March 8th is not just a date on the calendar. It carries the weight of years of struggle, suffering, and resilience. It honors women who fought in silence and, despite every hardship, rose stronger than before. These were women who learned to raise their voices and tear down the walls of silence. We are daughters whose opportunities were stripped away, yet no one has ever succeeded in stealing our dreams. Those dreams still burn inside us, even when the world tries its hardest to put them out.
I remember it clearly. In 2025, the first piece I ever wrote was about March 8th. It was my first real step toward amplifying the silenced voices of my sisters. On March 5th, I made the decision to tell the story of a girl in Afghanistan, and in that moment, I felt something I had never felt before. I had done something real. It was small, yes, but it was genuine. From that day on, I made myself a promise: I would speak for girls who had no platform. I would make sure their stories never faded into silence and were never forgotten.
Last year, on the very day I was writing that piece, a friend texted me and asked me to go out. I told her I had to finish what I was working on and could not leave. Her reaction caught me off guard. She wrote back: “Why are you even bothering with this? Does anyone actually read stories about girls like us? There are thousands of stories out there, but nobody is listening. You are wasting your time. None of this is going anywhere.”
I pushed back immediately. I asked her: “Do you honestly think that just because someone does not listen once, or even many times, we should go quiet? Should we stop talking about what women in Afghanistan go through?” She did not hesitate. She replied: “Yes. If no one is listening, why keep going? Writing does not fix anything. Nothing is going to change. This is just how life is. It is fate, and you have to accept it.”
I saw things completely differently. I told her: “I disagree with you entirely. Sure, a writer can pour herself into a story and find no readers. We can fail over and over. But there are people in this world who do listen. Some people stand with us. And through writing, we can find those people, even in the middle of a crowd.”
I kept going: “When we keep moving, one step at a time, we will find the ones who walk beside us. I believe a day is coming when our voices are too loud to ignore. A day when supporting women is not seen as controversial or shameful, but as the most ordinary, human thing anyone can do.”
Still, I know you cannot reach everyone. There is an old truth in the saying that freeing a person from chains is easier than freeing them from the belief that the chains belong there. When I said all of this to my friend, she still did not buy it. And honestly, deep down, I had lost a little of my own hope, too.
I had seen so many girls and women speak up, again and again, only to find almost no one standing with them. They fought alone, surrounded by ignorance and indifference. But now, looking back, I catch myself thinking: thank God I kept going. Because the women who once stood alone no longer stand that way. More voices have found theirs. More people have shown up and said, out loud: “We are here. We are with you.”
The path ahead is still hard. There are still walls that need to come down. But something real has shifted. Hope feels more alive today than it ever did back then. And I still hold onto the promise I made myself that day, to keep writing, even if no one reads it for a long time. Because somewhere in these pages, a girl might one day find her way to these words, read them, and realize she is not alone. When that happens, no story from Afghanistan’s daughters will ever disappear into silence again.
You can read the Persian version of this Afghan woman’s story here:
