The Unspoken is a series about what’s visible and never questioned, and what’s invisible and never given a voice.

This is The Unspoken — 04

I was walking my dog last evening when it happened.

I was on a call. He was beside me — doing what he always does — moving at his own pace, checking in, present in the way only dogs know how to be.

But his body language got sad, and he became a little distant. Instead of doing his thing, he started pulling. A particular kind of pulling that I’ve learned to recognize — “be with me”.

He can’t say it. But I knew exactly what he was feeling. So, I hung up.

And as I saw liveliness and connection returning, I thought to myself — “He is such a good boy. He never complains.”

And then I got stuck — in the word, in ‘complain’.

He did in his own way. But why?

He was missing my presence. That was ‘his time,’ and he wanted me to be with him.

And in that instant — I wondered whether complaint is simply another language for an unmet need.

The Question That Followed

If a complaint is on one side, what lives on the other?

Without a moment’s hesitation, compassion flashed in my head.

It seemed obvious. And yet I’d never put them together before.

So, I turned it inward.

I looked back at every complaint I’ve ever carried.

What was the complaint really about?
What was I trying to say but not saying?
What was it that I was feeling and did not want to feel?

What Complaint Is Really Saying

I was a complainer for a long time.

My younger self had a particular fluency in it. Not maliciously. Not loudly. But persistently — in a hundred different ways, across a hundred different situations.

I never understood it the way I did yesterday. My complaints were a cry for attention.

Pay attention to me. I feel ignored.
Listen to me. I don’t feel understood.
Be with me. I don’t want to be alone.

I don’t think I was mature enough to understand, and courageous enough to ask. So I would reach indirectly, thinking that the complaint might get me somewhere. But it didn’t. In fact, I came to be known as a nag.

Underneath every complaint was just insecurity wearing the only language it knew.

What Compassion Sees Differently

Once I could see what sat underneath the complaint, I felt compassion first for my younger self, then for my dog, and then for the people I care about.

If I were to be a complainer, what would I say?

But if I hold it with compassion, what do I see now that I didn’t see before?

Not every complaint comes from the same place.

Some come from entitlement.
Some from resentment.
Some from habit.

And some come from something far quieter — loneliness, fear, invisibility, the ache of not knowing how to ask.

What Compassion Actually Does

Compassion opens us up to see what is really going on underneath.

The partner who is physically present but mentally elsewhere…
…may be carrying something they haven’t found words for. Or don’t yet feel safe saying.

The friend who talks about everything except themselves…
…may be circling what hurts, hoping you’ll ask what they cannot.

The father who keeps repeating himself…
…may not simply be frustrated. He may be afraid he is no longer being heard.

The mother who gives everything and insists she needs nothing…
…may have learned that asking feels heavier than carrying.

The person who shifts blame quickly…
…may be protecting themselves badly.

Compassion sometimes helps us see beyond the behavior in front of us.

And suddenly, you may see more than the behavior.

What they’re carrying.
What they’re not saying.
What they may not know how to ask for.

Compassion doesn’t excuse behavior.
But it changes what we think we’re looking at.

The Message

My dog didn’t complain. But I saw him. And in feeling my presence, his prancing came back.

Sometimes, underneath the complaint, that’s what’s waiting.
To be seen. To be met. To have someone hang up the call and just — be there.

The complaint isn’t the enemy. It’s the messenger.

It deserves compassion. Not judgment. Not fixing.

Just the willingness to hold space and look at it clearly —

What are they really saying?

And what would change if I met it with compassion rather than hitting back with annoyance or avoidance?

Where in your life is a complaint waiting to be met with compassion?
I’d love to know what you find.

This piece doesn’t end here. Neither does the conversation. It is the start of a questioning.

The Unspoken is a series about what’s visible and never questioned, and what’s invisible and never given a voice.

This is The Unspoken — 03

There is a particular kind of weight that comes with the word ‘responsibility’.

You know it. The work call that runs late on the same evening your child has a recital. The meeting you had to skip because something or someone else needed your attention right that minute.

The guilt that follows you because — you left something unattended.

What is it like for you when that one value, one word — responsibility — splits you into two?

Here’s What I Have Seen

Clients — mostly women, but some men too — vocalizing their thoughts in a safe space.

“I’m a good parent.
I have a job I’m responsible for.
This project needs my attention more.”

Then comes the whisper — “I’m doing the best I can.”

An attempt to silence the part of themselves that has chosen one over the other.

And that weight is heavy.

The person torn between the responsibilities to work and to home isn’t confused.

It’s the weight of the choices they are carrying.
The grief of having to make that choice.
The feeling that — they are not enough.

And that begs a deeper question.

What Does Responsibility Mean?

Does it mean ensuring everything is taken care of? Or does it mean doing everything yourself?

Somewhere along the way — through culture, societal expectation and pressures, through the stories we were told about what a good parent or a good professional looks like — they got collapsed into one.

And so the only way to feel responsible became:
be physically present, mentally available, emotionally engaged, everywhere, simultaneously, all the time.

Which is impossible.

And so that conflict, which eventually becomes a tight knot or a heaviness, continues to tighten and grow heavier — being attended to only when it becomes too much to hold.

When you say responsibility is your core value — what does it actually mean to you?

But what if responsibility means something else?

Perhaps the question isn’t work versus home at all.

The shift is — what actually needs my direct attention right now?
And where can responsibility be expressed through trust, through delegation, through ensuring rather than doing?

The parent who stays late but has ensured their child is safe and cared for hasn’t abandoned their responsibility. They’ve expressed it differently.

The professional who leaves early for something that matters but has ensured their team has what they need — same.

Responsibility is the outcome. Not the method.

Why The Reframe Is Harder For Women

Now here’s where it gets complex and begins to create differences.

For many women, the reframe doesn’t land as relief.
It lands as another layer of complexity.

Because the choice — stepping back, delegating, trusting someone else with a part of what you’re responsible for — carries a completely different weight depending on who makes it.

A mother who is not physically present is labeled as absent. As having chosen wrong.
A father who does the same is progressive. Involved when he shows up.

A woman who steps back from a meeting, delegates a task, and leaves early — uncommitted. Not serious enough.
A man who does the same — balanced. Mature. Setting boundaries.

The value is identical. The judgment is not.

And there is something else — something that rarely gets named.

When a man delegates his parental responsibility, there is almost always a woman absorbing it — A partner. A mother. A mother-in-law.

The responsibility doesn’t disappear. It transfers. Usually, to another woman.

When a woman delegates — she has to find the support, organize it, provide the brief, trust that it will be under control, and manage the guilt of having needed it at all.

Not just that — the labor that was just assigned to someone else, and if another woman, she is subjected to another layer of judgment.

“What is so important that you have to do it yourself?”

“You need to learn to manage your time. You can’t expect others to keep stepping in?”

And then comes the big killer.

“Is work more important than your child?”

The labor of delegating or asking for support is another form of labor and judgment.

Which is why she often just does it herself.
Which is why the knot stays and tightens.

This is not every story. But it is a pattern many will recognize.

The Fine Line

But inherited definitions of responsibility are not uniquely a woman’s burden. They simply show up differently.

Men inherit versions of responsibility, too.
Ones they never chose and rarely question.

The eldest son becomes the financial backbone for aging parents, not because he decided to, but because that is what the eldest son does.

Or the son who had to give up on his dreams and passions because he was in line to take over the family business.

Or the partner who works without pause, misses weekends, skips the school runs, not because he doesn’t care, but because somewhere he absorbed the belief that providing is caring.

His presence is measured in what he brings home, not whether he comes home early.

He didn’t write that definition of responsibility.
It was handed to him.
And questioning it can feel like abandoning the people who depend on it.

The weight looks different.
The knot sits in a different place.
But it is a knot nonetheless.

And that story deserves its own voice.

So if you’re a man reading this — I’d love to know how responsibility sits with you. What version of it were you handed? And does it still fit?

The Question Worth Sitting With

Responsibility as a value doesn’t ask you to do everything.
It asks you to care enough to ensure it’s done.

That distinction — small as it sounds — can be the difference between a life lived under the weight of an impossible standard and a life lived in honest, conscious care.

The question isn’t — “How do I do it all?”

The question is —
“What does responsible care actually look like for me? And is it my version or the version handed down to me?”

Because that second question — the one about who defined it — is usually where everything starts to shift.

This piece doesn’t end here. Neither does the conversation. It is the start of a questioning.

Follow me and subscribe to The Unspoken: What’s visible and never questioned. What’s invisible and never given a voice.

The Unspoken is a series about what’s visible and never questioned, and what’s invisible and never given a voice.

This is The Unspoken 02

I spent two decades inside the luxury world. Recently, a show — Your Friends & Neighbours — rendered it so precisely I couldn’t stop thinking about what it got right. Not the plot. The notes beneath the surface. The larger question.

This piece isn’t about the show. It’s about what it reveals — about identity, and what we entrust it to.

There is a feeling that the show never names directly.

It doesn’t need to.

It lives in the way Coop moves — the decisions he makes, the risks he takes, the lengths he goes to. It lives in his silence and the silence of his wife.

While it may appear to be a dark comedy about a wealthy man who turns to theft — there’s something deeper running alongside.

A precise, layered portrait of what luxury actually means to the people who own it and live inside it.

And it isn’t what they own.
It is what owns them. Almost in a possessed way.

When Identities Begin To Blur

High-end, almost impossibly achievable objects are never just objects.

They are the language people use to make sense of what they have built and where they have arrived — to themselves and to others.

Strip them away, and what remains is a void.

Not a financial loss. Something deeper.
An identity loss. A worth loss.

The show depicts this through Coop with an uncomfortable precision.

When Coop loses his job — after already losing his marriage — he loses, in his mind, what he had spent half a lifetime building. A place for himself in elite circles. An image that came with everything he had built.

He had assets he could have leveraged. The mansion. The Maserati. The Rolex Daytona. Possessions that could have funded a quieter, rebuilt life.

But his identity was so fused with his possessions that when one was gone, the other did not quite hold its shape. It is also the kind of disorientation and loss that comes with midlife.

It mirrors a reality many will recognize.

How sometimes it is harder to pick yourself up, shake off the dirt, and move forward than it is to hold on to what once was.

To protect the image of a self that may no longer exist.

The Legacy In Question

Not everyone in that world carries the same relationship to what they own.

Those born into generational wealth wear their possessions as identity.

They have not experienced the fight their ancestors fought to build what was passed to them. There is pride here — deep and unquestioned. But also a particular kind of fragility. A self built entirely on inheritance has never had to answer the question of what it would do to earn it.

Then there are those who built it themselves, who carry something different.

Each object marks the distance traveled. It is validation and self-worth made tangible — proof that the gap between where they started and where they now stand is real, and is theirs.

The feeling isn’t ‘look what I have’.
It is ‘look who I turned out to be’.

And then there is the next generation — the ones who receive both the inheritance and the history.

The backstory of what was built, how, and what it cost. Thrust into the experience of it before they fully understand what they are holding.

The show depicts this moment with quiet precision — when Coop places his Daytona in his son’s hands.

What is being passed is not the watch. It is evidence of a life.
The son receives an object.
The wife reads an entirely different moment.
She knows instantly what that piece cost to acquire, what it represented to the man who wore it, and what it means that he is now placing it in their child’s hands.

But here’s another layer.

The younger generation today exists in a different register entirely.

The logo is not the point. Their value architecture is simpler and more honest — they will own what they own for the purpose it serves. A watch tells time. Whether it costs $1,000 or $100,000, the purpose is to tell time.

But when the stories and histories are passed down, they may not fully feel their weight. And yet they wear it with pride. Because of what it meant to the person who placed it in their hands. (A moment also depicted in the show).

The moment when first-generation wealth becomes generational wealth doesn’t happen in a bank transfer or a legal document.

It happens quietly. In a moment like this. Witnessed by someone who knows exactly what it means.

These are not status symbols at that point.
They are ceremonies.

What Is Being Protected Vs. Not

The show gives us one image that makes all of this visceral.

Coop goes in for the Birkin. But there isn’t one. There is a collection — sitting behind a digital vault with its own passcode. The protection around it is a direct reflection of the lengths people go to in order to guard what gives them identity and status.

And that frame led me to a much deeper questioning:

What lengths are we willing to go to protect our true identity — our values, our self-respect, our self-trust, our humanity within?

We protect the tangible. And forget the intangible.
The objects get the vault. The self goes unguarded.

There is a question this piece keeps circling back to.
And it isn’t about luxury. It is about legacy.

What does your legacy mean to you — and for the generation that comes after?

I am getting close to 50. I do not have children. I live with an unpredictable critical illness — one that reminds me regularly that I do not know how long I will have my mind, my words, my ability to build.

So I build differently.

Through The Unspoken. Through @preetikurani.com. Through every question, I am willing to ask out loud. Through the people I work with, their true selves that get invoked, and the thinking I leave behind.

That is my legacy. Piece by piece.

What is yours?

When Life Dismantles Who We Were

There is a moment — in any life — when the version of yourself you built stops holding.
The job. The status. The world that recognized you. Gone.

And in that moment, three things reveal themselves.

1/ Who do we become when life throws us a curveball?

Here is what the show reveals.

When the things we hold so closely to us — possessions, status, relationships —collapse, we don’t lose objects or people; we lose our identity. We lose the clarity of who we are.

Coop’s wife betrayed him. That was her choice. But what followed was his.

He walked out of the marriage. And then — more quietly, more devastatingly — he walked out on his children. Didn’t fight for them. Didn’t stay in the wreckage long enough to be their father through it. The daughter felt it and said it much later. The son never spoke about it.

We go to extraordinary lengths to protect what makes us feel worthy — and walk away from the people who need us to stay.

2/ What are we choosing when life presents us with a choice?

The door for Coop opened.
His old job. Offered back. On his terms.

The legitimate path. The return to the world that had once rejected him — a rare chance to rebuild.

He didn’t take it.

Was it the disconnect he experienced with his earlier life or the thrill of the new one, despite the danger?

We unconsciously make innumerable choices every day — through how we think, how we respond, what we eat to nourish ourselves, and what we feed our souls. Every moment is a choice.

What are we really saying no to when we say yes to something that doesn’t serve us?

3/ Our resilience.

Resilience is not a decision.
It is what is needed after something unexpected happens or something unknown breaks.

The show doesn’t offer a clean answer here — and it can’t.

Because real resilience rarely looks like a turning point. It looks like a person standing in the rubble of everything, holding the one thing they can’t sell — their soul — and asking:

Who am I if I put my soul down?
And is that person someone I can live with?

So here’s something I’d like to leave you with.

What are you choosing when life dismantles who you are?
What are you fighting for and what are you walking away from?
And how much of that is conscious — and how much is just the path of least pain?

This piece doesn’t end here. Neither does the conversation. It is the start of a questioning.

Follow me and subscribe to The Unspoken: What’s visible and never questioned. What’s invisible and never given a voice.

The Unspoken is a series about what's visible and never questioned, and what's invisible and never given a voice.

This is The Unspoken 01

A question came up recently.

Quietly. Almost in passing.

“Can women have it all?”

I’ve heard it before.

But this time it stayed with me. Not because I didn’t have a view. Because something about the question itself didn’t sit right.

So I did what I do when something won’t leave me alone.

I flipped it.

Can men have it all?

And then I looked at the men in my life.

Some are building exactly what they want. Some are managing. And some — more than I had consciously registered — are carrying just as much as the women I know.

Quietly. Without language for it. Without anyone asking.

Which made me wonder why we ever made this a woman’s question at all.

Why Women Are Asking

Women have been vocal about this for a long time now.

Not because the struggle belongs only to them. But because the question got attached to a gender — and stayed there.

Here’s why.

When women began entering spaces never (intentionally) designed for them — boardrooms, leadership roles, careers that demanded singular focus — the tension became visible in a way it never had before.

Because a woman in that room came with an assumption attached.

That her attention will be divided. That home will come first.

And that assumption comes from association.

The school runs. The mental load of remembering everything for everyone. The default parent. The one who notices when the household is holding together — or quietly falling apart.

Not because women chose this.

Because culturally, this was never considered a man’s responsibility.

There are exceptions. But that is what they are. Exceptions.

And then there’s another assumption — that a woman’s ambition and performance drive won’t be the same as a man’s. The opportunities are fewer. The path to the seat is harder.

So when we ask “can women have it all,” what we are really asking is: why does ambition have to look different on a woman?

Now Flip It

Men were handed something at birth too.

Not a question. An identity.

Provider. Breadwinner. The one whose ambition is non-negotiable. Whose focus on work isn’t a choice — it’s what they should do, by default. Whose worth is measured in output, in progression, in never slowing down.

Not having ambition isn’t viewed kindly.

Choosing presence over promotion isn’t in the script.

And so men who feel the pull — toward home, toward stillness, toward something other than forward momentum — make their choices quietly.

And yet saying it out loud risks something they’ve been told their whole lives is foundational.

Their standing. Their identity. What a man is supposed to be for.

So the choice gets made. But never named.

Women agonize out loud — and get judged for the agonizing.
Men decide in silence — and get judged if the silence ever slips.
Neither is free.

The Reality

Sure, the world is moving. Men are making different choices. Women are claiming seats they were never offered. That is progress.

But progress for whom?

Women represent 43% of the global workforce — yet hold just 30% of leadership positions. Only 6% of CEOs globally are women. Just 8% of boards are chaired by a woman. 106 countries have never had a female head of state.

The roles are reversing — but only at the edges. Structurally and culturally, the norm hasn’t moved nearly as much as the conversation suggests.

So yes — the world is changing.

But what percentage of the world’s population is actually living that change?

The Real Challenge

We don’t choose our gender roles.

They are handed to us. Quietly. Thoroughly. From the very beginning.

Through the stories we are told, before we can question them.
Through the expectations that arrive so early, they stop feeling like expectations at all.

They simply feel like the way things are.

But what if we stepped back?

Not politically. Not ideologically.
Just — humanly.

What if we allowed nature rather than culture to shape the choices people make?

What if the woman who wants to build something chose to — fully, without apology?

What if the man who wants to be present at home made that choice openly, without it costing him everything?

We would have more conscious choices. More honest ones. More lives actually lived — rather than performed.

Why The Gap Remains — And Why The Question Still Persists

The consequences are not equal.

When a woman returns to the workforce, slows down, takes a sabbatical, or chooses to be present for her family — the gap follows her.

It becomes the thing people reference. The question in the room nobody quite asks out loud. She has to re-prove herself. Her commitment. Her capability. Her seriousness.

When a man makes the same choice, his identity remains intact. Stepping back doesn’t redefine him. Success still travels with him.

This is not personal. It is structural. The direct consequence of identities assigned at birth and never questioned.

And yet.

Here is the question worth asking —

Where are we complicit in our own diminishment?

Not through weakness. Through habit.

The apologetic qualifier before stating a choice. The over-explanation nobody asked for. The framing of a deliberate decision as something that needs to be justified — to a room, to an employer, to ourselves.

Because if we don’t own the choice, we can’t stand in it. And if we can’t stand in it, we walk back into the room already smaller — before anyone else has said a word.

The structural barrier is real.
The inner work is equally real.

One without the other only gets us halfway.

What I Know

I have made choices consciously throughout my life. And yet — I was never devoid of questioning them.

Moments when health needed more attention. Moments when home came forward. Moments when something else moved to the background because it needed to.

Even making them consciously, there were fears.

How would the gaps be seen? How was I being seen?

I reasoned with myself. I apologized to others. Even when the choice was right.

No one is devoid of the emotions that come with this.

But as I write this piece, something shifted in me.

I don’t have to feel apologetic.

These choices were mine to make. And I made them. They don’t make me less of a person, less of a woman, less of anything.

That is what it actually looks like to have it all.

Not everything at once. But the full range of a life — moved through with intention.

Something will always be in the foreground. Something else will be held quietly behind. And the understanding that what sits in the background is not gone. It’s waiting.

So when women say they can’t have it all — this is where that comes from.

Not weakness. Not failure.

So, “can women have it all” was never the right question.

The right question is, “Can anyone have it all”?

And perhaps even that doesn’t resolve.

Because having it all assumes a full arc. And not everyone gets one.

So maybe it stays open. Hanging. A question we live inside rather than answer.

Can anyone have it all?
I’d like to know where this lands for you.

This piece doesn’t end here. Neither does the conversation. It is the start of a questioning.

Follow me and subscribe to The Unspoken: What’s visible and never questioned. What’s invisible and never given a voice.

P.S. With thanks to Apoorva Deshingkar, whose honest perspective on the man’s side of a story made the thinking sharper.