I am a survivor, fighting for the right to work, study, live freely, and be happy. I’m a girl who, simply for pursuing knowledge and happiness, found herself condemned to house arrest. My dreams once soared higher than the peaks of the Hindu Kush, but now they crumble under the weight of Taliban captivity. We belonged to a generation that courageously battled on. We stumbled, but we always picked ourselves up and started anew. Yet, in the blink of an eye, all our hard-won progress vanished into thin air. Since then, day and night have merged into an unending blur for me. The brightness of day now rivals the darkness of my grim fate.
At times, the suffocating darkness becomes nearly unbearable, tempting me to extinguish my breath. I yearn for my labored breaths to fade away naturally, sparing me the haunting guilt of taking a life, even in the afterlife.
As a dental medicine student in my fifth semester, I found my dreams of continuing my studies shattered by the Taliban’s oppressive rule. The restrictions they imposed on education had dire consequences for female students, pushing us to lag and endure irreversible setbacks. I shared the struggles of countless female students, particularly those in medical fields who had toiled tirelessly to achieve their dreams. These challenges were not fleeting; they cast a long, dark shadow over our aspirations, and the fruits of our hard work seemed to wither away.
As I grew up and understood the meaning of having a goal, I studied under the scorching sun and on rocky terrain to achieve it, becoming a stranger to the word “peaceful.” For us, girls who grew up in a traditional society, dreaming and pursuing those dreams was not an easy task. To achieve our goals, we paid a price: the price of becoming outsiders and losing the love of our parents and those we cared about. By raising our voices for our rights, we became defiant and were ignored even by our parents.
We fought for education and pursued our dreams, enduring a challenging educational journey without any supporters or sponsors, in the hope of reaching happiness, but it didn’t come. I give medals of bravery to the girls who fought on this path with the barest of resources. We were the ones who, in pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment, saved every penny to ensure we wouldn’t be left without money to buy books and notebooks in the future. For us, having old shoes or clothes was not a disgrace; not having books and pens was. We walked long distances to reach schools and universities, spending our taxi fare money on buying books we were supposed to read in a week. In common terms, we were the girls who sacrificed meals to keep our educational materials. We did all of this with the many challenges we faced. We used our bread money for books and our travel fare for educational gatherings. We loved this path and method because we always believed we were the new generation, the generation of change. We believe we should strive for a prosperous and advanced society, one that competes with the most advanced countries in the world.
Ignoring the gender stereotypes that existed in our society, and although we were always considered the weaker sex, we made efforts to uproot the ideas that were causing the younger generation, especially girls, to lag. We cherished each other’s ideas and aspirations. We researched and studied the history and ways of progress in first and second-world countries. Although we were never allowed to put our plans and ideas into practice, and our request for practical implementation was verbally ridiculed, we remained undeterred.
Now, we are reduced to mere spectators, with nothing to do but watch our misfortune and displacement. Sometimes I wonder where those girls who were unstoppable and had solutions for every problem were. But these girls have been scattered or captured by the Taliban. Some have fled to foreign lands, while others remain in the captivity of this group. A group that has held power for over two years and has no mercy for the women and girls of Afghanistan. Fighting against this group is nothing but a suicide. Myself and other girls have encountered those who have twisted religion to justify any injustice against women. This group is more ignorant than one can argue with for freedom, and the right to education, and work.
These are regrettable and concerning conditions. Girls are left behind in education and progress, while society is pushed towards ruin. Instead of being in university classrooms and pursuing our studies, we are confined to the corners of our homes. That’s why I’m constantly seeking a pretext to keep myself engaged and, in this way, rescue myself from the mental turmoil that sometimes engulfs me. But in a situation where I have no permission to work, travel, or even access public parks, it’s hard not to dwell on my misfortunes. Sometimes, in solitude, I ask myself if we are truly living in the 21st century, an era where others are at the forefront of progress and thinking of groundbreaking technologies. Yet in our society, the distinction between boys and girls persists, and being a girl is still considered a crime. Why has gender discrimination been enforced so ruthlessly, where boys have the right to education, and girls do not? It has even deprived them of the right to sit and stand. So, what sets our society apart from the era of ignorance when Arabs used to bury girls alive?
We, too, have come to a halt at the hands of a group that bears no difference from people of the era of ignorance, who consider themselves the guardians of Islamic values. Time has stood still for us. But what is most painful is the years of hard work and sleepless nights we endured to escape ignorance and folly, all seeming to have gone to waste. It’s as if everything has returned to square one. We have no way forward, and there’s no way back. We are stuck in a deep abyss with no escape. Our fate is in the hands of men who have confined women due to their gender. Thinking and countless disappointments lead to mental tension, and I endure moments of unpleasantness and desolation.
The only ray of hope that sometimes saves me from the crisis of thought and mental distress is thinking about the girls and boys who have the opportunity to attend schools and universities, provided that the excessively strict educational curriculum of the Taliban doesn’t alter their path and goals. They are the only gateway to change in a society that abolishes gender segregation. Myself and all the girls who have been deprived of the right to work, study, and live freely await the day when the light of knowledge, justice, and freedom blinds the eyes of the ignorant and the hard-hearted, and we attain liberation from captivity.
