Ask Soniya

  Micro-Habits Over Extreme Routines: Small Steps Still Count Have you ever watched someone’s “perfect morning routine” and felt tired before the video even ended? Wake up at 5 a.m. Drink warm lemon water. Meditate for thirty minutes. Exercise for an hour. Take a cold shower. Read twenty pages. Prepare a healthy breakfast. Write in a gratitude journal. All this before the rest of the family wakes up! Such routines may work beautifully for some people. But for many of us—especially women already balancing children, work, household responsibilities and everyone else’s needs—they can become one more standard we feel guilty for not meeting. We are not always lacking discipline. Sometimes, we are simply exhausted. When Self-Improvement Becomes Another Pressure We begin a new routine with excitement. We buy a planner, download an app and promise ourselves that this time we will remain consistent. For two or three days, we follow everything perfectly. Then real life happens. A child falls...

I Matter Too Before you read this, I would request you to read my previous blog on generational trauma: Can We Unlearn What We Learnt from Our Mothers and Grandmothers? This post is not a separate conversation. It is the voice that rises after we finally recognise what generations of women have been silently carrying. We girls are introduced to forgetting ourselves so early that, after a while, it no longer feels like sacrifice. It feels normal. We watch the women before us eat after everyone else, rest after everyone else and think about themselves only after every other need in the house has been fulfilled. We learn to adjust before we even understand what adjustment means. We learn to lower our voices, swallow our disappointment and smile at decisions in which nobody thought it necessary to include us. And slowly, quietly, we become women who take a back seat in our own lives. The Invisible Training Begins Early A girl is often praised for being obedient, accommodating and mature b...

  Can We Unlearn What We Learned From Our Mothers and Grandmothers? “Don’t answer back.” “Learn to adjust.” “Keep the family together.” “Good women don’t complain.” “Think about what people will say.” Most women have heard some version of these sentences while growing up. Sometimes they were spoken gently. Sometimes they came as warnings. And sometimes no one needed to say them at all—we learned them simply by watching the women around us. We watched our mothers eat after everyone else had finished. We watched our grandmothers forgive without receiving an apology. We watched women hide their exhaustion, silence their anger and continue serving people who rarely stopped to ask, “But how are you?” Slowly, sacrifice became our definition of love. Silence became our definition of strength. And abandoning ourselves became our definition of being a “good woman.” But can we unlearn what we learned from our mothers and grandmothers? I believe we can. The harder question is: Are we ready to...