by Rizwana Bi

Listening to Nadiya Hussain’s podcast with Paul C. Brunson on We Need To Talk is a mix of vulnerability, heartbreak, and pain, with moments of humour, too. 

Nadiya speaks about things that are rarely ever said out loud: growing up in a volatile home, sexual abuse, suicide, mental health, broken relationships with her parents, bullying, panic attacks, and loneliness. 

She opens up about the toll Bake Off took on her. The abuse she received, including death threats so graphic the police couldn’t even read them out to her. It got so serious the production team had to live with her. Ten years on, she’s still carrying the weight of that trauma.  She speaks about having panic buttons installed at home and how her kids grew up thinking that was normal - that every home had one. 

She speaks about colourism too and how her father felt the need to warn her father-in-law that she was “dark”.   

She’s frank about how “all-encompassing and suffocating it is to be a Muslim in the UK” - facing racism and the silent burden of constantly managing other people’s comfort. 

At one point, she says she lost herself - became a caricature. Everything about her had to be filtered and shaped to make others comfortable. As she puts it, “Gratitude should not sit on your face like a muzzle.” That line says it all. For many of us, especially women who exist in multiple margins, the pressure to perform, please, and stay silent is all too familiar. Like Nadiya, we’ve had people want things from us, not for us. 

But it’s not all heavy. There is joy and love.

She talks about her faith and how grounding it is. Her hijab became a figment of love symbolising safety and being loved unconditionally without judgement. She says she just needed to be loved, and she found that from wearing a hijab. That line stopped me in my tracks. Knowing first-hand the struggles Muslim women and girls can experience with what the hijab means for them. For Nadiya, this was her saving grace, an extension of liberating herself from expectations and a mirror for expressing her feelings. For example, when in Bake Off, wearing the black scarf, she states conveyed the stressful impact of the competition on her.

There are moments of humour too. When she got into the final 12 of Bake Off, she panicked and told her husband to call the producers and say she couldn’t do it - because she’d died. He looked at her and said, “You call them.” Her response, “I can’t. I’m dead.” 

Bake Off became the place where she stepped into a power she didn’t even know she had. 

“I’m not comfortable in boxes. I prefer glass ceilings - so I can smash through them.” 

The episode is filled with moments like this - sharp, honest, and unforgettable. Her story stayed with me long after the episode ended. If you haven’t already, I really recommend listening as there’s so much more than I can capture here. Follow her journey. Support her voice. 

Watch on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZZaSNZ1GNE 

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4iuRasxT4cTd46T9PXRjY5