The light of my phone is all that is awake with me as I continue to scroll the news about Zahir Jaffer and Noor Mukadam. Once strangers to me they are now present in my daily life. I’m barely able to compartmentalize my obsessive thinking about the murder.

It’s nearing 1 a.m. and I’ve come across a gruesome timeline of events of the last 48 hours Mukadam was with Jaffer. My 17 month-old baby sleeps next to me, his four-year-old brother next to him and my husband sleeps on the next bed with our five-year-old son. They are asleep but they are not immune to the sickness that I am grappling to understand.

It’s not the first time my nervous system has been hijacked by the news cycle. It used to happen so often in my twenties that I gave up watching news and decided to put my head in the sand; sure that I would get the news I needed through friends and family.

I know I’m healthier in mind, soul and body without the news media. It is clear once I get triggered by an event in the news my body and brain get on to a sleep defying maniacal train cart. I know I am not helping myself or anyone else drowning under unanswered questions, night long visions of horror scenes, obsessive thoughts, and intellectual arguments that keep me up but would put others to sleep. But I keep doing it over and over again.

This is one manifestation of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

How quickly a human tragedy becomes my petri dish of unresolved trauma.

This time I feel like I could have been her, especially at 27 years of age, when I lost a “stable” life and entered my PTSD with just a bare bones survival kit made up of superficial ways to cope with loss and grief. There I am, 28 years young, high and drunk most nights in an intense affair with an addict and all the dangers it brings.

I remember being new to the Karachi scene, naive and trusting. I remember dressing seductively desperate to attract men to cover the feeling of worthlessness I carried deep inside. I remember dancing into the well-oiled scripts of men who had perfected this game of catch and release. I remember the ways I was played and then rejected. All the times that life’s sliding doors could have led me to experiencing assault or death from an accident because I was with an intoxicated driver have wrapped around my nervous system like a snake.

For days after reading about the murder I was unable to push out obsessive images of the opulent house of emptiness that Mukadam was trapped in and her attempts to escape. I know too well the impunity with which a rich man is given unchecked freedom and privacy to rooms where he can hide weapons, imbibe a cocktail of drugs and have women sleepover. I know too well how a troubled and dangerous person can still find love and trust in a good woman.

Over the days I feel my neck and shoulders unclench as the shock of the murder passes and I can stop intrusive thoughts and images from coming at me during the day and night. My mind has become more spacious as some part of me seems to accept that I won’t ever understand why this happened.

Mukadam’s murder brought me close to smell the stench of my denial of how women are treated in Pakistan. They are being murdered in degrading and shocking ways every day but many of us in the upper class sleep at night believing those women are not us. We want to believe we are not raising boys who use women like tissue and can turn into monsters with power, privilege and access. We have bought into this insane belief that violence against women, addictions, and brutal murders happen in another sector of society. We amplify our superiority, believing we are immune to the power dynamic of patriarchy because we have credit cards, foreign degrees, psychotherapy, and liberal mothers, sisters or female friends.

Then the match strikes and the flames spread, wrecking what little peace we’ve maintained by hiding our ugliness under the covers.

All the shady characters we’ve implicitly supported, all the sexist jokes we’ve heard, all our friends who have lost their enigmatic being to a relationship of domination and control come to haunt us. I want to rage about the injustice against women until it extinguishes everything that I love about life. I want to think my way out of this scenario. I want to cover up my own insecurities, my own infidelities, my own judgments and my part in this grand drama of perpetual oppression. But I can’t.

A tragedy must mean more than just filling up our own weak centers with outrage and disappointment. Outrage starts to lose its shiny edges when it continually finds nowhere constructive to go. Outrage experiences an untimely death when with a right hand swipe of our Facebook or IG story we flittingly go from murder to a picture of the expensive meal made for dinner.

We must ask more of ourselves than just this hollow way to show up for the ills that plague us. We must ask where the sickness is in me? What can I do about it and how can I help myself? How can I arrive at a life of authentic activism and swim upstream in a society defined by capitalism, toxic masculinity, environmental destruction and consumerism when all my beliefs, comforts and ways of coping come from these obviously dead and decaying ways of life?

In my hope for change lives the experience of not putting my expectations for justice and fairness in the dunya. I know that things will only change a little even when facts show how far we are from being an equitable, caring, and safe society for women and girls. I brace myself for the reaction, the so-called “backlash”, to be belittling, violent, and rip away even the tiny space of mobility women have in our society.

The bird’s eye view of the scenario is helpful until my intellect cascades upon itself and I notice I’m barely breathing anymore. Then I reach out to a friend or tell someone how hard it has been for me to sleep at night. I take deep breaths and find anchors in my room. What can I see, smell, hear and touch? I turn to my journal and write everything without stopping to edit or think. I want to close the gap between my hurt and my current reality. I focus on the best way I can show up to be of service to a world that pulsates with ancient traumas even as it gives me the canopy to live under. I allow myself simple treats: A visit with a friend. A relaxing shower. A walk in the park. Today, I can do all those things safely. A heartbreaking number of women in Pakistan can’t.

If you or a woman you know is in danger call 1099, a 24-hour helpline set up by the Pakistan government in 2020. Save the number of your local police station in your phone under a pseudonym if necessary. Make a safety plan with a friend or a professional you trust for how you can reduce your risk of getting hurt at the hands of an intimate partner.

The writer is an Islamabad-based yoga practitioner and mother of three young boys.