Nayla’s Notes on Life

Tag: blog

  • Superhero Suit Not Included

    Superhero Suit Not Included

    If you could go back in time and give your younger self advice, what would it be?

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    “You need to grow a thicker skin,” she proclaimed with the confidence of someone who’s always been comfortable in hers.

    My eyes darted to the darkest corner of the room and lingered.

    The pregnant pause in our exchange broke as Mom’s voice softened. “It’s a harsh world out there.”

    I drew my gaze back towards her, secretly hoping it would alter the usual trajectory of these uncomfortable childhood moments…

    You see, I’m someone who cries over a cat food commercial, a tender moment in a sitcom, and a lonely snowflake on a winter morning.

    This has been a bit of a problem, because I come from people who survived by not feeling things out loud.

    Mom and Dad were displaced into the Western world as refugees.

    They were stripped of their jobs, their possessions, their savings, and, most importantly, the place they called home. Mom brushes it off. “We were young…” she says, as her voice trails off into distant memories carefully tucked away.

    They rebuilt their lives from the contents of their suitcase: a couple of saris, a few toiletries, and a quiet hope that maybe it would all be okay again.

    “Not dwelling on things” was a survival strategy.

    One that I failed to inherit.

    As a child, I’d squeeze my eyes shut tight and try my best to will this so-called “thicker skin” into existence… like an Iron Man suit that shoots lasers and has a built-in snooze button for gory TV shows, large crowds, and cat food commercials.

    I never did grow that thicker skin.

    I just stopped criticizing myself for having the skin I have… and it turns out most of the sting was from the second hit.

    I’m not sure I wish my younger self had known this, though.

    Because sometimes I wonder…

    Perhaps my parents survived by not dwelling on things so that I could have the luxury of doing so.

  • Step One: Don’t Be Weird to the Aliens

    Step One: Don’t Be Weird to the Aliens

    If aliens arrived tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d ask them?

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    I’ve survived job interviews, blind dates, and one extremely tense potluck, but none of them prepared me for the pressure of greeting an alien.

    My first instinct was to ask “Why are you here?” It felt responsible. Firm. Very “Please fill out this customs form: business or pleasure?”

    But that question shows up with its arms crossed. Nobody’s ever felt welcome after being asked to state their intentions at the door.

    So I swung the other way, toward wonder: “What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen that humans can’t even imagine yet?” Lovely! Poetic! Also deeply presumptuous, because it assumes the aliens know what humans can imagine. I’d basically assigned a stranger homework on arrival.

    Eventually I landed on the one that felt right: “How can I make you feel welcome?” It’s kind. It’s humble. It’s what you say to a houseguest holding a suitcase.

    Then came the obvious snag… what if they’re hostile? I tried adding “…while keeping everyone safe,” which turned it into the world’s most polite hostage negotiation. Still, the idea held up. You can be warm without handing over the keys.

    And then I realized the bigger problem. Maybe leading with any question is the mistake. In some cultures, a barrage of questions at first meeting is rude. In others, it’s a sign you don’t know your place. For all I know, the aliens consider “Hi, what’s your deal?” a declaration of war.

    But alas, the exercise was to come up with a question… so my final answer is: “Welcome! How do introductions work where you’re from? We’d like to understand how you prefer to get to know others, and we’d be glad to share how we do this here on Earth.”

    It’s less “state your purpose” and more “take your time.”

    It asks how they like to meet people, and it offers to share how we do it here. A fair trade, a bit of curiosity… It’s giving “let’s both dip our toes in the water” energy (assuming they have toes).

    Of course, they could respond with silence. Or interpretive dance. Or, a pause followed by “You first.” If it’s the latter, I’ll be ready… I come from a long line of people who will let a casserole go cold rather than be the first one to serve themselves.

  • Torn Between a Safe Career and a Meaningful One

    Torn Between a Safe Career and a Meaningful One

    What’s a moment in your life that made you feel truly alive?

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    I had a five-year career plan. It lasted until a stack of brochures showed up.

    It was a gorgeous autumn day in Toronto. The leaves were showing off, turning bright shades of yellow, orange, and crimson red. The crisp air didn’t bother them like it bothered me. 

    I’d recently graduated from law school. Yet, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life… until that day. 

    Don’t get me wrong, law school opened many doors. But it was a career I fell into by default rather than design.

    I spent the better part of that fateful morning reviewing a series of pamphlets I had been asked to consolidate. I poured over each one, neatly stacking them on my desk as I finished. Most importantly, I couldn’t take my eyes off them. 

    They talked about conflict.

    Not the destructive kind that we see on social media and the news these days. You know what I’m talking about… the kind that makes you want to click, sigh, and type a comment you’ll regret by Thursday. 

    No, this was the “boring” kind of conflict: conflict resolution. 

    The kind where two people sit down together and have a true dialogue. Where communication means more than people saying “I hear you” and clearly not hearing a thing.

    Before you scroll on, let me also share that I used to hate conflict. (This was, in hindsight, a questionable foundation for a career built on disagreeing for a living, but I digress.)

    I had avoided confrontation my entire life.

    And yet there I was, captivated. Who were these people who called themselves peacemakers*? How had they learned to do what seemed like the hardest thing in the world: helping people who are fighting to work together?

    *Peacemaker: a person who sits between two people who each believe they’re the reasonable one, and somehow leaves with everyone still talking.

    As much as I tried to ignore what I was feeling, I couldn’t seem to shake the inner tug to dig deeper.

    It also made my shoulders tighten. 

    My career was finally shaping up, and the thought of throwing it all away felt irresponsible. The cautious part of me was terrified of failure. It had kept me safe for many years, like an umbrella I carried on perfectly sunny days. I never got wet. But I also never got to feel the sun. 

    I took a deep breath and Googled what it would be like to work in this area. The cautious one spoke up immediately:

    You’re nowhere near as qualified as they are.

    I haven’t applied for anything.

    Yet… That’s what worries me.

    This time another voice chimed in. It didn’t speak in words, but in sensations: a flash of excitement, deep fascination… and a mildly terrifying sense that my whole world was about to change.

    I now know that this was the curious part of me.

    Has this ever happened to you? The feeling of being pulled in two directions by different parts of yourself?

    On that beautiful autumn day, the curious one gained enough courage to put the umbrella down. It looked the cautious one deeply in the eyes: “It doesn’t matter what you think we’re supposed to do… we need to keep going.”

    I could feel the cautious one release its grip… almost as if it was waiting for someone to grab the steering wheel so it could finally step down for a while. My shoulders softened and just for a moment I stopped caring about mistakes, failure, or looking foolish. I simply felt the joy of wondering.

    The next day, I went to a bookstore and bought a book on conflict resolution. The cautious one wanted to be certain I was prepared, so one book became a stack, the stack became a shelf, and eventually the shelf became a career. 

    If you’re feeling torn, you may not have a decision to make so much as an internal meeting to chair. I recommend bringing patience, snacks, and low expectations for the first 30-minutes.

    I never did go back to the five-year plan. I hear it’s waiting for an apology. 

  • Nobody Panic, We’re All Someone Else Now

    Nobody Panic, We’re All Someone Else Now

    The genie grants you a wish. What is it?

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    So, one wish. Here it is: once a year, for one week, everyone on Earth swaps bodies with someone whose life looks nothing like theirs. 

    A long-haul trucker becomes a kindergarten teacher. A CEO becomes a line cook who gets home at 1am. A teenager becomes a 72-year-old retired farmer. A suburban Western mom wakes up as a market vendor in Marrakech, fluent in a language they’ve never studied, haggling like they were born for it. Think Freaky Friday,* but with eight billion people and no hair-and-makeup budget.

    *Freaky Friday: a cinematic scenario in which two people switch bodies, learn a life lesson in under 97 minutes, and are returned with their hair fully intact.

    There are three ground rules, and they apply to all of us.

    Rule one: it never happens during a bad time. If you’re caring for a sick loved one that week, you don’t swap. You stay right where you are, with them. 

    Rule two: nobody has to do anything that goes against their moral code. You’re borrowing a life, not auditioning to be a villain.

    Rule three: everyone gets all of their host’s memories. Nobody learns empathy while hunting for the cutlery drawer in a stranger’s kitchen.

    At the end of the week, we all go back to being ourselves. Just ourselves. We’d still overthink our emails, still have strong opinions about the thermostat, still say “no worries” when there are, in fact, several worries.

    But maybe we’d have a bit more compassion.

    Maybe we’d be a bit more understanding.

    Maybe we’d come home with new ideas about how to make the world a better place, because we’d have spent a week living in the part of it we’d only ever fleetingly wondered about. Multiply that by eight billion, and I like our odds.

    That’s the whole wish. No gold, no private island, just a planet’s worth of people who’ve each walked a week in shoes that don’t fit.

  • Exercise One: Don’t Step in Anything

    Exercise One: Don’t Step in Anything

    What are five simple exercises to do at home?

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    No Equipment Needed, Just a Cat and a Lint Roller

    Fitness influencers swear you only need a living room and commitment. They never mention the fringe benefits that come with a cat.

    1. The Cleanup Lunge

    Throw up. Or the classic: pee landing exactly two centimetres outside the litter box, with the precision of someone who measured. You’ll find it the way everyone does, with a sock, at 6:15 a.m.

    Repeat daily, bonus points if you’re barefoot.

    2. The Shouting Match

    Several times a day, your cat will stand in the hallway and yell at a wall (especially if she’s the “geriatric” kind). You, in turn, will yell at her to stop yelling at the wall:

    “MEOWWWRRRRRRR!!!”

    “What is it?”

    “Meowwwwwww?”

    “Are you hungry?”

    “Meow.”

    “You have a full bowl. I watched you ignore it at 9 p.m.”

    “MEOWWWRRR.”

    “Do you need something? Water? Are you cold? Is it the wall again?”

    She looks at the wall. She looks at you. She looks at the wall again, slower this time, like a cat who is done repeating herself to someone who claims to be “adulting.”

    3. Interval Training (6 to 8 p.m.)

    Entertain your feline friend with a feather wand between 6 and 8 p.m. so she’s too tired to wake you between 2 and 4 a.m. Results may vary.*

    *A legal phrase meaning she’ll be standing on your sternum at 2:47 a.m. anyway, having thoroughly enjoyed the wand and moved on.

    4. Furniture Draping

    If you’re allergic to cats, like me (don’t ask) make sure every surface gets a blanket, and then the blankets get blankets. This targets your lats, your traps, and the muscle group known as “why is my back like this?”

    Add the sneezing and you’ve got a full cardio session.

    5. Documentary Photography

    Finally, take approximately 400 photos of her looking angelic: chin on paws, soft window light, the face of a cat who has never once yelled at drywall. Crop out the blankets, the lint roller, and the suspicious spot near the litter box.

    If this ever goes to trial, the evidence will conclusively prove she’s an angel.

    Extra Credit: Call Your Mom

    Call your mom, a lifelong cat hater, and gush about yours. Send photos. Use the word “baby” unironically.

    She will let you finish, sigh, and say, “These are not the grandkids I asked for.”

    Congratulations, you are now frustrated enough to run a 10k. Cardio complete.

  • Mom

    Mom

    Which relationship has taught you the most about yourself?

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    She could win an argument with a parking meter.

    Everyone has that one person who could negotiate a ceasefire and a discount in the same breath. Mine was a 4-foot-9-inch giant.

    I learned who I am by standing next to someone I’m not. Here are three stories about Mom that show it: how she moved, how she laughed, and how she never once apologized for either.

    Move or Be Moved

    Maybe she was born with an independent streak, or maybe life forced her to develop one. Either way, she had a confidence I could never replicate, no matter how many times I practised in the mirror.

    In a past life, Mom was a general. A psychic said so. (And I 1,000% believe it.) Every morning, she put on makeup like she was heading into battle: she called it “war paint.”

    I, on the other hand, was told by my Kindergarten teacher to stop avoiding conflict so much.*

    *I did fix this. I became a mediator, which is what you do when you’d rather not be a general.

    A Little Levity Goes a Long Way

    Of course, good warriors know that not every battle needs a cannon. Sometimes they need a punchline.

    At one of her first jobs in London, a colleague kept sitting at her desk. (It happened to be right in front of the attractive boss’s office.)

    Mom got so fed up that she started telling the desk-stealer to inform him she’d gone home for the day because she had nowhere to sit. This went on for a while… until finally, she marched in to complain directly.

    He was seated behind his desk, but from where she stood, he might as well have been a skyscraper.

    She took a breath.

    “I have a problem,” she began, hesitantly.

    He waited, probably wondering what this tiny woman who’d been skipping out on work wanted to gripe about now.

    “You’re too good looking…”

    Mom was quick witted like that (disarming before you’d even seen her aim). I, on the other hand, am a classic tube-light.

    Let’s Hang in the Shallow End

    Mom’s approach to self-discovery was simple: be yourself, loudly, and let everyone else catch up.

    So when I gave her a copy of The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz, I should have known what to expect. She gave it about seven seconds, then threw it back at me, muttering, “What’s this crap?”

    The book and I both sat there, stunned.

    Unlike Mom, I spend most of my time wallowing in introspection, gobbling up every self-help book I can find with the voracious curiosity of a raccoon at a picnic.

    Mom is slowly making her way out of this realm. She’s taking her time, on her own schedule, as usual.

    In Avengers: Endgame, Frigga says, “Everyone fails at who they’re supposed to be. The measure of a person, of a true hero, is how well they succeed at being who they are.” Mom never needed that lesson, since she was born knowing exactly who she was. I had to fail at being her first.

    I’m not like her. But I know who I am because I got to stand next to someone who knew exactly who she was.

  • What’s the Funny Story from Today?

    What’s the Funny Story from Today?

    What are some life hacks that you practice?

    Journaling has always been the “the one that got away” for me. I’ve known of its benefits for ages: stress reduction, self-reflection, a healthier gut flora. But I was never able to find a way to make it work… until a few weeks ago.

    Every time I would start a journaling practice, it would fizzle out in no time like a bad high school crush. 

    I didn’t like writing in a journal. It’s ergonomically challenging to slouch and press down with your pen at this age. Not to mention the small voice that kept insisting: “Hey… me again… sooooooooo are we still really committed to this whole leaving our deepest darkest thoughts lying around thing?” 

    In an effort to get it to back off, I bought a cheap tablet that I kept on airplane mode. It took so long to fire up that all of my entries started with a rant about big tech. Alas, friction is the nemesis of healthy habits. 

    I was about to give up altogether when the instructor in one of my courses assigned us a daily writing practice: Reflect on your day and ask yourself, if you had to do a 2-minute standup comedy from the day, what story would you tell?

    This has hit the sweet spot for me. It feels like a joyful rubix cube for my brain to play with every evening. I don’t write anything fancy… one of my entries said nothing more than this:

    How we still make friends in the same way that kids do: OMG you like unicorns! I like unicorns!!! Wanna be best friends forever??? :) Just replace “unicorns” with whatever adulting rabbit hole you’re in at the moment (meditation, scrapbooking, colourcoded spreadsheets) and perhaps tone down the second sentence slightly.

    As for those moments when I do need somewhere to release intense emotions, existential spirals, or conspiracy theories about how my gut flora is plotting against me… I have one of those LCD writing tablets. Perfect for getting your frustrations out without leaving the evidence lying around. 

  • The 5-Step, Fail-Proof Method to DIY Your Own Pixie Cut

    The 5-Step, Fail-Proof Method to DIY Your Own Pixie Cut

    A rigorously tested, professionally unqualified method.

    If you identify as a jack of all trades like me, you already know the real secret to a successful DIY project isn’t skill. It’s delusion sustained over several weeks. 

    Here’s my fail-proof, five-step method for DIY’ing your own pixie cut, developed over a lengthy YouTube playlist, a mild identity crisis, and a very expensive drawer of barely-used scissors. 

    Step 1: Tell everyone.

    Not just your partner. Not just your group chat. Everyone. Your coworkers. Your dentist. The guy who delivers your packages. This isn’t for accountability… accountability implies you might back out. This is so that when it goes wrong, it goes as spectacularly wrong as possible. 

    (But whatever you do, don’t tell your family. Friends offer skepticism. Family opens an inquiry.)

    Step 2: Research extensively. Apply nothing.

    Build a DIY pixie cut YouTube playlist so long it starts to feel like a relationship. Watch every video twice. Sit with your popcorn, expertly judging strangers despite the fact that you’ve never held a pair of clippers, let alone filmed a YouTube tutorial. Most importantly, let yourself believe that watching someone confidently cut their hair is basically the same as doing it.

    This belief will not survive contact with actual clippers. Deep down, you already know that. Ignore it.

    Step 3: Buy every tool you could possibly need… plus several you can’t justify.

    Clippers, guards, hairdresser scissors, thinning scissors, texturizing scissors, and sure, why not… a thinning razor you will use exactly zero times. This step isn’t really about hair. It’s about the deep, specific comfort of owning tools that outrank your skill level by several years. 

    None of them will help. All of them will feel like progress. 

    Step 4: Wait until it’s too late to back out.

    Let your hair grow just long enough that it has to be cut, and just short enough that undoing a mistake means starting over from nothing. This is the sweet spot. This is when fear finally shows up… right on schedule, arms crossed in the bathroom mirror, daring you to blink first. Ignore it. Pick up the clippers. Close one eye (for reasons that remain unclear even to you). Let the muscle memory you don’t have take over. 

    Somewhere, a professional stylist will feel a disturbance in the force.

    Step 5: Reveal your results to a deeply unimpressed audience.

    Here’s the part nobody warns you about… after weeks of buildup, the internal spiral, and the one-eyed leap of faith, your friends will not gasp. They will not so much as flinch. One will simply walk past you. Another will look directly at you and ask if you got new earrings.

    Eventually, you will not be able to take it anymore, and you will do the thing you swore you wouldn’t… announce it yourself.

    “I did it! I cut my own hair!!”

    This will be met with the same energy as someone announcing they’ve reorganized their sock drawer. 

    So there you have it. Five easy steps to a pixie cut, tried and tested by me, on me, with no professional supervision whatsoever… a method that will change absolutely nothing about how people see you, and everything about how you see yourself. (Not as someone with a good haircut. As someone who is clearly ready for the next bad idea.)

  • Everyone Else Is Facing That Way. I Have Thoughts.

    Everyone Else Is Facing That Way. I Have Thoughts.

    What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?

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    Making peace with what I’m good at and what I suck at.

    In my fifth decade of this thing we call “being human,”* I’m finally aware of (and more at ease with) where I can deliver and where I will fall short.

    *Being human: a lifelong subscription with no manual, no refunds, and terms and conditions you only get around to reading in your forties.

    I think many of us struggle with this, especially when the parts of us that are outliers don’t match what society treats as “the norm.” The pressure to conform is real, and it’s tough to feel like a typo in a world that loves a clean draft.

    Allow me to present three of my own typos, left in on purpose.

    Introvert (aka the Tubelight)

    I’m a card-carrying introvert. Don’t get me wrong, I can say a few semi-intelligent things in a meeting, but my best and deepest reflections show up later, when I’ve been handed a problem to noodle on. Picture a tubelight warming up. It stutters, it hums, and then it’s the most reliable thing in the room.

    I’ve learned to carve out this space for myself with creative subject lines like “Re: Thoughts on the Meeting (Composed in My Head Since 10:15, Now Available).”

    Initiation Energy When It’s My Idea, Struggle When It’s Not

    When I have an idea, I go from zero to a five-part workshop series in eleven minutes, complete with a title slide and no registered participants. For years I wondered why I was always the one starting projects or organizing get-togethers, until I realized that other people’s ideas just don’t give me the same ignition.

    Follow-through is the other half of this though. I definitely need the energy of others, or else my project moves into a folder called “v2_final_ACTUAL,” where good intentions go to nap. So I’ve learned to enlist people.

    Taking Time to Make Decisions

    Sometimes a decision takes me a while, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise. When a big one shows up, it’ll wait by the door with its coat on while I look for my keys, my shoes, and possibly my feelings.

    Living with that uncertainty used to drive me crazy. Now I understand it’s simply my process, and I’ve learned to sit with it:

    I’m not indecisive. I’m in a due diligence period.

    Future me will have more information and better lighting.

    Nothing is on fire. Probably.

    I think we all have a few things we were taught were wrong. Too slow. Too quiet. Too sensitive. At some point you stop trying to correct them… a typo left alone long enough starts to look like handwriting.

    If you need me, I’ll be reading through the fine print of “being human.” So far I’ve found no clause requiring me to be good at everything. I’ll send my full thoughts in a week. Subject line: “Now Available.”