The Things We Let Others Take From Us
{ and why hindsight is a lesson is growth }
There's a particular kind of heartbreak that comes with hindsight—not the sharp, immediate pain of loss, but the slow, dawning realisation of what we once allowed to be taken from us.
It settles in quietly, usually years later, when we're strong enough to see clearly what we couldn't see then.
I think about this often when I remember the person I was over a decade ago. I was still living in London. My life consisted of life I thought I should be leading - a well paying legal job, mother, a Pakistani living in London.
Three times a week, I began what most young professional people do: mat rolled under my arm, walking to yet another yoga class in London. I was obsessed in the most beautiful way—the kind of obsession that lights you up from the inside, that makes you feel like you've found a piece of yourself you didn't even know was missing. I had my heart deeply connected to a particular yoga studio in West London, I knew my bus route, I stopped at my favourite coffee place on the way back, I had my favourite yoga teachers, a few of whom I’d befriended. My practice had become a sanctuary, a place where my body and mind finally made sense together, where I felt both grounded and limitless.
But obsessions, especially the healthy ones, can make others uncomfortable.
They hold up mirrors we don't always want to look into.
They ask questions:
Why aren't you this passionate about anything?
Why don't you prioritise your wellbeing?
Why don't you make time for what feeds your soul?
Someone in my life then began to chip away at my obsession and not in a way that was healthy, for them or me. The criticism started small, as it always does. Little comments here and there, disguised as concern or humour.
"You're always at yoga."
"It's just stretching, isn't it?"
"You're becoming one of those people."
Each comment was like a tiny pinprick, barely noticeable on its own, but collectively they began to deflate something essential in me. I needed yoga then I believe because my life was in a particular sort of emotional turmoil, yoga gave me time to be me, to nurture my interiority.
And then a yoga retreat invitation came at the height of my practice. An island off the coast of Italy. A week of intensive yoga, meditation, and the kind of deep restoration that only comes when you fully commit to your growth. I can still feel the excitement that bubbled up when I first read about it—the certainty that this was exactly what I needed, exactly where I was meant to be.
But excitement, when shared with the wrong person, becomes vulnerability. And vulnerability, in the hands of someone who feels threatened by your growth, becomes a weapon they can use against you.
The "no" never came directly.
It was more insidious than that—a slow erosion of my confidence through sighs and eye rolls, through comments about the extravagance, the impracticality, the selfishness of it all. It was the particular kind of emotional manipulation that doesn't leave fingerprints, the kind that makes you second-guess yourself until you're no longer sure if your desires are reasonable or ridiculous.
I didn't go to Italy.
I told myself it was my choice, that I was being sensible, that perhaps they were right about it being too much. But deep down, I knew I was shrinking myself to fit into someone else's comfort zone, dimming my light so they wouldn't have to confront their own darkness.
The yoga practice gradually faded too — for a long time.
Not all at once—that would have been too obvious, too clearly connected to the subtle campaign against it. Instead, it died by a thousand cuts: missed classes due to "more important" commitments, the mat gathering dust in the corner, the slow replacement of something that nourished me with things that merely filled time.
Looking back now, what strikes me most isn't the loss of the practice itself, though that was significant. It's the loss of trust in my own judgment, the gradual learning to prioritise someone else's insecurities over my own growth. It's how easily I handed over my power, not because it was demanded, but because it was slowly, persistently undermined.
We all have these stories, don't we? The dreams we set aside, the passions we cooled, the parts of ourselves we learned to hide because someone else couldn't handle their brightness. The job we didn't take, the trip we didn't book, the class we didn't sign up for, the person we stopped being because someone else needed us smaller.
The cruel irony is that in trying to preserve a relationship by diminishing ourselves, we often destroy both the relationship and the self we sacrificed for it. We become resentful ghosts of who we once were, mourning losses we can't quite name because we participated in our own diminishment.
But here's what I know now that I wish I'd known then: someone who truly cares for you doesn't need you smaller. They don't require you to dim your passions to make them comfortable. They don't speak to your dreams in the language of criticism and doubt. Someone who loves you wants to see you fully alive, even if—especially if—it challenges them to grow too.
It’s been over a decade, and now yoga is back in my life, but not in with the same vigour. So much has changed for me since, but the practice has returned now, with the trust in my own judgment. I've learned to recognise the difference between someone who supports my growth and someone who merely tolerates it. Now I think I’m at a stage in my life where I need no one’s permission but my own — what the past has taught be is valuable enough for me to be reminded of it this week. I’ve been at my lowest with a physical ailment that began this month, which has left me changed in many ways (more on this soon.) But it’s made me think that even a physical hinderance would not diminish my light when I believe I want to do something.
That retreat in Italy? I still think about it sometimes. Not with regret, exactly, but as a reminder of the price of letting others dictate the terms of our becoming.
If anything that is truly clear to me now is that the only permission we truly need is our own.
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