’s family is kharab because her mother’s a divorcee.” The gift was dropped off at the gate. Imagine carrying those little experiences as a child.

Her mother’s advice was always to ignore what people say, earn your own bread in a rightful way, and do right by people. But the stigma stuck. Sonya grew up feeling like something was missing, like there was an emotional amputation. A friend later reframed it for her, saying her mother was both a mother and a father. That shifted everything. She realized she had never been lacking. But she also noticed a pattern that many children of single parents might recognize: you grow up feeling like you don’t need a man. “Everyone needs companionship,” she says now, reflecting on how she had to unlearn that extreme independence. Balance is the real work.

The outlier’s path

Sonya scraped through a finance degree she never wanted, chosen for her by a mother who didn’t want her to struggle. But at 18, she secretly applied for an apprenticeship at Daily Times and fell in love with seeing her byline in print. She tried a bit of everything: FM 89, hosting an architecture show on Hum TV where she had to drop 20 pounds in a month, English copywriting at an ad agency, and heading the Lahore office for Instep at The News International.

Then came Columbia. She cold-applied to the School of Journalism, got in, but couldn’t afford the plane ticket. A friend funded her GRE and TOEFL. She got the Fulbright, and USEFP placed her at Columbia. It was terrifying. She was 26, scared of the subway, a fresh off the boat student told to go out and report on day three. But when she came back to Pakistan in 2010, she had fresh eyes. She started teaching journalism, going on photo walks in the old city, and eventually launched her little postcard company, From Lahore with Love. She says, “I feel like a little puzzle piece has gotten stuck back into its rightful place in Lahore.”

We talked about how society views success vertically, like climbing a ladder in one field, but for some people growth is horizontal. It is doing many things, exploring many passions. My husband calls me an outlier. Sonya is one too. The world is slowly making space for people who refuse to be put in a box.

The dark night of the soul is not romantic

During the lockdown, Sonya hit a wall. She was a journalist who derived validation from being seen and perceived by others, and suddenly she was stuck at home. She was depressed, lonely, and going through what she calls the dark night of the soul. She threw herself into self-discovery: reading, watching Impact Theory and Dr. Gabor Maté, meditating, praying, and journaling like a mad woman.

A year in, a little voice told her that one day all this learning would be used in the world. And it happened. She says, “Nothing breaks me anymore. Alhamdulillah, touch wood.” But she is very clear about one thing: do not romanticize self-awareness. It is not a pretty, aesthetic journey. It is weather-beaten and emotionally exhausting. Her advice is to start with journaling, every single day, not just when you hit a wall. Write down your thoughts. Keep a tab on your emotions and remember that your emotion is not the reality. It is just a conditioned response. And move your body. Exercise. When your body is active, your mind is not a devil’s workshop.

Motherhood and the dissolving of the old self

I shared with Sonya how motherhood felt like a nuclear bomb going off inside me. Everything I was collapsed. I lost my identity completely. I knew how to be a mom, something I had never been before, but I didn’t know how to be anything else. I grieved my past life. My self-esteem was finished, my confidence gone, and the words I used for myself were really, really bad.

But recently, I accepted it. I said goodbye to the old Hamna Raza. She is gone. And now I see it as a blank canvas. Motherhood humbled me in a way where I am not attached to anything I was attached to before. I feel free. I also realized I never loved my body unconditionally. I only loved it for the way it looked. When I started yoga and did body scans in shavasana, I would think about how my feet paced at night rocking my baby, how my uterus carried him, how my breasts fed him. I cried because I had hated my body for how it looked but refused to love it for what it had done. A woman’s body is a home to life. That realization broke the attachment to society’s beauty standards.

Sonya, at 39, told me she only now doesn’t give a damn what she looks like. She looks back and thinks about how many years she wasted comparing herself to others. Beauty fades. The dissolving of that old ego, whether through motherhood or simply through age, is deeply empowering.

Why this conversation matters

This episode is for anyone who has ever felt like they don’t belong, who has carried a chip on their shoulder, or who is in the messy middle of losing and rebuilding themselves. Sonya’s honesty about her pain and her healing is a reminder that the inner voice, the one we so often ignore, is the most important one we have. Self-awareness is not a quick fix. It is slow, it is hard, and it is worth it. I hope you leave this conversation feeling a little less alone in whatever you are navigating.