I’ve spent a lot of this new chapter trying to find my purpose.
I’ve asked myself, over and over, what I’m supposed to be doing now. When the answer didn’t come, I turned on myself. Why haven’t I figured this out yet? What’s wrong with me?
Lately I’ve started to wonder if I’ve been asking the wrong question.
For me, connection has never been extra. It’s like oxygen. I can go without a plan for a while. I can’t go long without people.
I keep thinking about what it means to be human. Animals live in herds and packs. They stay close for safety and warmth, and we do that too. But we need more than warmth. We need to be known.
We need someone who remembers the story we told last month. Someone who hears what we didn’t say. Someone who laughs at the same thing at the same moment.
A day can be full of tasks and still feel empty if nobody really saw us in it.
Maybe I’m the only one who feels this way. I doubt it.
A lot of women reach a new chapter and get told to look inward. Heal, grow, reinvent. There’s value in that. But some of us won’t find ourselves alone in a room with a journal.
We find ourselves across a table from someone. In a phone call that runs long. In a friendship that picks right back up after years apart.
I think I’ve been treating purpose as something I have to earn before I’m allowed to enjoy my life. As if the long dinners and the long calls were a reward for figuring things out, instead of part of the answer.
So this is what I’m giving myself permission to do now. Stop waiting. Call the friend. Make the plan. Stay a little longer when the conversation is good.
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I’ve never liked the word. A crisis sounds like a sports car, or a sudden haircut, or someone leaving.
What I feel is closer to homesickness.
The strange kind, where you’re homesick standing in your own kitchen.
The house is still the house. Same rooms, same windows. But it’s quieter now, and I hear the quiet the way you hear a clock after it stops.
My mother is gone. My father is gone.
With them went the two people who knew me first. There are questions I never thought to ask them, and now I can’t.
That’s homesickness too. Missing a place you can’t go back to, because the place was a person.
My daughter is in college now. For most of her life, she wanted to be wherever I was.
Now I’m the one who wants to be near, and the calls are shorter. It breaks my heart every time.
Maybe that’s the hardest kind of homesickness. The person is still here. I hear her voice whenever she has a minute. But the place she used to be, close enough to need me, is somewhere I can’t go back to.
I won’t pretend I’m fine. I’m not, not yet.
The life I built everything around has changed shape, and I’m still working out where things go. I’m heartbroken. I’m also proud of her. Both are true.
I keep reaching for things that aren’t where I left them.
Nobody warned me about this part. That you can miss a time while you’re still living in the years that came after it.
The cure for homesickness has always been the same. You learn the new place slowly, street by street, until one day it starts to feel like yours.
I’m still learning this one. But I’m learning it.
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My friend Christine just moved into a new condo, and for her housewarming she invited the people who have known her the longest: family, old friends, and a handful of us who once worked with her in a newsroom.
This condo is Christine’s fresh start. The last few years were hard on her, and she picked herself up and built a good life on her own terms. I’m proud of her. She’s an inspiration to me.
I left that job when my daughter was born, about twenty years ago. A few of the people in that room I still see now and then. Some I hadn’t seen since.
There was no warming up. It was easy right away, the way it is with family, as if we had never been apart.
I think that’s because we grew up together. We were young in that job, and we went through a lot side by side. Now we’re in different places and different stages of life. None of that came into the room.
What surprised me was how close I felt to people I barely knew back then. We had shared a newsroom and not much more. That night we talked like old friends. Maybe the years you spend in the same place count for something, even if you didn’t spend them talking.
At one point we all lined up on Christine’s staircase for a picture, one or two of us per step, leaning on the banister.
Later someone held a phone out for a selfie and nobody stood still. It came out blurry, half of us mid-laugh.
From a pedestal in the corner, a pumpkin with a carved old man’s face watched the whole thing.
I came home grateful. Every person in that room has been through something hard, and every one of them came through it strong. I admire them for that. Being around them reminds me I can be strong too, and that there’s a good life still ahead of me.
I’m glad that after all this time, there’s still a room where we fit.
Who are the people who knew you before? When did you last see them?
My daughter was home for her father’s birthday, and we just dropped her back at school. After she left, I cleaned her room. Then I closed the door.
I keep it closed. It’s too painful to see her room without her in it.
She’s a junior in college now, and by the third year I was supposed to have figured this out. That was the unspoken deal. You cry through the first semester, and by junior year you’ve found your purpose. A business, a degree, a cause. Something of your own.
People assume I’ll go back to broadcast journalism, the career I left to raise her. I won’t. Every part of me says that chapter is behind me, and I want something completely different. I don’t know yet what it is or how to find it. But every day I push myself to feel secure where I am, and most days I remember how blessed I am.
I’m still waiting. The door is still closed.
I know she’s doing great. She’s fine. I miss her anyway, with an ache I can’t explain to anyone who hasn’t been here. I miss her face, her real face across the kitchen in the morning, not on a screen.
Some nights I open Life360 just to see the little dot that shows where she is. On an ordinary day, that’s the closest I get to her. It tells me where she is. It can’t tell me how she is.
I admire women who are full-time mothers, and women who manage full-time careers and motherhood at once. I couldn’t do both. So I chose the one that mattered most, and that was my daughter. She still is. She always will be.
Now she’s grown, and the job I chose is done. I’m truly grateful to watch her out in the world, finding her footing. And still, without her, I feel lost.
Some women reach this point and simply move forward. They’re in a good place, building the next part of their lives, and I’m glad for them. That isn’t me. Not yet.
On the hardest days, it feels like a whiteout. The light is so bright I can’t see the horizon or tell which way is forward. That’s the closest I can come to explaining lost.
Missing your child is hard enough. Then a second voice shows up to tell you you’re doing it wrong. Too much, for too long. Why can’t you let go? Why aren’t you doing more? I’d never talk to a friend that way. Most days, I talk to myself that way.
So I’m practicing something else. We don’t all cope the same way, and we aren’t meant to. One woman’s solution is another woman’s dead end.
Part of the difference is where I come from. In my Afghan family, closeness was the furniture of daily life. We lived near each other, ate together, and knew each other’s days without asking. Girls didn’t leave home until they married. It was old-fashioned, but it was how I grew up. Raising a daughter who would pack up and go away to college meant doing something the women before me never did. So when she did exactly what I raised her to do, I had no map for this goodbye.
I’ll say the harder thing too. Some days the sadness runs deep, and my health doesn’t always give me the energy I want. The missing makes the sadness heavier, and the sadness makes the missing louder. Still, I fight my way through.
I don’t fight alone. I have women in my life who make me feel I’m enough exactly as I am. They hold my hand when things are hard and applaud when things are good. Growing older has taught me how much that matters: friends who walk with you through each chapter and don’t need you to have it all figured out. That sisterhood is a big part of how I’m finding my way back to myself.
And I come from strong women. My father was a diplomat at the United Nations, and my parents came here planning to go home when his posting ended. Then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and there was no home to go back to. My mother raised us in a country that was never the plan and made sure every one of us went to college. Both my grandmothers, my aunts, and my cousins lost the lives they knew and started over in foreign lands. If they could carry that, I can carry this.
My daughter is watching, too. Children do as you do, not as you say. If she sees me admit how hard this is and keep going anyway, that’s what she’ll remember.
If you feel it too, the loss and the pain and the pride all at once, you’re not the only one. That’s why I’m writing this. There are many of us standing in the same storm, and you’re not standing in it alone.
Everyone who reproduces that photograph reproduces the camp. The dark wall behind her, the dust, the torn shawl. That’s what made Steve McCurry’s 1985 National Geographic cover impossible to put down, and it’s what people reach for when they paint her.
I kept her face and threw the rest out.
I painted this in April 2013. Nothing about the place I gave her has become true since.
Sharbat Gula, after Steve McCurry, 1984. Oil on canvas, Laila Sattar, 2013.
Behind her there’s open turquoise with light coming through it. Color falling across the top of her head, pink and yellow and blue, petals or confetti, I didn’t decide which. The shawl isn’t torn. It’s embroidered, magenta and white beadwork, navy and yellow dots, small green leaves worked into the folds. Somebody made that shawl with care and she’s wearing it. Underneath her, pale pink and white, a field in bloom.
I wanted her somewhere peaceful. A place she never got to.
The one thing I didn’t change is the eyes. The cover of the June 1985 issue said they were full of fear: “Haunted eyes tell of an Afghan refugee’s fears.” Seventeen years later, when someone finally asked her, she said it was anger. I believe her. I also think anger is only where it starts. What I see in that face is what anger becomes in a girl who has to survive with it. Strength. Something fierce and very still, that doesn’t need your permission to stare back at you. I gave her a better background and a shawl nobody had ruined yet, but I wasn’t going to soften that.
She was about twelve, living in a refugee camp in Pakistan after her village was bombed. When a foreign man raised a camera in her school tent, she covered her face, and it was her teacher who told her to uncover it. By her account, nobody asked if she wanted her picture taken. Nobody wrote down her name.
It became the most recognized photograph in National Geographic’s history. McCurry’s studio prices an open-edition print at $18,000, and larger prints have sold for as much as $178,900 at auction. She didn’t know any of it existed. She was married at thirteen, raising children in a camp, living a life nobody thought to ask about.
When they found her in 2002, National Geographic gave her financial assistance, the first compensation she’d ever received for the image. I want to be fair about that. I also know how she took the news. She and her husband were nervous and sad, and she later said, “The photo created more problems than benefits.”
Then the rest of it. Two of her children died. So did her husband. In 2016 she was arrested in Pakistan for getting identity cards so she could stay there with her family, and she was deported. Five years later the Taliban took Afghanistan back, and she was evacuated to Italy, where she lives now. The girl the world used as the face of Afghan suffering went on to live nearly every chapter of it.
Afghans are known for hospitality. In Dari we call it mehmannawazi, and it means you honor any guest who comes to you, stranger or not, whatever their religion or wealth, and you expect nothing back. Nearly two hundred years ago a British envoy wrote that it was the most remarkable thing about us.
I grew up inside it. Nobody came to my parents’ house without being fed. My mother was a great cook, but that was only part of it. She made every guest feel special, like the house had been waiting for them. She was petite and beautiful and attuned, a strong Afghan woman in a petite frame, and her strength showed up as softness toward whoever walked through the door.
Sharbat Gula was raised the same way. A stranger walked into her classroom, and she gave him the one thing he came for. She didn’t offer it. Nothing came back to her for seventeen years.
Forty years after that magazine hit newsstands, Afghanistan is the only country in the world that bans girls from high school and women from university. And the girls are still going to school anyway. Every morning at dawn, teenage girls in Kabul slip through an unmarked door and down a dark stairway to a hidden basement classroom. One woman’s secret online school now teaches 12,000 girls across the country. A seventeen-year-old wrote that the Taliban never considered how long Afghan women have been practicing resistance. For generations, she said.
The place I painted her into doesn’t exist, not for her and not for the girls going down those basement stairs every morning. I made it anyway. I didn’t ask her permission either. I couldn’t. That’s the part I keep sitting with.
Where to help
Aid Afghanistan for Education was founded by Hassina Sherjan, an Afghan woman, and has run accelerated learning programs for over 22 years, putting more than 7,000 Afghan girls and women through school. Sahar Education partners with local schools inside Afghanistan on literacy, coding, and English programs for girls banned from the classroom.
