My Story

I'm Tamanna.

I'm the youngest daughter of 4 to my Bangladeshi immigrants parents.

I was raised in Canada from an early age.

I come from an ancestral lineage that survived empires.

British colonialism. The India-Pakistan partition. The 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.

Migration across a whole continent

My bloodline carries the resilience of men & women who rebuilt life after war & paritition

with their bare hands.

But resilience without healing is just survival—and I refuse to pass down survival mode as an inheritance.

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My Parents immigrated to Canada when i was 11 years old. It was ahuge shift for me.

I spent my childhood and teens carrying two identities - and neither one was fully me:

At home: I made myself small to be the "good Muslim daughter" who upheld culture and faith. Don't question. Don't upset. Don't be too much.

At school: I faced relentless pressure to assimilate, belong, become someone my parents wouldn't recognize.

I was never fully myself in either world.

Fear of judgment. Fear of disappointing my parents. Fear of not belonging.

It all exploded into a severe identity crisis in my late teens.

Here's what I didn't understand then:

I wasn't just carrying my own pain. I was carrying generations of it.

The Pattern: My mother was the eldest of 6 siblings. She raised her siblings while still a child herself. Her childhood wounds showed up in how she parented me - the hypervigilance, the control, the "what will people think?"

My father was an orphan who grew up too fast. His survival mode showed up in his emotional unavailability, his inability to sit with my feelings.

They were loving parents. They gave me everything they could.

But they gave me their unhealed patterns, too.

The anxiety that lived in my mother's body? It moved into mine.

The emotional shutdown my father learned as a boy? I learned it too.

The cultural shame about being "too much" or "not enough"? I swallowed it whole.

By 16, I was a panicked little girl in a woman's body - trying to make sense of two worlds, belonging to neither, drowning in emotions I was never taught to process.

The Turning Point: I don't blame my parents.

They did the best they could with what they had.

But I'll tell you what I wished for every single day:

I wished they had healed themselves - so I didn't have to carry it.

I wished someone had broken the pattern before it got to me.

But here's what I realized:

It has to start somewhere.

So I decided: let it start with me.

I became the cycle breaker.

The Transformation: I broke pattern after pattern and I still do it layer by layer:

✅ I quit graphic design college when I realized I rushed into something that was not for me. I loved being creative but Graphic Design was not my platform of creativity (rooted in my unmet childhood need for approval)

✅ I got married and became a mother - I struggled in the beginning with 3 small children. Raising them emerged a lot ofmy emotional triggers which I did not learn to cope with, nor were they met in my own childhood. Being a mother was my opening ceremony to HEALING.

Instead of repeating the anxious, controlling patterns I inherited, I chose radical presence & reflection

✅ I homeschooled my children and traveled the world with them - breaking the "safe and small" pattern my parents lived

✅ Everyone said we were crazy for selling our house to travel with young kids

But here's what I saw:

My children learned that life doesn't have to exist inside four walls, a 9-5 job, fear of judgment, and "what will people think?"

They learned: you can live a life you love while maintaining your deen.

In January 2025, my husband and I made Hijrah to Malaysia

- breaking yet another pattern our parents thought was too terrifying.

Our immigrant parents sacrificed family and friends to bring us to Canada for a better future.

We honored their sacrifice by continuing what they started.

They broke their pattern. Now we're breaking ours.

And our children? They'll inherit a rewritten Lineage where fear and survival does not hinder their growth emotionally and physically. Insh'Allah