Middle Fingers Up

This episode is about shifting the way we think about our bodies — even as our day-to-day bumps up against old rules, comparisons, and messages (or should we say misogynies) we’ve inherited. 

We are here to challenge  the pressure to look a certain way, diet culture, celebrity trends, or "finishing the plate". It’s about noticing what our bodies are actually carrying and listening without shame.

Have you ever looked in the ...

Safe space. You’ve heard the term everywhere lately — but what does it actually mean? Who is responsible for the 'safety' part of the space?

In this gup shup, we sit with a phrase that shows up everywhere lately: safe space.

From social media to wellness circles to community conversations, the language is everywhere — but the experience doesn’t always match the label.

Looking at the roots of safe spaces i...

In this episode of Middle Fingers Up, we sit down with Rama Swamy, a pelvic floor practitioner and physiotherapist who immigrated from India, for a necessary and overdue conversation about women’s health — the parts we were never taught to understand, name, or advocate for.

Drawing from her lived experience with pregnancy, birth, and postpartum recovery, Rama shares how cultural taboos, education gaps, and the normalizatio...

In this episode of Middle Fingers Up, I’m in conversation with Farida D, author of The Shit That Made Me a Feminist — a body of work that names the lived realities many women are taught to swallow quietly.

Out of respect for her safety, this episode is audio-only.  Farida’s work — which centers women of color, power, rage, and structural inequality — does not allow her the privilege of visibility without risk. And yet, she...

The one where we stop pretending everything’s fine just to keep the peace.

In this episode, I sit down with Kam Bassier  (from Episode 136: “You’re Not Lazy, You’re Burnt Out”) to talk about a tension so many BIPOC adults are carrying right now:

Why are we — the kids of immigrant parents, BIPOC millennials and Gen Z — having conversations our families never could?
Why does naming pain feel like betrayal?
A...

Taken from South Korea as a baby, removed from his culture, and told it’s for a “better life” that he "wasn't wanted".  This is the reality behind many international adoptions.

In this episode, I speak with Moses, a therapist, advocate, and human being whose lived experience gives him a unique perspective on how 'adoption' functions as an industry of child trafficking. Through his work, he challenges the nar...

I came across Shawn Ahmed’s work the way so many of us do now — through a moment of laughter that quietly turned into curiosity. What followed was a conversation that went far deeper than comedy.

Shawn is a South Asian Canadian actor with an impressive body of work across television, film, and comedy — and in this episode, we talk about what lives beneath the credits. Growing up in that in-between space — being Canadian wh...

We’ve all been in rooms where the energy doesn’t match the claim of being a safe space -  overthinking, comparing, and surface-level talk are what tends to go down instead. I sat down with Arunie, Psychologist with PCHS Calgary and co-host of Brown Girl Problems, for a conversation that goes beyond surface-level chats. Arunie highlights the truth behind the pressure to turn trauma into currency, and what it takes to build connectio...

Reshma Kearney returns to Middle Fingers Up following Episode 128, where she first shared her experience of losing her husband to suicide and raising three children through grief. In this conversation, we go deeper — into what grief looks like over time, how it lives in the body, and how it quietly shapes our mental health, parenting, and sense of self.

We talk about grief as an ongoing relationship rather than something t...

In this episode of Middle Fingers Up, we sit down with Rahell, a 23-year-old mixed-race individual navigating identity, privilege, and growth.

Rahell shares his experience as a “passing white kid” unpacking whiteness — what it meant to belong in some spaces, and what it cost in others. He talks about how hip-hop shaped his understanding of culture, power, and resistance, and the ongoing work of unlearning misogyny with hon...

In this episode of Middle Fingers Up, I sit  down with Nisha Mody, the relational and trauma-informed coach known online as Healing Hype Girl. Nisha shares her raw journey from a childhood marked by strict expectations and silenced playfulness to navigating codependency in a marriage to an addict, ultimately choosing divorce, childfree living, and reclaiming her voice. Together, we get into the common struggles of South Asian women...

Be A Tiger is an episode about what it really means to grow up as a South Asian girl who’s told to be strong… while also being told to stay quiet, stay small, and don’t make anyone uncomfortable.

In this conversation with award-winning author Kelly Kaur, we step into the world of Letters to Singapore through Simran — this young brown girl who is trying to hold herself together as an immigrant student from Singapore to Calg...

Before we get into this episode, I want to name something real: there’s a moment in life when grief meets growth. Our guest Shri lived that moment. And today, she’s helping us understand it.

Grief has a way of interrupting your life—
but life never stops interrupting your grief.

My guest today, Shri, knows this intimately.
Within 18 months, she lost her father and sister… all while she was pregnant with he...

In this gup shup, I want to talk about something we don’t talk about enough —
rebuilding our relationship with ourselves during perimenopause.

Not the charts.
Not the protein grams.
Not the supplements or the workouts.
Those matter — trust me, I’m on top of them.
But I’m realizing I’m ready to focus on something deeper:

How do I stay in relationship with myself while everything in me is shiftin...

In this episode of Middle Fingers Up, I sit down with Christian Ortiz — Afro-Indigenous social scientist, technologist, and creator of Justice AIGPT — and this conversation hit me on so many levels.

Christian grew up as a latchkey kid in 80s/90s Los Angeles and later confronted internalized racism, machismo, and white supremacy in the American South. With  a fierce single mother, and a lifetime of asking “why?” shaped a mission bigg...

Ever feel guilty for not feeling festive?

The holidays are sold as sparkle and joy — and honestly, it starts in August the moment the gingerbread hits store shelves. The holiday decor floods every aisle...

But for many of us, what follows isn’t joy. It’s guilt — spiraling that we’re falling behind and it’s only mid-summer — overstimulation, pressure to spend, perform, and somehow stay grateful while losing our minds.

Maybe it’s the Se...

This one made me laugh, pause, and think.

I get to sit down and really get to know Calgary comedian and Planet Jerf host Jeff D'Silva—the stories behind his humor, how he sees the world, and the experiences that shaped him. We talk about biracial parenting, Calgary mall culture, and what it was like growing up Pakistani-Canadian in the 80s.

I first came across Jeff after hearing his viral South Centre Ma...

 Have you ever asked yourself why so many of us first-gens ended up dating or marrying white people? I have!  I see now that our immigrant parents’ survival strategies — keeping your head down, working hard, staying small — shaped ours. And for our generation, that survival often meant assimilation, performing the “white version” of ourselves — at work, in friendships, even in love.

In this intimate gup shup, I want you to...

Hey everyone, quick question — when was the last time you really talked about periods? Not whispered, not joked about… I mean honest, open, real talk.

If that made you pause, this one’s for you — and for the men in our lives too: dads, brothers, partners, sons… anyone who wants to understand better.

Dr. Anne  invited me to sit down with her as part of her month-long speaker series celebrating her book "The Pe...