Every morning, before the sun rises and the world opens its eyes, I step out into the dark. From Gujarkhan to Islamabad, my journey begins at 4:30 AM and ends late into the night. For the last 2.5 years, I’ve traveled to university using local transport through bitter winters, blazing summer heat, and the sacred stillness of Ramadan. While the world calls it dedication, I call it survival.

My name is Loveeza Fartashia. I am a university student, a daughter, a sister, and a woman navigating through a reality where independence comes with a heavy cost. My parents, peers, and even teachers insisted I shift to a hostel to ease my burden, but I couldn’t. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I was chained by the fear of stereotypes and a deep-rooted responsibility toward my family’s image. Every day, I face not just the exhaustion of the commute, but the weight of gazes, shameless, invasive, and dehumanizing. Stairs become stages for judgment, and buses become spaces of discomfort. My silence, they say, is strength. That I must ignore the comments, avoid eye contact, and hold my dignity by saying nothing. “Don’t respond,” they advise. “They will walk away.”

But one day, I was too exhausted to ignore. That man’s stare was unrelenting, his eyes a weapon. I stared back not with fear, but with fire. My silence broke into a death glare. In that moment, his expression changed, shock, then retreat. He never looked again. It weren’t just my eyes he saw it was a storm he hadn’t expected. That single act wasn’t just resistance. It was peacebuilding. Because peace is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of justice. True peace is not built through silence that suffocates, but through courage that confronts. Girls like me, millions of us, carry the weight of “maintaining peace” by absorbing disrespect and fear. But how can there be peace when the cost is our self-respect? Peace becomes “yummy”, truly satisfying only when it is craved, fought for, earned. Not when it’s handed out in exchange for our silence. Peace tastes better when it’s built on truth, not on buried pain. It’s not about enduring destruction but about transforming it. It’s not about avoiding conflict but resolving it by facing it.

Women’s empowerment isn’t about slogans it’s about the stories we carry in silence and the courage it takes to speak to them. My story is one day in a thousand. But it matters. Because every time we raise our voice even silently through a stare—we reshape the narrative. We reclaim space. We build peace, not with passivity, but with power.

To every girl traveling alone, every woman silencing herself for respect, I say: peace begins when you stop pretending that silence is your protector. Your voice, your presence, your strength, they are peace in motion. Because this is not just my journey. It is our collective fight. And peace, real, delicious, long-lasting peace only comes when we dare to stir the silence.

About the Author:

This blog is written by Loveeza Fartashia as a part of the Virtual Media Competition under the #FarqParhtaHai initiative, showcasing youth voices and creative expressions for social impact.