Aisha Mirza: Teaching us that misery loves company

For those constantly shrouded in cognisance of the world’s injustices, Aisha Mirza is a name to know. They’re a writer ensuring recognition and creating room for people of colour, Black people, and people who exist outside the binaries of gender – in every realm they permeate. Pakistani and Egyptian, Mirza is a writer, DJ counsellor and creator of a sober night club and mental health group for QTIBPOC people in London. 

After earning a scholarship to NYU in 2014, Aisha studied mental health and art, having spent time struggling in various mental health facilities themselves. Drawing from their experience in these institutions, they went on to work as a social worker to support those with complex mental health issues in Manhattan, spending their nights working at Bellevue Hospital.

In parallel with helping society’s most vulnerable, Aisha began writing and publishing prolifically. Their work soon cropped up in Buzzfeed, The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times, Vice, Cosmopolitan, Black girl Dangerous, Media Diversified… The list goes on. That brought them to begin working as an advice columnist for gal-dem – a popular magazine which retired last year – where they brought their expertise to navigating questions on trauma, grief, identity and healing.

Once they completed university in 2018, Aisha was steeped in depression and lacked the health insurance to treat it. This landed them back in London, in yet another hospital, where they came to terms with what they likely already knew: Misery loves company! That year, Mirza founded Misery, using their training in psychology, trauma and Indian head massaging to forge a space they knew London needed.

Misery became a revolutionary realm, championing vulnerability and prioritising the emotional needs of underrepresented people in the city. Along with an eclectic array of friends – including DJs, art therapists, health educators, writers, legal case workers, community organisers and chefs – Aisha set about crafting a space that centred around therapeutic practices and ancestral modes of healing. 

The collective’s message speaks for itself: “We so often hear accounts from people who have been miserable once they have found their way out the other side of it, as though sadness can only be tolerated in hindsight. No one wants to be sad all the time, but Misery is an invitation to come as you are, to talk and heal collectively, to be sad or quiet in public, to celebrate and to give gratitude for those before us and around us who have not had that option.”

Beyond sober parties, Misery hosts an endless diversity of haunts: ‘Twerkshops’, ‘draggy sci-fi burlesque’ shows, board game hangs, kink workshops, perfume-making, self-defense, nature walks, movies showcasing marginalised filmmakers, online grief spaces – each event an offering on the altar of wellbeing. Misery soon garnered a hefty following, with these thoughtfully orchestrated hang-outs earning them a spot on TimeOut London’s best QTIPOC parties list of all time the very same year the group launched. 

Misery emphases wellbeing in every sense, which is evident in its sliding-scale approach – focused on accessibility, not profit. It operates on an equitable basis: “No QTIBPOC will be turned away for lack of funds,” its Instagram states. It encourages those not from underrepresented identities “to pay on the higher end of the scale.” Its ticket sales go entirely toward event costs and keeping events free for those otherwise unable to afford it. It’s a rare undertaking; one that gives precedence to providing knowledge, resources, community and services to those who need it.

Besides their work at Misery, Aisha continues to write on their Substack. Their works are piercingly vulnerable, and in baring their soul, their words glean staggering self-assurance and agonising rumination. While their odes don’t possess much reason structurally – streams of consciousness at a pacifying pace for the cluttered Gen-Z mind – they tenderly expatiate their reflections on the world around them. Their laments range in hingings, from the usual anxieties that irk us all today – settler colonialism, white supremacy, accessibility – to their personal struggles with depression, their time in ‘psych wards,’ grief and loneliness, gender and healing through it all. 

Unbridled and rhythmic, they sneak typos and colloquialisms between biting lyricisms that one feels in their lungs. “I am not a settler in any sense of the word”, they write on their substack article ‘ten years ago i moved to new york’, which haphazardly traces musings on their time in London and New York. “I am grateful to be guided, for a strong and ceaseless sense of what I am willing to dream. I do not settle for the state of things. My body tells on me when I cross its wisdom. I do not settle for the ways some would like to treat me,” they write. “Love in the shadows of myself. I do not settle for sorrow in the eyes of a lover. Despite the alternative being inconceivable pain and loneliness, I do not settle.”

Aisha is a voice for those who have truly – for lack of a better term – gone through it. They have taken the darkest facets of their time on earth and morphed them into art that coaxes and nourishes others onto paths of acceptance and healing. Through both Misery and their writing, Aisha’s work is a reminder that our deepest wounds can be the foundation for building community, connection and radical self-acceptance.