Soulful

  2025 has been a year of personal revelation and reconciliation for me. After years of struggling with anxiety, I finally had clarity about my truths. It all started some years ago when I decided to follow the path of making conscious choices only. One such conscious choice that took shape this year led me to face my most inconspicuous battle. My speech difficulty in challenging environments. Speech anxiety or, as they call it, now, +**selective mutism. It was always there, so open yet so hidden. As they say, no wins without failures.

Labels, Silence, and the Story I Was Telling Myself Before you read further, you may want to listen to Episode 2 of Unmuted —   I Thought I Was an Introvert — Then I Learned the Name for My Silence 🎙️ Listen on Spotify:  This post expands on the reflections shared in the episode and offers space to pause, read, and return whenever you need quiet company. “Hey… you’ve put the wrong label on this.”  my friend pointed to the glass jar she was holding.  It was salt. Not sugar. A harmless mistake—but imagine if she’d added it to her cup of tea? Sometimes, a label seems harmless… until it changes the entire taste of something. Martina Navratilova, my favourite tennis player, once said: “Labels are for filing. Labels are for clothing. Labels are not for people.” And I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Because labels don’t just describe us. Sometimes, they decide how the world sees us. And worse—how we see ourselves. Ironically, it was a label that once helped me make...

🎧 Listen to the Podcast Episode Before you read further, you may want to listen to Episode 1 of Unmuted — a spoken version of this story, shared in my own voice. 🎙️ Listen on Spotify: This post expands on the reflections shared in the episode and offers space to pause, read, and return whenever you need quiet company.

Hello beautiful souls, Welcome to a new chapter of Soulful , a space that has held bits of my journey over the years — scattered reflections, thoughts, and emotions shared whenever life allowed me to. Until now, this blog was a quiet corner for my random posts. Today, it becomes something more intentional… something closer to my heart.

Sometimes, the most powerful leadership lesson doesn’t come from a keynote — but from one awkward, honest question asked with kindness. I was excited to attend  Leadership School 2025 with the Ministry of Justice, it was a unique experience that I looked forward to attending in person for a long time. During a session led by  Sam Conniff , we were asked to “ask an awkward question to your neighbour.” My group facilitator, Mark Buttanshaw , turned to me and asked, gently: “How does it feel to be the only non-white person in the group?” He seemed to sense a quiet discomfort I hadn’t yet recognised in myself. So, it took me a few moments to even process what he meant. I had noticed my own minority presence and the striking majority in the room, but in my group, I just saw people — their energy — and my own. Only after he asked did I realise that yes… I was the only brown person in that small circle. When I asked him in return how he felt about it, Mark said...

"love the sanctity of wildflowers, hundreds of them sewn together on ground,