Not because she didn’t believe she was, but because she noted that calling yourself a “lucky woman” reduced the undeniable hard work it took to get to the place and situation she was currently in. And by all accounts, I believe in this sentiment.

I feel that, as women, we can reduce ourselves to something smaller and more palatable, put a big smile on our faces after we achieve something tremendous and say, “I’m just so lucky”, when really, haven’t we created our own luck?

Haven’t we pushed against the grain to achieve our ambitions?

Haven’t we persevered when the odds are stacked against us?

Haven’t we rebuilt ourselves after losing our way?

Haven’t we shown the world what we really are capable of?

And truly, I ask these questions not just as hypotheticals, but as considerations and nuances in the argument of “self-proclaimed luck”.

Because you see, something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is that perhaps there are two kinds of luck women carry through their lives.

There is the luck we can create~ through ambition, perseverance, resilience, kindness, etc. And then there is another kind that existed long before we were born: something passed down from generations of women who perhaps wouldn’t call it luck at all, but sacrifice.

I think I have felt this most deeply since my Manji, my paternal grandmother (and the last living of my grandparents), passed away last September.

A few months after her passing, my Aunty called to ask if I’d like her sewing machine. Given I’m the only one of her grandchildren who took a career in creative endeavours, she found it fitting that it be passed along to me.

Growing up with South Asian heritage, from my Manji’s perspective, becoming a lawyer or doctor seemed to be the most appropriate path to take. And while she was still alive, I could tell that perhaps her understanding of me choosing a creative career did not make sense to her, especially one that aligned with her own journey, and one she pursued out of necessity, rather than one that, from her perspective, could secure prosperity for the family line.

My Dad, although generally quiet about stories of his childhood, recounted the many hours his Ma would spend at the sewing machine making clothes for her six children; stitching buttons onto items of clothing or mending holes. Details that, on the surface, seemed so ordinary, but at the same time, made me think about all the stories I would never get to hear; details of her life that existed around me, but that I had never thought to ask about while there was still time. And for that reason, I find myself, even now, listening differently when my Dad and other family members speak about her.

These memories are something I keep coming back to, perhaps because now I realise I have this creative expression with making, just as she did. Suddenly, this seemingly simple connection between us has emerged. And while I believe we may have inherited the same skill, we did not inherit the same circumstances.

I studied fashion and sewing because I chose to.

She sewed because she needed to.

In the wider context of things, it got me wondering about all the other women in my bloodline to whom I’ve been compared for their artistic expression and creative endeavours.

My Mum’s great-aunts~ whose presence resided in my family home through paintings, embroidery and tapestry growing up~ were spinsters who lived on an orchard farming estate and would spend their time, by all accounts of my Mum, painting and embroidering.

Me, a young creative myself, only ever understood this detail as fascinating: a little way to peer into the looking glass that was my ancestral heritage.

But now, I think about their lives with a little more complexity.

Because the truth is, for women of their generation, particularly those born before the 1920s, the possibilities for education, careers, financial independence and, let’s not forget, self-determination were far more restricted. There is no doubt they were born into a time when women’s choices were profoundly different from the ones available to me.

Art, embroidery, sewing and other creative pursuits could be passions, for sure, but they could also exist within the narrow boundaries of what was considered appropriate for women to do.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t romanticise their lifestyle, and I think this is completely normal to do when looking back at women from these eras: to imagine them painting, embroidering or sewing in their idyllic country house, surrounded by beautiful things. And perhaps there was genuine joy in those pursuits.

But I think there is something important in holding two truths at once. Their creativity may have been a source of freedom and expression, while also existing in a world that gave women far fewer avenues through which to shape an independent life. Their artistic pursuits were meaningful, but the fact that those were some of the avenues available to them matters too.

I think that is why these women in my family mean something different to me now, and why the items they leave behind aren’t inanimate anymore~ they are reminders that I can live this life because of them. Small trinkets and objects become so much more enriching to hold onto and inherit.

Because it’s not only my Manji’s sewing machine that has been passed along to me, but also two of my maternal grandmother’s sewing boxes. Before she was married in the 1950s, she was a tailoress.

These boxes, which I’ve had for 10 years now, hold tools, threads, remnants, buttons… all small and somewhat unimportant things that were kept because they might one day be useful, but now are even more powerful reminders of how grateful I am to hold a piece of her in my lifetime.

And given I’m currently living overseas, these boxes sit on a shelf unused. But a part of me is yearning for the day I return to those objects and find myself getting lost in all the possibilities: wondering what garment the half-used box of snaps was used on, or where she purchased the assortment of cotton thread that is practically impossible to find nowadays compared to its polyester counterpart.

In many ways, the same sense of connection lives on through another object I was fortunate enough to inherit: my great-grandmother’s sewing machine.

It sits seemingly unnoticed; in fact, it’s most likely in my Mum’s garage, in a box somewhere. Yet it carries with it a much larger presence and, like my Manji’s sewing machine, it is a tangible reminder of the hands that once used it and the history that is being passed down to me through it.

But perhaps what feels most meaningful is that I don’t just see their history in these objects; I see their spirit in myself.

I see it in the instinct to make, to create, to work with my hands, to turn an idea into something real.

But I also understand that I have inherited something more than their creativity.

I have inherited the belief that because of their lives, and the limitations they endured, I get to experience the opportunities available to me within my lifetime.

They lived within the moulds of womanhood that existed within their time and found ways to create within those boundaries, even when their choices were limited. And because of not just these women, but every woman that came before me, I have been given the opportunity to live with fewer of those boundaries.

I can pursue a career that fulfils me.

I can make things simply because I love making them.

I can question what it means to be a woman and decide for myself what that looks like.

So when I think about the sewing machine that belonged to my Manji, the sewing boxes that belonged to my Nan, my great-grandmother’s Singer machine, or my great-aunt’s tapestries, I don’t just see objects that have been passed down to me.

I see my lineage, and a path that has been forged for me.

I see women whose hands made things before mine, women whose lives were shaped by circumstances different from my own, and women whose creativity has somehow travelled through the generations to reach me.

I may have inherited their love of making, but I did not have to inherit their limitations.

And perhaps that is what I cherish most about them now.

Their lives remind me that the freedom I have to pursue my own dreams is not something that appeared from nowhere. It has been built by generations of women making lives within whatever circumstances they were given.

Their sacrifices do not feel distant to me anymore.

They live in the things they left behind, in the stories I wish I had asked more questions about, and perhaps most of all, in the parts of myself that I recognise in them.

I carry their objects with me, but I also carry the privilege of being able to take what they gave me and make something of my own.

And perhaps that is the part of this “luckiness” that I have never really considered.

To be born into a life where I have the freedom to decide what I want is really a kind of luck in and of itself.

And the sentiment of my trip, upon reflection, was exactly all these things. There’s no doubt about that. But something that stayed with me more deeply was this sense of contradiction brought on by a terrible event that unfolded between an underage Thai girl and a foreign Australian man.

I took this photo on Saturday, 27th June, less than 12 hours after officers discovered the body of 17-year-old Thanchanok Donhomla inside a suitcase near a railway track in Pattaya, Thailand. While I awoke that Saturday with excitement for how I was going to spend the last day of my trip, less than two hours away, a family had begun the impossible task of understanding that their daughter would not be coming home.

The news of Thanchanok’s murder came slowly, then fast, with details emerging of the violence that ensued... the day after spent going about his usual activities, the disposal of the suitcase, the quick attempt to escape and flee the country. What also emerged was nothing short of embarrassing (but also not surprising) for the Australian media landscape, which followed a “script” we’ve all seen before. His struggles. His loneliness. It was an invitation for the public to try and understand this man before we even began to understand Thanchanok.

The sentiment that followed on my side of the algorithm was the same... a mix of heartbreak, fury, frustration and sadness at how little we care about victims, and how much the media paints predators in a harmless light for their heinous behaviour.

I’ve had enough.

I don’t care about the tragedy of the man who killed Thanchanok before we’ve reckoned with the future he erased.

Every time conversations about women’s safety arise, it isn’t long before someone asks,

“Wait, women are equal now, right?”

I mean, sure, we have female CEOs, women leaders. Heck! Did you know women can even vote now? But in reality, this is not progress. It really is like a fancy smoke-and-mirrors trick. When you think about it, equality is difficult to celebrate when women continue to be killed because they are women. In fact, according to UN data, one woman or girl is killed by an intimate partner or family member every 10 minutes worldwide.

Can you take a moment for that to sink in?

At least one woman has died unnecessarily at the hands of someone she trusted, someone she thought cared about her, in the time you’ve read this. The way I see it, equality isn’t measured by how many women break the glass ceiling or move up the corporate ladder. It’s measured by whether they get to live full lives, and whether they can expect to come home safely.

One woman every week is killed by a current or former partner in Australia. And it’s the same cycle unfolding... we repost infographics, we yell and scream online about how this should never happen again, politicians make statements. Then another woman dies.

It feels like we talk about safety like it’s going out of fashion, and as much as I want to believe we’ve shifted the narrative from women protecting themselves to educating men on the importance of viewing women as people rather than objects of desire, it doesn’t feel like much has changed.

On the first night I spent in Bangkok, I was told I had to experience the nightlife, that I had to see a “show”. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been around long enough to have an understanding of the nightlife that exists in Thailand. Let’s just say there’s been more than enough middle-aged men you hear about through the grapevine (especially in a town like the one I grew up in) who go through their midlife crisis to “find” themselves in Thailand. But alas, I digress.

Put it down to naivety, but I followed like a little lamb, expecting something that had been sugar-coated for tourists; maybe a little uncomfortable, but ultimately harmless. Instead, I walked into a room lined with bright lights and louder music. Women stood on stage in heels and sequined bikinis, swaying almost mechanically to songs they seemed less than interested in. Some smiled when I passed them; some turned away without registering me at all. What caught me most wasn’t the dancing; it was the numbers clipped to their waistbands. Small plastic tags transformed names into numbers, making it feel less like I was watching people and more like I was watching a catalogue.

My first instinct was embarrassingly simple. I kept saying, “Are these women okay?” over and over, almost as if saying it enough times someone would answer. Even writing that now, I realise the issue is not about whether every woman in that room had consented to be there; it was that consent and choice are words that become far more complicated when poverty, gender and tourism all sit in the room together. Everyone around me insisted that the women held the power, that they were the ones choosing and profiting from their role in the place, but the longer I was there, the less convincing that narrative became.

Let’s be honest, consent and agency don’t exist in a vacuum. Entire economies have been built around selling the fantasy that these women are choosing freely, while carefully ignoring the circumstances that made those choices necessary. A woman cannot meaningfully hold power simply because she’s standing on a stage when, between her and the man watching, sits an entire architecture of inequality rooted in fetishism and sensationalism.

It would be easy to dismiss what I saw as something unique that exists only in Thailand, as though this entire structure were simply another cultural difference for tourists to gawp at before boarding a flight home. But that would be missing the point entirely. That stage was simply the most visible version of something much larger; the countless ways societies package the exploitation of women into something much easier to consume.

Priyanka Dubey writes in No Nation for Women about the countless women and girls in India (where one woman or girl is estimated to be raped every 10 minutes) who never report sexual assault because doing so often costs them everything... their families reject them, their communities ostracise them. In the eyes of their culture and beliefs, honour matters more than justice.

It would be comforting to believe that’s where the story ends, that this is a problem of culture or geography. That this issue belongs in places where there is “less development”.

It doesn’t.

We don’t disown women in quite the same way in the West. Instead, we dissect timelines, question memories, analyse clothing, drinking habits, past sexual partners and text messages. We ask why she didn’t leave… why she reported… or why she didn’t report sooner… why she didn’t scream for help… why she didn’t say no... need I go on?

Brittney Higgins, Chanel Miller, Virginia Giuffre, Anita Hill, Gisèle Pelicot.

Different countries. Different legal systems. The same instinct exists~ protect his future, question hers. Somewhere along the way, empathy became something women had to earn, while men received it automatically.

Which brings me back to Thanchanok and the stories we tell ourselves after an event like this unfolds...

We tell ourselves she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We tell ourselves he had a difficult life.

We tell ourselves women are equal now.

We tell ourselves that exploitation is empowerment because it makes us more comfortable.

We tell ourselves that justice exists because admitting otherwise would demand something from us.

Thanchanok should have been planning her 18th birthday.

Instead, the world is already trying to understand the man who made sure she’d never have a life of her own to live. Until our instinct is to centre the lives of women instead of explaining away the men who destroy them, we cannot keep pretending this is progress. Because when you think about it, the measure of our society isn’t how loudly it says it values women. It’s how quickly it stops asking them to carry the cost of a man’s violence.

When I look back at the photograph I took that afternoon, I no longer see a painting that is simply beautiful. I see a woman completely at rest. She isn’t being watched, she isn’t being bought. She is existing, just the way she is, being gently held by the water, free from the weight of the world. This is the kind of freedom I wish every woman could know in her lifetime, not only in living, and certainly not only in death.

Perhaps that is the world women have been asking for all along. This is the world that Thanchanok deserved.

Somehow, it’s been a year, which feels almost impossible and like I’ve only just arrived. One thing I’ve really noticed is that time seems to move differently here; days blend together softly, guided more by the rhythm of light and rain rather than by schedules or clocks.

When I think back to my life in Melbourne, it truly feels surreal; everything there was sharper, faster, louder. I’ve been back home twice in the past year and it was like seeing a past version of myself move on autopilot and to verbalise the life I was living in Bali felt like a fever dream. It was a weird comparison I found myself experiencing watching these two versions of myself coexist in time to say the least.

Now with that being said, that’s not to say that the transition here was easy. The first few months of adjusting to a new working life, new lifestyle and learning how to adopt a schedule I was not used to was hard. I found that even the smallest things, a delay, a misunderstanding, the chaos of traffic, would send my mind into a spiral of its own commentary and I’d just have to patiently wait as all I wanted was for it to quiet down.

In those early weeks of moving, I found myself searching for something to anchor me, a way to quiet the noise in my head and just be where I was. So, I made a small promise: to slow down and read more.

That’s why, when I packed to move here, I tucked The Power of Now into my suitcase. I mean for anyone who has seen it in hard cover back form would also think, it’s not a thick book, it seems quite achievable right?

Wrong.

I quickly realised that after picking it up, that it was the digesting of the ideas that was the slow process, I’d get halfway down the page and find myself daydreaming soaking up what I’d just read. And surprise, surprise, this book is sitting even now with a bookmark a quarter of the way in.

The one passage that seemed to stay with me though was when Eckhart Toile said something along the lines of. “If only women when menstruating could understand the power of living in the present moment.”

My first thought was, if only men could understand the reality of having a period. But still, the point stuck; having awareness of the body, of cycles and flow is really a portal to the present moment.

Life here has been teaching me that in its own way, every single day.

Now don’t get me wrong, even now I still have my off days~ moments when I’m impatient or clouded, but all I need to do is look around and see so clearly how lucky I am. Not just to live here, but to live the life that I do.

That feeling of gratitude has a way of showing up in the simplest moments– like on my daily commute. I still don’t ride a motorbike, even though I’m commuting to an office for work now, but what I’ve come to love is that there is something oddly comforting about being driven instead, it gives me space to think, to observe, to listen. Each Grab or Gojek ride feels like a window into someone else’s world and I’m reminded again and again how perspective shifts everything.

One particular lesson in perspective happened when I was on the way to Pottery late last year. The driver that morning asked where I was from. “Australia” I said. His response sounded surprised as he said, “Oh– I thought because your name is Rani, you are Indian”. This happens quite a lot I’ve noticed as my features don’t emulate the name given to me. So I usually have to say and in this instance I replied to him saying, he was indeed correct and I explained my mixed heritage as we drifted into the hum of Saturday traffic.

After some back and forth conversation, about midway through our drive, he mentioned he had broken his ankle. Then, he lifted his pant leg to show me; it was swollen, almost the size of a balloon. I asked him if he was okay and if it hurt. He shook his head and gently said, “It’s okay. It happened three years ago. That’s why I drive very safe.”

I thought at first that maybe he’d been mistaken or it got lost in translation, that perhaps it had only been 3 weeks or 3 months, but when I asked again, he reconfirmed it was in fact three years.

Three years.

I was quiet for a moment, thinking about how easily I take access to care and health professionals for granted and how different life would look if something like that happened back in Australia. But, he was calm and steady, there were no traces of bitterness I could pick up on, but instead only gratitude that he could still work, still ride, still move through his days.

It stuck with me though, I mean even now writing this, it feels surreal to think so deeply that you never know what other people are going through; not people who pass you on the street, or the ones that could drive you home, or even those who smile the widest. There’s so much resilience that exists quietly in this place, without needing to be seen.

That is something that Bali has shown me again and again.

These drivers, who are kind, patient and endlessly curious have become teachers for me. They encourage me to practice Bahasa (one driver in particular made me count from 1-20 in Indonesian an entire way to work one morning until I got every number right), teach me about culture, or another memorable ride was when a driver spoke to me about Hindu gods and goddesses and their symbolism in Balinese culture, stopping along the way to point out things to me that I’d overlooked before.

What I love the most is how these exchanges are never one-sided. There’s a mutual curiosity, a gentle back and fourth where we both become students in our own way.

They always, without a doubt, apologise for their English, even as they compliment the little Indonesian I can comprehend, and I always tell them it’s me who should be apologising, because I am a guest in their country.

And then somehow, no matter where our conversations begin, whether it’s language, culture, or the traffic, they almost always find their way back to my name.

For most of my younger life, growing up in a place without a large Punjabi community, my full name was something different, sometimes I would be afraid that it would be mispronounced or questioned (especially when someone would ask what my middle name was, and I’d say Kaur, only to be met with confusion or poorly disguised jokes).

But here, my name has become a bridge.

It’s a name that means something to people in Bali. Rani is familiar and it’s wild and welcoming to me that it can invite such conversation. For what once made me feel like an other has, here, become a source of connection. It sparks conversation about heritage, family, food and love.

And in those exchanges, we talk about (in my broken Bahasa and their more than often good English) their wives and children, their work and of course those who know always bring up Rani Muhkejee and follow up with the sweet humming of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, which I can’t help but smile; it brings back memories of my cousins teaching me the lyrics as a kid.

It’s small, but it’s everything; this exchange of joy, language, and shared humanness that truly grounds me.

I’ve had so many of these encounters lately, and each one leaves me reflecting a little deeper. It mostly makes me think about how much I’ve grown since I first arrived and how without grand moments of revelation, I’ve softened in ways I can’t quite articulate.

It’s made me think that maybe growth isn’t meant to be loud or obvious. Maybe it happens unconsciously, in the space that exists between my thoughts, in the warmth of a stranger’s kindness, in the realisation that life doesn’t always need to be figured out.

We are always unfolding, even when we don’t notice.

And perhaps that’s the real beauty of being here; that this place, and the people who fill it, have taught me how to live inside that unfolding and to truly learn how to meet the world with a little more gentleness every single day.

For me, having family in Kuala Lumpur, and growing up visiting meant I was exposed to this dynamic, and over the years, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have mixed feelings. At a young age, the novelty of playing in the outhouse room of the helper or washing our clothing in buckets was fun and exciting, then at primary school age, a person tending to your every need felt special (especially because it meant mum wasn’t ’nagging’ us to clean up after ourselves).

But through my teenage years, an uneasy discomfort would settle in me as I witnessed these young women navigate a strict, often dehumanising household hierarchy. Where in my experience it was most commonly in the form of my matriarchal grandmother yelling and shouting at a young girl for making the smallest mistake, and while so much of me wanted to speak up, I also had to respect the hierarchy and keep quiet and impart some ignorance to the situation.

Now that I’ve grown and have entered my late 20s, all these feelings linger, and the helpers I interact with on family visits to KL nowadays are more often than not the same age as me. These are women in their early to mid-20s who also like me, are navigating the turbulence that is being a 20-something-year-old, except, their reality is very different to mine.

And I cannot lie, I have had this feeling buried down deep inside of me that’s been there for nearly two years now, this feeling that hasn’t left me, which I don’t think I’ve felt brave enough to articulate till now.

I think it’s mostly heartbreak, but it is also probably a mixture of helplessness, sadness and a little bit of pity. It’s this feeling of overwhelming guilt that I get to live a full life where I can travel, have career aspirations, new experiences, try new hobbies, and even move to a country where I can live beyond comfortably, while their lives have given them limited resources, privilege, and access to pursue the same things we in the Western world often take for granted.

As women, we are constantly fighting for our freedom, especially in a society that consistently tries to silence us, politicise our bodies and belittle us as objects. But, growing up in Australia has meant my dreams and aspirations have been limitless. I’ve not been restricted to settling or had to make my glass ceilings lower and while there are a set of nuances in that itself, this gap that separates my life from that of the helper only seems to widen.

I recognise that these helpers earn significantly more than what they would back home in their countries, they receive food, and accommodation and in some cases, the experience of living abroad offers a kind of independence, a temporary escape from the confines of their home and family expectations. In many ways, it could be seen as an opportunity, but that is only one part of the story because when I take a step back, I can’t ignore the larger systems at play.

There is no doubt that this kind of labour while necessary is extremely undervalued. Domestic and household work will forever be viewed as lesser than the sum of its parts, and the dynamic of the ‘helper’ is shaped by legacies of post-colonial labour migration, deeply gendered expectations and an inherited class divide that determines whose dreams are valid and whose are simply practical.

Very recently on a visa run to KL, my cousin shared with me a conversation they had with their helper, a young woman from Punjab, India who just celebrated her 25th birthday. He told me that she opened up to him about her dream of going back to school to study hotel management. This nearly brought me to tears, because this wasn’t a small conversation, it was a glimpse into a future she has been holding onto as she spent her days folding laundry, cooking meals and caring for my nephews.

Hearing this stirred something in me. It reminded me that ambition doesn’t and shouldn’t belong to the privileged alone. Her dreams aren’t any less valid than mine, they are just harder to reach. And yet she still dared to speak it into existence.

I still don’t have the words to fully hold this contradiction. But I know this: every woman deserves more than survival. Every woman deserves to dream, not in whispers, but in a full voice. Even if the world hasn’t caught up yet, the least I can do is listen.