I had an epiphany recently, of all places, on a walk to the train station.
I was thinking about the first course I ever created — Responding to Life Differently — and how transformative that month was for the women who worked through it with me. And then, somewhere between one step and the next, a thought arrived that stopped me in my tracks. The problem is not people’s circumstances. The problem is that most people cannot tell the difference between the reality and their reality.
Think about a metropolitan city. Millions of people occupying the same streets, the same air, the same physical space — and yet living completely different lives. Same reality. Radically different lived experiences. The difference is not always money, or luck, or who you know. More often than not, the difference is how each person is processing what is around them. What they believe is available to them. What they have decided, quietly and often unconsciously, about who they are and what they deserve.
Some people walk through the world looking for opportunities. Others walk through the exact same world collecting evidence that they are stuck. And here is the uncomfortable truth: both of them find exactly what they are looking for.
In his book Disruptive Thinking, T.D. Jakes writes about the moment people stop waiting for their lives to change and start taking responsibility for the transformation. He argues that the power to change is not somewhere out there — it is already inside you. You have it right now. And if you want a different life, you cannot stand on the sidelines of your own story. You have to, as he puts it, “be complicit in the transformation you are praying for.”
That line has stayed with me since I first read it. Because how many of us are praying for something with our mouths while building the case against it in our minds?
I know this because I lived it.
When I came to Malaysia, the first place I fell in love with was Pavilion at Bukit Bintang. I would make the trip almost every week — walking from KLCC, through the convention centre, all the way to Bukit Bintang — and the entire time, the same thoughts would loop in my head.
I would love to live here. But I cannot afford it. Someone like me does not live here.
My brain was not asking questions. It was making statements. And statements do not open doors — they close them. I was not imprisoned by the neighbourhood. I was imprisoned by the story I kept telling myself about who belonged there and who did not.
Here is what nobody told me, and what took me far too long to realise: there was no sign on the road with my picture on it saying forbidden to live here. No notification. No official rejection. The barrier existed entirely in my mind, constructed brick by brick from assumptions I had never once questioned.
I kept myself in a prison of my own making — feeling pain, angst, anger, watching other people live the life I wanted and quietly deciding they must be special. Because if they were not special, if it was simply available to anyone willing to reach for it, then what did that say about me?
The day I made the decision to move next to the Twin Towers, it took me less than a month to make it happen. Less than a month — after years of telling myself it was impossible.
Was I scared? Absolutely. But I took the leap anyway. And it did not kill me.
Now, every time I step outside, I wake up in the city I once only dreamed about from back home. That feeling — the one I used to watch other people have and wonder why it wasn’t mine — turns out it was always available to me. I was just too busy collecting evidence that it wasn’t.
That is the difference between the reality and your reality.
The reality is where you are. Your reality is the meaning you assign to it.
You can be in the same city, the same job, the same financial situation as someone else — and one of you is building a way out while the other is cementing the walls in. The ones who move forward are not more gifted or more lucky. They have simply decided to ask better questions. Instead of why can’t I have this? they ask how can I make this possible? Instead of scanning their environment for proof that they are trapped, they scan it for the opening, the angle, the next move.
Mental shackles are the most convincing kind, because you cannot see them. Nobody put them on you. You cannot blame anyone for them. And that is both the hardest and the most liberating thing to accept — because it also means you are the only one who can take them off.
So, here is the question I want to leave you with:
When you look at your life right now — your neighbourhood, your income, your relationships, your possibilities — what are you looking for? Are you looking for opportunities, or are you looking for evidence that you are stuck?
Because your brain will find whatever you send it to find. It is extraordinarily good at its job.
The reality is just the raw material. Your reality is what you build with it.
And you are always, always building something.
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over here