Today we’d like to introduce you to Wajahat Khan.
Hi Wajahat, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I grew up in a very large immigrant family. We came to the United States when I was very young, and we moved around the country while we got settled. Eventually we landed in Dallas-Fort Worth, where I’ve been since middle school aside from a couple of short stints elsewhere.
I’ve always created art since I was a kid. I was constantly drawing and painting, enough that I got put in gifted and talented programs and entered local art shows occasionally. By middle school I’d picked up a real passion for music. I played guitar all day after school and jammed with my friends, and I really thought I’d end up being a musician one day. I also spent most of my adolescent years skateboarding with those same rocker friends.
After high school, real life got in the way. I spent most of college focused on the books and fixing my terrible study habits, which earned me grants and scholarships and got me to graduating with honors with a marketing degree. The problem was the job market was still recovering. I did retail sales for years, then a brief stint in pharmaceutical sales in Philadelphia, but I wanted to be around my family and help with my younger siblings as my parents were getting older, so I moved back to DFW. I ended up in a stable corporate gig where I spent my formative professional years, first in insurance sales, then claims adjusting, until I got lucky and landed a hybrid role as a content and web developer. That was the first job that actually nurtured my creative side, and it gave me enough experience to start a side hustle of my own.
For years I developed my craft as a photographer and videographer. I was doing weddings, music videos, client shoots, sports work, corporate gigs, street photography and more. That work eventually led to getting published in Richardson Living a couple of times in 2019. I started to dabble on and off in content creation on social media too, but eventually burned out on all of it. Life changed again after I started a family and I pulled back from everything for a couple of years. That was the right call.
Recently I’ve spent the last few months getting back into it. New profile from scratch, small following, mostly fitness and mostly not that serious. I’m skating again, badly, and I’m fine with being a beginner again. Music is probably next. I sing and occasionally play guitar here and there but I haven’t really started again yet.
Right now I’m just focused on the crafts themselves and slowly putting the work out. If it turns into something, great. I’d like to see where it goes, whether that’s modeling, music, or building a community of people who like what I’m making. I like being social and I like helping people, and eventually that’s what I want this to be.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The biggest struggle has been self doubt. I’ve dealt with imposter syndrome in almost every role I’ve had, that feeling that I got lucky and someone is eventually going to figure out I don’t belong. I’ve never fully felt like I belonged anywhere. Growing up I always had one foot in two different worlds, my family and my culture on one side and the rest of the world on the other, and I never felt like I was fully either one. You get good at code switching and you lose track of which version is actually you.
I also spent a lot of years being quieter about what I wanted than I should have been. It took me until pretty recently to realize that some of the voices telling me to play it small weren’t even mine. They were things I absorbed a long time ago and just kept repeating to myself. That’s an uncomfortable thing to notice, but you can’t do anything about it until you do.
The thing that actually changed it was losing 100 pounds. Not because of how I look, but because it was the first time I set out to do something difficult over a long stretch and just did it. No shortcut, nobody doing it for me. My dad always told me I could do anything if I put my mind to it and I think I believed him in theory, but I didn’t have proof. Now I do. When I doubt myself these days I have something concrete to point at.
I’m still figuring out who I am. But I know I can make things happen, and that’s a much better place to start from than where I was.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Honestly, this is the part I’m still working out. For years I did this as a service. Weddings, clients, corporate work, projects for other people. I was good at it and I’m glad I did it, but I stopped offering any of it a while back and I don’t have plans to start again. What I’m doing now is making things for myself and seeing what comes of it.
If I had to name what I specialize in, it’s composition. That goes all the way back to drawing and painting as a kid. Long before I picked up a camera I was already thinking about where things sit in a frame, what to leave out, where your eye goes first. Everything I’ve made since has been some version of that same problem. Street photography is where I feel it most, because you don’t get to arrange anything, you just have to see it coming and be ready.
What I like is capturing a moment the way it looked in my head, which is never quite the way it looked in real life. For years I struggled to express what was in my brain. Part of that is probably that English wasn’t my first language, so to communicate what was in my mind I’d use a different medium instead. A pencil, a paintbrush, a camera lens, a guitar string, a skateboard wheel.
What sets me apart is probably that I’ve never stayed in one lane. Drawing, then music, then skating, then photo and video, now fitness. For a long time I thought that was a flaw, that I should have picked one thing and gone deep. I’ve come around on it. Every one of those taught me something the others use. Skating taught me patience with failure more than anything else has, and it also taught me how to shoot, because skate video has its own language you absorb without realizing it.
As for what I’m most proud of, it isn’t a specific piece of work. It’s that I came back to it at all. It would have been easy to let the pause become permanent. Plenty of people put their creative stuff down for a couple of years and never pick it back up.
Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
Loud. Crazy. Always in trouble. My parents gave me a nickname as a kid that loosely translates to hooligan, and I’ve used some version of it as my handle and gamertag ever since. That should tell you most of what you need to know.
I was very social and very extroverted, and I think a lot of that came from moving around so much. I went to an extremely diverse elementary school and my group of friends was made up of guys from every background you can imagine. When you move that often you either learn to read a room fast or you have a rough time. My dad used to quote that Bruce Lee line about being like water, and that stuck with me.
Honestly, that’s carried me further than anything else. I’m not the most technical guy in the room and my qualifications are average at best. But I can talk to anyone and I can usually tell what someone actually needs versus what they’re saying, and that’s gotten me through most of my career.
Interest wise it was always music and art, and it still is. I never grew out of the 90s counterculture stuff. Loud rock, punk, rap, graffiti art, skate videos. That whole world got its hooks in me early and I’ve never really wanted out of it.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whoxligan
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@whoxligan
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@whoxligan
