My Story

I’m Tamanna.

I’m the youngest of four, born to Bangladeshi immigrant parents, and raised in Canada from an early age.

I come from a lineage that survived wars, colonialism, and migrations:

• The India-Pakistan partition

• The 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War

• Migration across continents

My ancestors rebuilt life with their bare hands. Their resilience is in my blood.

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

My parents immigrated to Canada when I was 11. It was a HUGE shift.

I spent my childhood and teens carrying two identities—and neither felt fully mine:

At home: I made myself small to be the “good Muslim daughter”—to uphold culture and faith. Don’t question. Don’t upset. Don’t be too much.

At school: I faced relentless pressure to assimilate, to belong, to 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—they all built into a severe identity crisis by 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, eldest of six, raised her siblings while still a child. Her childhood wounds showed up in her parenting—hypervigilance, control, the constant “what will people think?”

• My father, an orphan, grew up too fast. His survival mode became emotional unavailability, an inability to sit with feelings.

They were loving parents. They gave me everything they could. But they also gave me their unhealed patterns.

• The anxiety in my mother’s body became mine.

• My father’s emotional shutdown? I absorbed it too.

• Cultural shame for being “too much” or “not enough”? I swallowed it whole.

By 16, I was a panicked little girl trapped in a woman’s body—drowning in emotions

I had never been taught to process.

The turning point: I don’t blame my parents—they did the best they could.

But every day, I wished:

• I wished they had healed themselves so I wouldn’t have to carry it.

• I wished someone had broken the pattern before it reached me.

Then I realized: it has to start somewhere.

So I decided: let it start with me. I became the cycle breaker.

The Transformation:

Layer by layer, I broke patterns:

✅ I quit graphic design college when I realized I had rushed into it for approval, not passion.

Creativity was mine, but Graphic Design wasn’t my platform.

✅ I explored multiple passions and turned them into money making businesses and proved that Earning doesn’t just come from a Degree, you just need the right mindset and tools

✅ I got married pretty early in a famly dyanmic where we had to first have a career then arranged marriage

But I kinda did it the other way in :D Islamically correct. Alhamdulillah

Then I became a mother. Raising three young children unearthed my unresolved emotional triggers.

Motherhood became my opening ceremony to healing.

Instead of repeating anxious, controlling patterns, I chose radical presence and reflection.

✅ I homeschooled (which my family who were raised under the colonized education mindset did not understand)

my children and I traveled the world with them—breaking the “safe and small” pattern my parents lived.

✅ Everyone thought selling our house to travel with young kids was reckless. But my children learned: life doesn’t have to exist inside four walls, a 9-5, or fear of judgment. They learned you can live fully while honoring 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, friends, and familiarity to give us a better life. We honor their sacrifice by continuing what they started: breaking patterns and rewriting our lineage.

Our children will inherit a lineage where fear and survival do not limit their

emotional or physical growth. Insh’Allah.