The official theme for World Mental Health Day 2026, marked on October 10, is “Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change,” as announced by the World Federation for Mental Health. Let me start with a sentence you may already know the shape of, even if you've never heard it in these exact words. And let me start it in October. I know it is September as I write this, a month that arrives with a promise and ends with two women's birth anniversaries.
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932; she would have been ninety-four this year. Sara Shagufta, closer to home, was born on October 31, 1954; she would have been seventy-two. Two women, two countries, two literary lives, and yet, perhaps, the same uncomfortable question about what happens when a woman is heard but not truly understood. I hear you. I empathize. And then, without a pause long enough to notice, the sentence turns: I know you're paranoid now. How are you supposed to manage love? A relationship? A boardroom?
If you have ever disclosed something, an abuse, a diagnosis, a collapse, a marriage that wasn't what it looked like from outside; you know there are two honest reactions waiting for you. One is distancing: the slow fade of someone who no longer knows what to say to you, so they simply say less. The other is displeasure: the flash of irritation at being handed a truth they didn't ask for. Both are uncomfortable. Both, at least, are what they claim to be. The third reaction is the one I want to talk to you about, because it took me the longest to recognize it as a wound. It arrives clothed as care. It exploits all the right words—hear, empathize, understand and it ends, quietly, at the same destination as the other two: you are now a misfit. In the bedroom. In the boardroom.
Somewhere between the two, a decision has been made about what you are now unfit for, and no one has told you when the meeting happened. Any society including ours can revoke someone's credibility quickly, and it never bothers to send a notice when it does. This is where Sylvia comes in. And, closer to home, Sara. Sylvia Plath was heard. I want to be precise about that, because the easy version of her story is that nobody listened, and the easy version is wrong.
Her doctors heard her. Her hospitalization in 1953, the electroconvulsive therapy she later rendered so exactly in The Bell Jar, the discharge that sent her back into a life whose conditions had not changed at all, none of that happened in silence. She was heard, diagnosed, treated, and returned. The system did its job, by its own definition of the job. What it never did was ask what she was actually telling it.
Plath's writing is not the record of a woman who needed a treatment. It is the record of a woman describing, with unbearable precision, a life that needed to change a marriage, a set of expectations, a version of womanhood she was expected to narrate gratefully. Medicine heard a set of symptoms. It did not hear a verdict on the life producing them. That gap between being heard and being understood as making an argument is the gap I keep falling into, sixty-three years and one country away from her. We do not need to steal the entire argument from another country.
Sara Shagufta was heard too. Born in Gujranwala, Punjab, on October 31, 1954 which makes this month her seventy-second birth anniversary, she moved with her family to Karachi, where she spent most of her life and did most of her writing. Accounts of her life describe abuse, repeated marital breakdown, and psychiatric hospitalization; she kept writing through all of it, in a voice too unresolved and too female for the literary establishment of her day to sit comfortably with.
In 1984, at twenty-nine, she died by suicide in Karachi. Her hospitalization was not silence either. Someone was, technically, listening. What seems to have been missing was treating her account of her own life as evidence of anything that needed to change around her, rather than only inside her. Sixty-three years after Plath, and four decades after Shagufta, our care systems have simply localized the same gap. Health care hears you and reaches for a diagnosis. Social care hears you and reaches for a euphemism: she's going through something, we say, the passive voice doing its usual work of making sure no one did anything to her. Legal care hears you and reaches for a standard of proof so demanding that silence starts to look, perversely, like the safer legal position.
The Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2017–18 found that 56 percent of ever-married women who had experienced physical or sexual violence had neither sought help nor told anyone about it. I no longer read that as a mystery. I read it as a cost-benefit analysis, conducted quietly, by women who had done the math on what disclosure would actually buy them. Sahib, for his part, has learned the vocabulary too. He can say women's empowerment at a conference without hesitating. Inclusion. Dignity. Safe spaces.
That is Sahib. Not just one man, but a type: progressive in language, selective in practice.
The words travel easily through donor-funded programmes, conference halls, and policy papers. But look around the room: men still hold much of the power who speaks, who decides, who gets funded, who gets believed. And sometimes women do the policing too. Not because they hate women. Because they have learned the rules so well that they start enforcing them on other women: too angry, too damaged, too difficult, too much. This is the sophistication I want to name plainly. The language of empowerment can sit quite comfortably beside the old hierarchy.
“I empathize” can be the softest way of saying no. That is Sahib. Not just one man, but a type: progressive in language, selective in practice. Do not ask me what many such Sahibs do to women in their private spaces. So here is where Rakhshinda puts herself into this. I have met many Shashi Tharoors in my interesting life except, of course, the actual Shashi Tharoor, whose command of English has done, for years, what status and articulate English routinely do for men everywhere: buy a pass the facts alone were never granted. One of the Sahibs I once met through my writing and since I am an indecent writer too, let me admit that this was not the only “platonic” thing I had in my life, developed what I thought was a platonic intellectual relationship with me.
There was no romance to confess, no secret to hide from anyone. There were words, an exchange sustained entirely through writing, long enough that I mistook its consistency for character. What follows is a composite of more than one such exchange; I've compressed details rather than reporting anything verbatim, because it is the pattern I want named, not the person. Words can become intimate long before people admit that they are. Then came the reply I hadn't expected.
I was waiting for a long, Shashi Tharoor-vocabulary kind of response, something thoughtful, elaborate, perhaps a careful reckoning with my disclosure. Instead, I got a few clipped lines that read like an internal memo, the kind of sentence written to close a file, not open a conversation. Sahib had made an executive decision. So my disclosure, trauma, and trust had resulted in an official memo.
Yes, I cursed myself for not being “mindful” enough mindful to what level, exactly, to survive in the city of elites? And how was I supposed to prove, and to whom, that a Sahib with an excellent command of the English language and human psychology had made me feel unguarded as well? Anyway, I am not that kind of feminist who mixes matters of the head and heart with harassment.
Fair enough. People are allowed to leave. I only wish they could leave gently and avoid using “empathy.” But then came the moment that stayed with me, my own disclosure, gently rewritten as a liability. What had been called brave a few lines earlier had, without any visible hinge, become a reason for caution. I had not changed between those two moments. The story had not changed.
What changed was the category in which I was being placed. Brave woman. Resilient woman. Traumatized woman. Paranoid woman. And somewhere between those words, perhaps: woman difficult to have a relationship with. This is what I mean when I say that “I hear you” is not always the end of listening. Sometimes it is the beginning of a different kind of judgment.
I remain, by choice, an indecent writer, someone who conducts feminist autopsies in public, herself included. But self-deprecation has its own exhaustion, and the guilt a conventional upbringing installs in a daughter does not dissolve just because she can now name it. So let me ask the real question plainly, instead of apologising my way around it: why did I open that door at all? Not foolishness. Not loneliness mistaking attention for care.
I opened it because I was raised, like most of us, to treat elegant English as a certificate of character to hear a well-turned sentence and mistake the turning for the truth. That is not a personal failing. It is a colonial hangover with excellent diction, and it nearly cost me more than an email. And perhaps that is why I keep writing. Not because I have “healed” into some polished, TED-Talk version of a woman who can now explain her pain in three neat points. I haven't. Still vulnerable. Still an indecent writer. But I am also still here.
And there are many women like me, women whose disclosures are welcomed until they become inconvenient; women who are heard until what they say begins to affect how someone wants to see them. So no, I don't want your sympathy. I want you to notice the moment when empathy turns into a verdict. That moment is where the real story begins.