Sanah Ahsan
"There's lots of stuff I'm doing actually. I'm trying to think about things that might be more interesting," says Sanah Ahsan in a coffee shop in London's Edgware district. She's talking about using poetry and therapy to help develop a community space for queer women of color and the work is already interesting. In a conversation that acts as a process for untangling the intertwined threads of Ahsan's life and career, the psychologist, spoken word poet and activist examines the path that led her to become the inspiration she is today.
| Sanah Ahsan Spoken word poet and psychologist | Social Media: |
Ahsan's personal experiences with the UK mental health system made her realize at a young age that she wanted to be a psychologist. As she was going through therapy in her teenage years, she found it hard to communicate the complexities of her culture to the predominantly white, middle class therapists assigned to help her.
"There are different cultural understandings of what mental health and healing means for people," Ahsan says, about the language and words used to describe our varied experiences. "These cultural understandings differ significantly within the British Pakistani community itself, let alone within western psychiatric narratives. But, yeah, I think stigma exists across the board."
This reality made it hard to make sense of the medicalized narrative of Ahsan's mental health issues, both for herself and for her parents. "Even just going in and being told, 'you have 'x' label and this is the medication that you should take', didn't fit with what I understood was going on for me. And I couldn't go home and say that to my parents because they didn't understand what that label meant, and they didn't understand the need for medication. It was just a whole other world to them."
The more Ahsan saw flaws in the existing system, the more she was driven to train as a psychologist and make a difference from within, however challenging and competitive that might be. "The process privileges whiteness and being a queer Pakistani woman with my own mental health difficulties brought its own hurdles to the journey, for sure. The rejections and knock-backs I got just made me want to get there more."
Ahsan is still in her 20s but the way she addresses questions of cultural identity and the importance of community in one's life attests to her emotional maturity. "I think when I was younger, I made a lot of harmful choices but with time I learned to channel those things into more productive outcomes. But it's been a journey, I don't think it's linear," she says, continuing that it's been hard not to internalize the societal narratives that make one question their cultural, religious and sexual identity.
"There's a lot of stigma around women's health issues. There's a lot of stigma around being bisexual, about being Muslim, being a woman. It's definitely a journey to get to a place of pride and openness and learning to love those parts of yourself, to use them in a way that can facilitate growth for yourself. It takes time."
Poetry was a means of self-expression that helped Ahsan on the road to self-acceptance. Her older brother often played hip-hop in the house and Ahsan had an early ear for lyrics and the power of the word. Her first point of contact with poetry was Tupac's collection The Rose That Grew from Concrete. "I remember just being like, 'wow, this is such a beautiful form of self-expression!' The poem 'In the Depths of Solitude: Dedicated 2 Me' still to this day rings through all my bearings of managing multiple identities, feeling really conflicted with different parts of yourself, managing loneliness and shifting that into solitude." Ahsan was writing poems from a young age, without knowing that a spoken word scene existed. "I wish I knew when I was in my teens that this was a thing because it probably would have steered me away from a lot of bad choices," she says. "There's something about having a non-judgmental platform that allows you to wear your heart on stage in a safe way with a bunch of other people that are doing the same."
It wasn't until 2015 that Ahsan took part in BBC Words First, a showcase of spoken word talent across the UK. She submitted a selfie video with little expectation and ended up being one of 10 poets selected. Ahsan's first ever poetry performance was at the BBC. "When you're writing to perform, the content can shift if you get too caught up in thinking about delivery and the audience you're trying to reach and connect with," Ahsan says. "I think there's so much in establishing whether you're writing for yourself, for others to seek validation, or whether you're writing at the urgency of your message, and whether it's true to who you are and what you're feeling. I think that performance poets and writers on public platforms are negotiating these dilemmas constantly."
After such a smooth transition to her first stage appearance, Ahsan's entry into a Master's degree program in forensic clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College in London was more challenging. "I think that you have a really harsh awakening to the level of judgment in our society around people that have psychosis, schizophrenia and who commit crimes," she says about working in forensic services. "You hear that someone committed a crime and there's no empathy—only judgment, a punitive response. The reality is that people often do things because they had horrific life experiences as kids. They're still those young boys but they're treated like men and punished by the system like men in adult bodies. The reality is that they were never fathered or mothered like they deserved to be as young boys and have carried that deficit through life, and to some extent have been punished for that still, in adulthood. I found that hard to sit with."
Ahsan learned a lot through the program. Thanks to her Buddhist supervisor, she developed an interest in meditation and started practicing with the forensic service users as part of their therapy. "On Mondays, we were sitting in a room with all these men who had complex, shocking histories of offenses, things that are difficult to get your head around. We were just sitting there, meditating together in this most present form of love and communion." Ahsan uses mindfulness in her work and personal life to this day.
During her Master's, Ahsan started her ongoing research on different cultural understandings of mental health. She interviewed psychologists on how they work with people from different backgrounds in forensics, which eventually led to her PhD thesis on decolonizing the field of clinical psychology. A culmination of her work as a poet, activist and therapist, Ahsan's focus is on deconstructing the profession of clinical psychology. "So interviewing white, middle-class psychologists on how they understand the intersection of being white, middle-class and female," she elaborates plainly. "'How that impacts their work with service users within the profession on different levels."
Outside of her PhD, Ahsan is in the process of developing a community space for queer, Muslim women with Other Box, an organization advocating for diversity in the creative industries. Her goal is to create the kind of community she lacked in her adolescent years and help others overcome the toxic narratives generated by the experience of being 'different'.
Recently conducting workshops on self-love for women of color, Ahsan draws on her skills as a therapist and her experiences with mindfulness and poetry. She works closely with participants, teaching them everything from how to meditate to writing love letters to themselves.
"I've at times been on the brink of wanting to end my life for the shame around my sexuality and my faith. Faith is such a big part of my life and resisting that for so long was the source of so much unhappiness and conflict," Ahsan says. "Now I'm in a place where it nourishes me and influences every single thing that I do, in every part of my day, to be in this place where I can create a space for queer and Muslim women and put those two things in one sentence. I want it to be something that's co-created, like we are all authoring our own stories together in this space. Let's come together and create something that we all need. It's very fluid, and hopefully going to be informed by what people need and want from it."
Ahsan has also performed at Shakespeare's Globe for a program shedding light on Muslim voices called Voices in the Dark with a poem addressing her sexuality, her faith, and her culture. For the performance, she collaborated with Intermission Youth Theatre, an organization that works with predominantly young Black kids to engage them in theater and make the celebrated English playwright more relevant to them. The way Shakespeare explores love in his works, as a flawed part of the human condition can offer a lot of value to teenagers in an intense period of self-growth, at a time when they are transitioning into adulthood.
"My understanding of what love is, is nurturing your own spiritual growth and the spiritual growth of others," says Ahsan. "I want to be a part of that journey for people and support people to do that however I can; to find that narrative, to re-author their own stories. If I can be part of helping them find that pen and write a different narrative that is more healthy and loving, more nourishing for themselves, then that's what I want to do."
As for her own journey of self-love and self-acceptance, Ahsan says it's an ongoing process. "I think that with every single aspect, every single facet of my identity I'm still journeying with, but is it with more love? Definitely. Is it with more growth? Definitely. Is it with more learning? Definitely. Evolution of the self doesn't stop. It's a never ending journey."
Written by Andrea Kelemen
