From a Village No One Could Point to on a Map, to a Graduate Degree Abroad

On forging my own path without a guide

Anita Graduation Day Photo

At no point in my childhood was “graduate school abroad” a sentence that made sense.

I grew up in a village in Pakistan where girls were raised, mostly, to be raised well, to cook well, to marry well, to be spoken of well by the neighbors. Ambition wasn’t discouraged exactly. It just wasn’t a category anyone had built for us. Nobody sat me down and said “the world is smaller than you think, you could leave it if you wanted to.” I had to find that out on my own, slowly, the way you find out anything that nobody around you already knows.

I became a physiotherapist. I ran my own clinic. By every measure that mattered, I had already done something. And for a while, that was enough. It had to be. Because wanting more, when you already have more than most people around you, can feel almost embarrassing to say out loud.

But there was a restlessness in me that I didn’t have a name for yet. I kept treating patients and kept thinking about the questions behind their pain that clinical practice alone couldn’t answer. Why did some people cope the way they did? What was actually happening in someone’s life, not just their body, that shaped how they healed? I didn’t have language for “research” yet. I just knew I had more questions than my clinic had room for.

My mother didn’t live to see where those questions eventually took me.

I think about that a lot, the specific unfairness of it. That the person who would have understood exactly what it meant for me to leave, who would have known what it cost and what it was worth, isn’t here to see the parts that came after. Grief does strange things to ambition. Sometimes it flattens it. For me, it did the opposite. Somewhere in missing her, the decision to go stopped being about me. I wasn’t just leaving for a degree anymore. I was leaving so that her name would travel somewhere it had never been. So that something of hers, her resilience, her refusal to shrink me, would exist in a country and a classroom she never got to see.

I was the first person from my village to pursue graduate studies abroad. I didn’t know that would be true until people started telling me, half in awe and half in disbelief, as if I’d done something more dramatic than fill out application forms and cry over English proficiency tests at 2am like everyone else. But I understand now why it landed differently for them. It wasn’t really about me. It was proof of something they hadn’t let themselves believe yet, that a girl from where we were from could end up somewhere else, doing something else, and come back different but not lost.

Anita (with so many thoughts) going Abroad

Canada is a long way from that village, in every sense you can measure distance. I remember my first winter here through the senses before the meaning of it caught up with me. The air had no smell, which felt wrong before I understood why, no dust, no woodsmoke, no neighbor’s cooking drifting over a wall. Snow fell in total silence, which unsettled me more than the cold did. Everything about the season seemed designed to make me feel like a guest in my own life: the light left too early, the streets emptied too fast, and I kept catching myself listening for sounds that simply weren’t there anymore. I remember sitting in classrooms full of people who had never had to explain where Pakistan was on a map, let alone a village nobody has heard of even inside Pakistan. I remember doing a master’s degree in a language that wasn’t my first, thinking in one language and writing in another, translating myself constantly, exhausted in ways that had nothing to do with the coursework.

Nobody tells you that the hardest part of “making it out” isn’t the leaving. It’s the after. It’s being fluent in two worlds and fully at home in neither. It’s video-calling home and realizing you don’t have the words anymore for some of what your day was like, and they don’t quite have the frame of reference to picture it even if you did. It’s being someone’s proof of concept while also just trying to pass your next course.

But I finished. I defended my thesis. I stood in front of people at conferences and talked about research that came out of questions I’d been carrying since long before I had the vocabulary for them. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, without ever announcing it to myself, I stopped being the girl who left the village and became someone building an actual life, with actual work, actual colleagues, actual mornings that are just mine.

Anita’s convocation portrait at the university sign

I still don’t know how to talk about my mother without my voice changing. I don’t think that ever fully goes away, and I’ve stopped expecting it to. What I do know is that every time I do something that would have made her proud, present research, mentor someone younger, even just get through a hard week, it feels less like an achievement and more like a conversation I’m still having with her, just in a language she never got to hear me speak.

If you’re reading this from somewhere like where I started, a place too small to be on the map, with a future too small to be imagined for you, I want to tell you the thing nobody told me: the smallness is not the truth of your life. It’s just the size of the room you happened to be born in. Rooms have doors.