Life Update

Reader,

How I’ve missed writing you. No perfectly strung sentence could ever describe how much care I have for the messages I write you. In this respect, I hope that you receive the message as I intended.

After graduating with my Masters this past May, I moved to New York City and stayed for a month. I’d always felt drawn to the city. During school, I spent every break in the city, as if rehearsing for a life I hadn’t earned yet.

Recently, I started work as a strategy consultant, and it feels like a dream come true. I’m still learning to believe that I’m here, working in the largest economy in the world, alongside people who are not just smart, but wise, ambitious, and share the same values. For most people around me, it seems like a footnote. To me, it’s the entire deck.

I continue to learn so much from my boss, who is Harvard-educated and a published author. Those details aren’t important in themselves, but they’re useful in telling this story.

How did I get here?

I started in banking after undergrad, a stretch that lasted three years. Toward the end of it, I knew I wanted to work with people who were wise, hardworking, and shared similar values, traits I wanted to hone in myself, too.

My driving force has always been a wish to change how girls in small townships see themselves. Girls like the ones I grew up around, who rarely saw women who looked like them on the platforms that seemed to matter. I understood, even young, that this meant visibility, credibility, and plainly, money. I wanted to be educated, wealthy, and generous with it. More than that, I wanted a life that felt good, not one that only looked good from the outside.

I’ve always been acutely aware of how much environment shapes mindset, and mindset shapes what we dare to reach for. That awareness quietly steered every decision, which schools, which jobs I applied to.

For my sins, I’ve struggled with a huge fear of rejection so I applied to only one university. By some grace, I was admitted with a Dean’s scholarship, not a full one, but it felt like the biggest dream of my life come true. If my story had ended at graduation, it would still have felt complete.

My mother supplemented income through selling atchaar and my father was a carpenter. There were a thousand reasons not to pursue my goals. But somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing our life as something to be shy about, and started seeing it as the foundation for what might unfold.

It took working on my self-image, relearning what it means to be a young Black girl from a segregated community, before I could even begin working toward making my dreams a reality.

My story is still unfolding, with many questions still unanswered. But as I sit here, looking over the itinerary for my first international business trip with my team, I think it’s worth saying plainly: your self-image is the work. Everything else follows from it.

It’s a lot of grunt and unsexy work. Don’t be discouraged if yours feels messier and more complicated than what you may see. It is still work that is worth doing!