Salma discovered she’d been doing it wrong at twenty-seven.
Not one thing—everything. Job interviews, dinner parties, the way you’re supposed to laugh at your boss’s jokes. The unspoken rules everyone else seemed to know from birth. She sat in her tiny apartment that evening, watching her neighbor Rina through the window, moving through her kitchen with the kind of ease that suggested she’d received instructions Salma had somehow missed.
“How do you do it?” Salma had asked Rina once, months ago, at the building’s stairwell.
“Do what?”
“Just… exist. Like you know what you’re doing.”
Rina had laughed, thinking it was a joke. It wasn’t.
The realization had started at work. Salma worked at an advertising firm—junior designer, quiet desk by the bathroom, the kind of position where people forgot your name between meetings. She was good at the work itself. Colors, layouts, fonts—these made sense. They had rules. Pantone 485 was always red. Helvetica always looked clean. But everything else?
Her colleague Nasir could walk into the creative director’s office with a half-finished idea and emerge with approval and a raise. Salma would present fully rendered concepts and get nodded at politely before they moved on. She’d watched Nasir operate for months, trying to decode his method. He made jokes at the right moments. He remembered people’s children’s names. He knew when to be confident and when to defer. It was like watching someone speak a language she’d never been taught.
“You’re too serious,” her friend Maya had told her once, over tea at a bakery where everything cost too much. “You need to relax more.”
But what did that mean? How much relaxing was appropriate? When did relaxed become unprofessional? The variables felt infinite and the formula stayed hidden.
Salma’s parents had loved her fiercely—that was never in question. Her father drove a CNG, saved money in a biscuit tin, made sure she finished her degree. Her mother cooked with precision, kept the house immaculate, prayed five times daily. They’d given her safety, education, values. But the other things—how to make small talk, how to know when someone was flirting versus being friendly, how to negotiate a salary—these topics never came up over dinner.
At family gatherings, Salma watched her cousins navigate conversations like skilled diplomats. They knew how to compliment aunts without seeming fake, how to deflect nosy questions about marriage without causing offense, how to make their lives sound successful without bragging. Salma either said too much or too little. Her silences felt awkward. Her honesty felt inappropriate.
“Why can’t you be more like Preeti?” her aunt had said last Eid, not even bothering to lower her voice. “She’s so outgoing, so comfortable with people.”
Salma had wanted to ask: How? What’s the trick? Did someone teach her or did she just know? But asking would only confirm what her aunt already suspected—that something in Salma’s wiring had gone wrong during assembly.
She’d tried learning. Read books about social skills, watched videos on body language, studied articles about networking. But it felt like learning to swim from a manual—technically informative, practically useless. The knowledge sat in her head like furniture in storage, never quite fitting when she tried to arrange it in real situations.
Her romantic life had been a series of misread signals and mistimed confessions. In college, she’d liked Arif for two years, only realizing he’d liked her back after he’d started dating someone else. “I thought you weren’t interested,” he’d said, genuinely confused. “You never gave any signs.”
What signs? What were the signs? Nobody had shown her the catalogue.
Later, she’d dated Imran for six months before discovering he’d considered them casual while she’d been mentally designing wedding invitations. “I thought we were on the same page,” he’d said during the breakup. Apparently, there was a page. She’d missed it entirely.
The worst part was the impostor syndrome that followed her everywhere like a shadow with commitment issues. At work presentations, she waited for someone to stand up and announce the mistake—that she’d been hired by accident, that she didn’t actually belong here, that everyone else could see through her performed competence.
Sometimes she wondered if she was slightly different in ways that mattered. Her mind worked at angles to other people’s straight lines. Social situations exhausted her in ways they didn’t exhaust others. She needed rules where everyone else operated on instinct. Was there a word for this? Was she broken or just… alternate edition?
Her therapist—a soft-spoken woman named Dr. Haque who kept too many plants in her office—had once said, “Salma, you’re trying to find the answer key to a test that doesn’t exist.”
“But other people have it,” Salma had insisted. “Look at them. They know what they’re doing.”
“Do they?” Dr. Haque had asked. “Or are they better at pretending?”
Salma had dismissed it then. Clearly, Dr. Haque didn’t understand. But the thought kept returning, especially during moments when successful people’s lives imploded spectacularly. Her manager, Farhana—so confident, so polished—had broken down crying in the bathroom last month, confessing she felt like a fraud every single day. Nasir, the office charmer, had admitted during a late-night deadline that he practiced conversations in his head for hours, terrified of saying the wrong thing.
Maybe everyone was translating. Maybe fluency was collective performance.
She started noticing cracks in other people’s certainty. Her landlord, who seemed to have life figured out with his three rental properties, mentioned he still didn’t understand his wife after twenty years of marriage. The shopkeeper downstairs, always cheerful and chatty, confessed he dreaded social events, found them exhausting beyond measure. Even Rina, perfect through-the-window Rina, once mentioned feeling lost in her own life, like someone had handed her the wrong script.
“I thought you had everything figured out,” Salma had said, surprised.
“God, no,” Rina had laughed. “I’m making it up as I go. Aren’t we all?”
Perhaps that was the secret everyone kept—that there was no secret. No manual, no instruction set, no hidden curriculum that separated the successful from the struggling. Just humans stumbling forward with varying degrees of luck and pretense, some better at hiding the stumbling than others.
Salma thought about the things she’d learned the hard way. Not to overshare in job interviews. That networking meant following up, not just collecting cards. That sometimes silence said more than words. These lessons had cost her—embarrassment, missed opportunities, painful mistakes. But they were hers now, earned through experience rather than inherited through osmosis.
And there were advantages to learning this way. She didn’t network with ulterior motives because she didn’t know how—so her professional relationships, when they formed, were genuine. She didn’t play social games because she didn’t know the rules—so people who liked her liked her actual self, not a performed version. She asked questions others thought were obvious—and sometimes discovered the obvious answer was wrong.
Her latest design project had come from exactly this. Everyone assumed the client wanted modern minimalism—that was the trend, the safe choice. Salma, uncertain of the unspoken preference, had simply asked. Turned out the client wanted something completely different, had been too intimidated to say so. Her willingness to confirm rather than assume had won the account.
“You’re different,” her new client had said, signing the contract. “Refreshingly direct.”
Maybe different wasn’t deficient. Maybe the manual she thought she’d missed had been full of mediocre advice anyway.
That evening, Salma made herself tea—the cheap kind from the corner store, not the fancy stuff Maya always insisted on. She sat by her window, watching Rina cooking again. But this time, Salma noticed the hesitation in Rina’s movements, the way she checked her phone repeatedly, the uncertainty in how she arranged food on plates. Not so different after all.
Life remained confusing. Job interviews still felt like performance art she hadn’t rehearsed for. Social dynamics still sometimes baffled her. But maybe that was fine. Maybe everyone was confused, just at different frequencies.
She opened her laptop, pulled up the design she’d been avoiding—a project that required innovation, risk, originality. The kind of thing you couldn’t learn from a manual because no manual existed for creating something new.
Maybe that was the point. The manual’s absence wasn’t a bug. It was the feature. It meant she could write her own rules, make her own mistakes, find her own way forward through trial and error and occasional humiliation.
She started designing. No reference materials, no templates, no prescribed approach. Just her instincts, her strange way of seeing things, her hard-won knowledge of what didn’t work. It felt terrifying and liberating in equal measure.
By midnight, she had something good. Maybe even something great. Something that definitely wasn’t in any manual because it had never existed before.
Outside, Dhaka hummed with its usual chaos—rickshaws honking, late-night food vendors calling out, neighbors arguing through thin walls. A city full of people, each navigating existence with their own incomplete maps, their own missing instructions, their own improvised solutions.
Salma saved her work and smiled slightly. Tomorrow she’d probably mess something up—say the wrong thing in a meeting, miss another social cue, misread another situation. But tonight, she’d created something real without permission or instruction.
Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was everything.