12% of the book — free to read
Healing Without
#Hashtags
SUBAH TASNEEM
Daastan Publishing 2026
First Published in Pakistan by Daastan
House # A-41, Madni Street, Lala Rukh, Wah Cantt, Punjab 47040
Text copyrights © Subah Tasneem
Book Design Copyright © Ahsan Rauf
Edited by: Shanzay Hussain
The moral rights of the writer, illustrator, and editor have been asserted.
All rights reserved
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or distributed in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN E-Book: 978-627-526-148-3
ISBN Print: 978-627-526-147-6
Contents
The Wounds Weren’t from Men This Time 4
They Touched Us Before We Understood Our Bodies 7
When Healing Becomes a Performance 91
Don’t Be the Trauma You Escaped 100
What You Tell Yourself, You Become 114
Peace Only Lives in the Present 119
The Chapter I Couldn’t Write 125
Before We Begin
For years, people have come to me when they were falling apart.
At work, in private, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. People who run teams and people just starting out. They would sit across from me holding it together on the outside while something inside them was quietly giving way. On paper, my job was to keep them functioning. But somewhere in those talks, it stopped being about work.
So I told them the truth. Not from any book. From my own life. The things I had lived through, the things that almost finished me, and the small ways I found my way back. Something in that honesty reached them. Years later, some of them still tell me that one conversation changed how they saw themselves.
The young ones came too.
Kids carrying weight that was never theirs to begin with. The pressure to be perfect. To top the class. To carry the family name. To smile through things no one their age should have to hold. At home, no one understood them. So they came to me and said the things they couldn’t say anywhere else. I never spoke down to them. I just gave them my stories, the messy ones, and watched something settle. A direction. A little hope. The feeling that they could build a life on purpose instead of only surviving it.
For a long time, I did this in pieces. One person. One late night. One story at a time.
Then one night, one of them broke. Someone young, worn thin by the weight of everyone’s expectations. Tired of being measured against a person they were never meant to be. Carrying the kind of quiet struggle their whole generation knows and almost no one around them sees. They reached out in the middle of it, coming apart, and I stayed with them until the sky went light. Just listening. Near the end, I showed them something I had written.
I have been writing notes to myself for twenty years. Small, private things I never saved and never showed to a soul. They read one of mine, and I watched it move something in them. Right there, the way they saw their own life shifted.
That was the night I understood.
If a few lines I scribbled for no one could do that, maybe these stories were not only mine to keep. Maybe out there is a woman who can’t name what went wrong in her life, or what to do next. Maybe a young person standing at the edge of a decision. Maybe you. Maybe you don’t need any of this at all. But I kept thinking, why leave it scattered across a hundred private pages. Why not put it all in one place.
So I did. That is how this book began.
What you are holding is not a plan with neat steps. It is stories, mine, and the quiet things I learned while carrying them. Take what fits your life. Leave what doesn’t.
One soft warning before you start. Some of these pages go to hard places. Things that happened to me as a child. A marriage that hurt. A time I no longer wanted to be here. Read slowly. Close the book when you need to. Nothing in here is in a rush.
These pages were never meant for anyone’s eyes. I healed quietly, with no one watching, long before I thought to write any of it down.
Now I am handing it to you anyway.
This is healing without hashtag
The Wounds Weren’t from Men This Time
I was never a quiet girl.
I laughed freely, spoke openly, and carried no mask, not out of defiance, but sincerity. In the world I stepped into, sincerity came with a price.
After my father’s death, everything changed. I threw myself into studies and work, not from necessity but from a desire to stand independently at twenty. While peers planned university trips, I sat in meetings with women twice my age.
Once, an older woman at work misread a harmless comment on my social media. My cousin, four years younger, was more like a brother than anything. We had written something lighthearted under one of my posts. But she chose to see malice where none existed. She leaned in with suspicion, not curiosity. Gossip slid from her lips, casual, almost polite, spreading like oil through water. Smirks became the new greeting. Conversations paused when I entered the rooms. Invitations stopped. For two long years, I carried the weight of their assumptions. I was no longer seen as a colleague or a woman with dignity, I was reduced to whispers, judged not for anything I’d done but for what they preferred to believe.
Years later, another woman in authority punished a minor mistake with a warning letter, no explanation, no conversation. I stood before her, tears clawing my throat, begging to understand. She watched, silent, until my pain bored her. The lesson? Some women don’t lead with empathy. They lead with wounds.
Fast Forward Eight Years
I was coming out of a deep depression while trying to survive an abusive marriage. On top of that, my body had started giving up on me. Because of weight gain, I developed such severe knee pain that even walking became painful. There was a time I could hardly get out of bed. Money was tight, and so was hope. I was slowly learning that healing doesn’t happen in a straight line.
I joined a Montessori school to start fresh. My walk was still unsteady, my leg was slightly twisted from the pain, and my body was still trying to regain its strength.
One afternoon, while passing through a corridor, I stopped near a side wall and saw something I’ll never forget. A few grown women were laughing and copying the way I walked. The limp, the twist, the way my body moved, they were making fun of it. Of me.
It hurt. Deeply. I felt something pierce my heart. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t cry. It was what it was. This was me. And honestly, I already had too much to deal with.
I kept showing up. Not to prove a point, but to survive. Some days, I smiled through silence. Others, I cried quietly after work. But in that slow, aching period, something was being built in something that didn’t need validation to stand tall. I learned to anchor myself in what I knew to be true. I realized that a woman’s worth isn’t determined by the stories others make up about her. And when the fog finally lifted, I saw it. Their mockery didn’t break me, it built my boundaries, my discernment, and my quiet refusal to ever explain my innocence again.
Some experiences don’t destroy you. They come to unmake who you were so you can build who you were meant to be. They pulled me apart like threads unraveling, but I wove myself back, tighter than before.
a note to you
The first-time women isolate you, you’ll obsess: What did I say? What did I do?
Hear this: It was never your kindness that was the crime. It was their fear of it.
You’ll meet women who judge instead of guide, who mock instead of uplift. Here’s the truth:
Some lead with healing. Others lead with trauma.
You don’t have to be like them to survive them.
One day, you’ll walk unapologetically. And when a younger girl stumbles behind you, carrying the same weight, you won’t laugh. You’ll reach back and say, You’re not alone.
Because that time, the wounds didn’t come from men, and I learned to heal them anyway.
They Touched Us Before We Understood Our Bodies
I still remember that mole on his cheek. The way his dark eyes never blinked when he called us to the back of the classroom. I was ten. A child. And he was my math teacher.
It wasn’t a one-time thing. It wasn’t a one-time fear. It was routine. Quiet. Hidden. I didn’t even know what the word “assault” meant, but I knew what terror felt like. Every time he called us one by one during class, pretending to check our copies, it felt like walking straight into a nightmare. My small hands trembled, my breath would freeze, and I could feel the other girls holding the same fear inside their tiny frames.
We were just little girls. Some of us hadn’t even hit puberty. We didn’t have the words. We didn’t understand the anatomy of pain. But our bodies remembered. And so did our hearts.
Sometimes he would call us into the staff room too, where no eyes were watching, no cameras recording, no adults to protect. Only silence. And him. Doing things no child should ever endure. No child should have to carry that shame, yet we did. Quietly. Invisibly.
And that wasn’t the only place I was hunted.
When I was around 11, my family had to live for a while at one of my father’s family friend’s houses. It was a three-story building, and we stayed on the second floor. Every time the bell rang, my sister and I would run downstairs to open the door. That’s when the predator would appear. Seventeen. Eighteen.
Hiding in the corners, in the shadows. Grabbing. Violating. Laughing. And we didn’t know what to call it. Only that we hated it. That we hated ourselves. I began to hate being a girl.
One day, something inside me broke. I came home shaking with anger and fear. And for the first time, I shouted. I called out to my mother and screamed his name. “Ammi, ask him to stop! Ask him to stop doing wrong things!”
My mother heard me. Really heard me. She didn’t shush me. She didn’t say “chup.” She acted. We moved out. She told his parents. She made sure he’d be shamed.
That was the first time I felt safe again.
Years later, at 18, I was in a public bus on my way home from university. A conductor started touching me in ways no stranger should. The bus was full. But silence has a way of freezing people, including me. Until that day. That day, I shouted back. Loud and clear: “Kya chahte ho? Kya kar rahe ho?!”
The bus went quiet. He went pale. And for the first time, they were afraid of me.
That’s when everything changed. That’s when I realized: if I don’t speak, they win.
I was only 10. I didn’t even know what words to use. I only knew I felt dirty, afraid, confused, and helpless. And now, years later, I meet girls who carry the same confusion in their eyes, the same helplessness I once did. The silence is still the same. The shame is still the same. The trauma is still alive.
People talk about women like we’re confused. They say we’re too emotional, too complicated, too guarded. But they don’t understand where that comes from. What do you expect from a girl who grew up being touched when she didn’t want to be? From a girl who was told to be quiet when she was just learning how to speak?
Some women never learn to speak at all.
And that’s the real tragedy, not just the assault, but the silence it forces on us. The way it makes us hate our own bodies. The way we start to blame ourselves for being born female. I remember being so small, yet so angry, so ashamed. I didn’t even know how to describe what was happening to me. I just wanted it to stop. And I wanted someone to listen.
It took 18 years to raise my voice.
And that’s why I see you. The girls who still live in that confusion. I see your fear, your pain, your silence. I know what it’s like to freeze. To run. To try to disappear. I know what it’s like to carry guilt that was never yours to carry.
And I also know the moment when something inside you snaps, when you finally scream back, and they get scared instead of you. That moment is real. And it changes everything.
You don’t become strong all at once. You learn it moment by moment. And the first step is this: it was never your fault.
To every girl reading this: You have every right to speak up, even if your voice shakes. I know what it feels like to be small, afraid, and unsure. But please, don’t punish yourself for the things others did to you.
Don’t hate yourself for being a girl. Your gender is not the problem; their actions are.
Tell someone you trust. Even if you don’t have the words, try. Cry if you have to. Shout if you need to. The first time I spoke up, I didn’t even say the right words; I just screamed, “Ask him to stop doing wrong things.” And that was enough. You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be honest.
To the mothers: Your daughter is not just your responsibility; she’s your priority. She needs your eyes, your attention, your presence. Not rules. Not fear. She needs love that checks on her gently. Ask her how she feels when she comes home. Ask her who she avoids in school. Ask her if anything made her uncomfortable today. Don’t wait until she breaks down. Don’t wait for proof. Prevention starts with listening.
Leave what your in-laws are saying. Leave what the world says. Look at your daughter. Until she turns 18 or 19 and becomes strong enough to fight back, you are her shield. Use it.
To the men reading this: If you have ever touched someone without consent, even once, don’t pretend you don’t know what you did. You knew. You saw the fear. You enjoyed the power. And now you don’t get to hide behind excuses.
If you’ve stayed silent when your brother, your cousin, or your friend made dirty jokes, harassed someone, or touched someone inappropriately, then you’re not innocent. You’re part of the system that protects predators. You don’t need my words. You need a mirror.
And if you’re one of the good ones, prove it. Protect. Speak. Intervene. Raise better sons. Be a father who believes his daughter the first time she whispers, “something feels wrong.”
a note to you
To the girl who is still quiet about what happened, I know. You didn’t have the words when you were small. And now that you do, you don’t have the trust.
Because what if no one believes you? What if they say it was nothing? What if they look at you differently forever?
So you try to forget. You try to act normal. You become the “strong” one, the funny one, the silent one. You grow up, but your body still flinches. You laugh, but some part of you still freezes. You talk, but not about that.
This silence you carry, it isn’t peace. It’s fear. It’s protection. It’s survival.
But you don’t have to stay stuck there.
You’re not broken. You adapted. And now, you can start unlearning what trauma taught you.
Here’s where to begin:
When something reminds you of the past, Don’t silence it. Sit with it. Ask yourself: What did I need in that moment that I never got?
And then give it to yourself.
Maybe you needed safety. Maybe you needed someone to say, “I believe you.” Maybe you needed someone to move you out of that house, that school, that place. Whatever it was, you can still give it to yourself now.
Through boundaries. Through self-respect. Through choosing people who don’t trigger your survival mode.
You don’t need to announce your story to the world. You just need to stop burying it inside yourself like it was ever your shame.
To the mothers, I know you’re tired. I know life keeps pulling you in every direction. But your daughter needs more than school fees and good food. She needs your eyes on her. Your arms are around her. Your questions, gentle ones. Your attention, the kind that notices when her smile feels forced, or her energy shifts around certain people.
Please stop thinking, “She’s too young to go through anything.” The truth is: abuse, discomfort, confusion, they don’t wait for a certain age.
So teach her: How to say no.
How to listen to her gut. How to tell you anything without fear of being punished.
And if something already happened, don’t silence her. Don’t panic. Don’t brush it off. Just sit beside her and say, “It wasn’t your fault. And I’m here now.” Because one supportive mother can stop a lifetime of self-blame.
And to the men, Understand that the women around you are not guarded for no reason. They have had hands grab them, eyes strip them, voices shame them, and they still show up.
So when she’s cautious, sensitive, emotional, slow to trust, know this: she’s protecting herself. Not because of you, but because of what someone else did, and no one stopped.
That’s the end of the free sample
You have read 12% of Healing without #Hashtags. The full e-book picks up right where this stopped.
- Unlocks the moment your payment clears
- Reads in any browser — nothing to install
- Subah Tasneem earns a royalty on every copy
Login with Google
