The Power of Being Consistently Inconsistent

My professor of photography once advised: “Be either consistently consistent, or consistently inconsistent.” Standing now, at forty years of age, looking back at kaleidoscopic, wild detours, I am happy to report that I have been gloriously, deliberately, consistently inconsistent, and damn, has it made a colossal difference on this journey we call life.

Growing up in Karachi, I was encouraged to observe society, formulate opinions, and think critically about the world, rather than follow along like sheep. That early invitation to pay attention became an engine for assertiveness, and discernment, later in life. By the age of ten, I was writing for a local children’s newspaper about pollution, animal welfare, combating poverty and widening access to education, while earning cheques for my articles. Unaware at the time, that experience lodged itself deep into my psyche. Creativity, when pursued with discipline and courage, could translate into a viable livelihood. A life, built on one’s own terms, is a truth I return to, again and again, especially during challenging times.

In Toronto, I have worn many hats. I have washed dishes in a café, not gonna lie, the experience was genuinely, unexpectedly fun. I have shot nightclub photography in punishing lighting conditions, squeezing through packed, sweaty rooms for embarrassingly little pay, learning the skill of adaptability under pressure. I have sat on law enforcement, anti-racism panels and schooled police officers far older than I am. I have spent two decades specializing in creative portraiture, developing long-term trust with clients and brands, which has led to meaningful relationships, and artistic success. I have curated performance art shows, worked at call centres selling tickets to national art events, written and photographed for magazines and blogs, taught and assisted in academic institutions, managed social media accounts for local businesses, painted public murals, taught English to young students in Mexico and Peru, saved turtles on conservation trips to Costa Rica, volunteered in palliative care hospital units, and sold shoes and scarves from Pakistan at crafts markets in the Greater Toronto Area, all roles that have significantly deepened my skills in storytelling, audience engagement, attention retention and digital/in-person communication.

I want to be honest because this does not garner enough attention in our creative circles. Diversifying income is not a distraction from creative practice. It is, for most of us, what makes the pursuit of our practice possible. Financial stability is hardly a guarantee for artists. It never has been, and a majority of us are compelled to navigate contract work alongside dry spells. Every skill I have added to my toolkit, and every industry I have worked in has funded, fortified and forged my identity as an artist.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, I have pivoted to serving newcomer and refugee adults, seniors, and youth, within communities that are too often underserved and overlooked, at various nonprofits across Toronto. Non-profit educational facilitation requires the ability to meet people inside the complexity of their circumstances, rather than the simplicity of our assumptions, and privileges. Our skills in empathy have to be honed through cultural humility and intersectional awareness. That orientation now seeps into every project I lead, be it creative collaboration, pedagogy, public presentations of my research, and/or conversing with the communities I am invested in.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” (Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, 2005)

When the pandemic hit, and our world as we know it, paused, followed by wave after wave of political, social and ecological upheaval, many people froze with fear of uncertainty. The unpredictability of the day to day is legitimately terrifying. But some of us have lived through enough personal and collective disruption. Just months before the pandemic my family experienced the demise of my mother from cancer. To me, there can be no greater personal loss than the untimely passing of a parent. If I can learn to live with that, and still find semblances of joy and hope in life, then every other mountain feels relatively easier to ascend. I pivoted, adapted and restructured. I found new ways to work and earn, joined several communities and platforms, and vigorously kept exercising the muscle of adaptability, developed through years of consistent workouts in consistently inconsistent circumstances.

Health, too, has been demanding as of late. I face challenges that have forced me to reassess, slow down and reroute. With a penchant for structure, I sometimes have to let go of timelines, which isn’t easy. But here is what I am learning through this new reality, albeit at a slow and stubborn pace: my health challenges will not be the end of my ambition. I am being implored to reimagine, once again, and alter the shape of my dreams so that they can survive, and thrive, while honouring new limitations.

Failure is as much of a friend as is success. There are projects I poured my blood, sweat and tears into that simply have not reached fruition, and that’s okay. Collaborations with long trusted colleagues that have fallen apart, and that’s okay. Long-standing friendships that have come to their end, and that’s okay. Every experience has served as a lesson in deploying non-negotiable boundaries around respect: who to collaborate with, who and what to let go of, and how to grieve a loss without letting it become a verdict. I am not afraid of failure. I have too much history with it to be frightened.

For a long time, I wanted to be a doctor and that ambition has lived inside me for years while I’ve pursued other paths. Here is some wisdom I want to offer to anyone reading this: there is nothing stopping me from applying to medical school. Nothing. The door has not closed. It was never closed. I do not believe in dead ends. We allow external voices to convince us that time has run out, or that we are too old, or just not good enough, but those voices are not oracles, and they are not ours. They are simply background noise, and should be dismissed as such.

I love science. I love medicine. I read peer-reviewed journals on vaccines, disease, and modern medical advancements because I genuinely find joy in learning. I follow space exploration closely and learn about emerging, evolving scientific methodologies and breakthroughs with the same enthusiasm I bring to the arts. I believe in logic, rationale, and sound proof, that keeps my feet anchored to an objective reality. I choose facts over feelings, while acknowledging that feelings have their place too. I keep doctors and scientific experts close because there is always more to learn from people who know more. My path as an artist has not pulled me away from science. If anything, it has brought me closer to it.

This orientation toward science has also made me a vigilant steward of my own health, and the health of the people I love most. Getting every available and appropriate immunization, staying committed to sobriety, enrolling in cancer prevention programs, making deliberate choices that orient our daily lives toward disease prevention rather than damage control, all values invested in evidence-based living, practiced at home. I do not take medical access for granted in the least.

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style.” (Maya Angelou)

Apart from wanting to be a doctor, another passion during my younger years was acting. So, last month, on a whim, I created an online profile for performing arts, and within a few days of posting, I opened my Gmail inbox to a string of emails. Audition requests for films, television, advertisements and voiceovers. Nervous, but genuinely excited, guided by the encouragement of my dearest friends, I showed up, and I have since landed several remarkable roles, including a leading, dialogue-heavy part as a Muslim mother in a South Asian film titled “Not Broken” by filmmaker, Ali Naqi. Like, WHAT? Give me a high-five!

I guess what I’m trying to say with this long-winding essay and all of my scattered thoughts is this. Do not let anyone extinguish the passion that is alive in you. Not circumstance, not community or family expectation, not the passage of time, not the body’s demands, not the markets or the pandemics or the crises that will, inevitably, keep arriving.

I am not abandoning a single career path or creative experience that came before. No moment in life is wasted: dishwashing, nightclub shoots, door-to-door sales, anti-racism panels, portraiture sessions, teaching, acting, volunteering. All of it lives on and has prepared me for whatever comes next. We have to stop editing ourselves for the comfort of others and start trusting the full, robust breadth of who we are, and who we are cannot fit into tidy, neat little boxes.

My professor was right. Be consistently inconsistent. Let curiosity and courage lead the way. Say yes more than you say no. Trust that the winding road knows where to carry you, and that for some of us the path doesn’t have to be linear, or rigid, or fully planned out. The dots, as it turns out, always end up connecting, irrespective of where they land on the page.