There are roles that fit like skin and roles that cling like armour.
The difference is this: one breathes, the other bleeds.
We inherit these scripts before we learn to speak—provider, leader, martyr, saint, fixer, peacekeeper, ladder-climber—whispers from ancestors who mistook survival for living.
We rehearse them in boardrooms, kitchens, and in the quiet desperation of “should” and “must,” until the armour fuses to bone.
But armour does not protect.
It isolates.
And isolation is the currency of a world that trades souls for spreadsheets.
We learn to ask, "What is my role?" when we should be asking,
"What part of me must die for the answer?"
For years, I armoured myself as a “fixer” of broken systems.
I optimized hospitals to extract profit from the sick, rationalizing it as “duty.” I dismantled livelihoods in the name of “synergy,” mistaking efficiency for purpose.
I became like the people around me... we had everything, yet lived like we had nothing.
Trading our energy today for a worthless piece of paper tomorrow.
Scarcity disguised as ambition.
And in my personal life, I did the same.
I used money as proof that I was enough.
I didn’t know how to show up as I was, so I paid my way in.
Lavish gestures instead of presence.
Generosity instead of vulnerability.
Currency instead of connection.
The armour held, but the person inside rusted.
Until one evening, mid-movie, my son turned to me and asked
"Why do adults help each other hurt people?"
His words weren’t an accusation—they were a mirror.
Like Solomon Vandy in Blood Diamond, I saw what I had accepted as ‘normal’ reflected back at me.
I wanted to tell him I didn’t know.
But I knew. And I had been complicit.
I had spent years living inside a script.
But roles are not neutral; they are rituals—repeated until the sacred turns sterile, until the actor mistakes the stage for the sky.
The parent who confuses provision with presence.
The leader who trades integrity for ambition.
The healer who sells pills but not peace.
We call this ‘success.’ It isn't.
It is capitulation.
To wear a role is human.
To be worn by it is a kind of death.
Pause and reflect for a minute...
What does your armour cost your soul?
I am not the first to mistake duty for identity. My parents did too.
At sixteen, my father left school to work in the family business, believing it was what was needed.
At thirty, he gave up his return ticket to London—gave up the life that might have been—to build the one that led to me.
My mother let go of her dreams of teaching and traveling to build something more certain for us.
They poured everything into our education, sacrificing much of what they once wanted so we could have more choices than they did.
Their sacrifices laid the foundation I stand on today.
But foundations are meant to hold weight, not bury the ones who build them.
I learned to carry duty like a debt that could never be repaid.
I once asked a man who spent forty years on a factory line what he regretted most.
He sighed and said, “I let ‘worker’ become my name. Now everyone I knew is gone, and I’m just a man who polished metal.”
Legacy is not what we leave behind.
It's what we refuse to carry forward.
The systems we serve—capitalism, tradition, even altruism—are not sentient.
They do not care if you burn.
They ask only that you feed the flame.
But fire is not a master.
It is a tool.
Burn the armour.
Not in grand gestures, but in the quiet rebellion of a single question:
Who profits from my performance?
- The executive who trades shareholder returns for soul returns.
- The parent who measures legacy in laughter, not trophies.
- The artist who stops selling vision and starts living it.
This is not idealism. It is arithmetic.
→ Subtract the roles that demand your absence.
→ Divide your hours: less for the role, more for the soul.
→ Multiply what remains.
I no longer “fix” systems.
I help those who refuse to be forged by them—those who choose to shape themselves.
My job isn’t to save lives.
It’s to remind people they’re alive.
To replace the banal with wonder, asking them, “What makes your pulse quicken?”
Their power is not in defiance, but in the radical act of showing up unscripted.
You need no permission to do the same.
The world will call this naivety. It is not.
Naivety is believing the stage is all there is.
Wisdom is knowing you can step into the audience, where the air is thick with the smoke of burned scripts and the taste of something alive.
In this week's quiet moments, ask yourself:
- What armour have I mistaken for skin?
- Who pays the price for my performance?
- What breath waits beneath the rust?
Then—act.
Not tomorrow.
Not after the next promotion.
Not when your pension kicks in.
Now.
Start with the smallest “no”—a meeting declined, a demand unspoken, a script rewritten in the margins.
The first ‘no’ terrifies.
The second frees.
A role is not a life.
A cage is not a home.
My son once drew me as a bird rising from a suit.
Children know truths we’ve unlearned: that ash is not an end, but an invitation to begin.
This is the math they understand:
- Subtract the armour.
- Divide the lies.
- Multiply the light.
Our parents' hands toiled.
Our children's hands sketch phoenixes.
Yours? They hold the match.
If you could burn one lie today, which one would set you free?
We’re all unlearning something.
We’re all burning something down to build something better.
What remains is not a role, but a life—imperfect, unscripted, ablaze with the messy glory of showing up as you are.
The algorithm that quantifies your worth will not applaud.
Let it burn. Let it crumble.
What rises from the ash is yours to shape.
With you, through the flame and beyond,
Zaheer
P.S. Ready to spark a change? Hit reply and let's light it up.
P.P.S. If you missed my letter from last week, read it here: Where is the current taking you?
