A Brief Note
This essay is part of a series about mental health under prolonged instability and war. While many examples come from Afghanistan, particularly the years between 2001 and 2021, the experiences described are not unique to any one place or people. They reflect what happens to the human mind when danger becomes ongoing, unpredictable, and unresolved.
These essays are not memoirs, though brief sections marked From Memory draw on personal experience.
This series is not a clinical guide. The language of psychology is used carefully, not to pathologize, but to give form to experiences that were often normalized, misunderstood, or endured without words.
Throughout the series, the word "we" appears often. Sometimes it refers to Afghans. Sometimes to civilians.
Sometimes, to people shaped by trauma more broadly. The meaning shifts; take what fits, and leave what doesn’t.
You will come across references to trauma, grief, and coping. If you need to pause while reading, do. Come back when you’re ready.
This is a story about people who didn’t always get help or therapy, and still found ways to keep going.
This writing can’t speak for everyone, but if something here feels familiar, you’re not being diagnosed. You’re being recognized.
If you’d like more context, Essay 0 sits at the beginning of the series.
This essay is part of a series about mental health under prolonged instability and war. While many examples come from Afghanistan, particularly the years between 2001 and 2021, the experiences described are not unique to any one place or people. They reflect what happens to the human mind when danger becomes ongoing, unpredictable, and unresolved.
These essays are not memoirs, though brief sections marked From Memory draw on personal experience.
This series is not a clinical guide. The language of psychology is used carefully, not to pathologize, but to give form to experiences that were often normalized, misunderstood, or endured without words.
Throughout the series, the word "we" appears often. Sometimes it refers to Afghans. Sometimes to civilians.
Sometimes, to people shaped by trauma more broadly. The meaning shifts; take what fits, and leave what doesn’t.
You will come across references to trauma, grief, and coping. If you need to pause while reading, do. Come back when you’re ready.
This is a story about people who didn’t always get help or therapy, and still found ways to keep going.
This writing can’t speak for everyone, but if something here feels familiar, you’re not being diagnosed. You’re being recognized.
If you’d like more context, Essay 0 sits at the beginning of the series.
Living with the Smoke
In Kabul, winter smelled like smoke. A smell I still notice, even far from there.
Fuel heaters, wood, coal – whatever people could afford to burn to keep the cold away left their mark. Smoke settled into everything. Curtains, coats, skin. We tried to mask it with scented candles, air fresheners, perfume sprayed a little too generously, orange peels placed on heaters, and coffee beans resting in small dishes. None of it worked for long.
Eventually, we stopped noticing the smell. Not because it disappeared, but because we adapted.
Then you’d travel abroad. Open your suitcase. And suddenly, there it was: sharp and unavoidable, clinging to every piece of clothing.
That’s when it became clear: the smoke had always been on us.
We had just learned how not to smell it.
In Kabul, winter smelled like smoke. A smell I still notice, even far from there.
Fuel heaters, wood, coal – whatever people could afford to burn to keep the cold away left their mark. Smoke settled into everything. Curtains, coats, skin. We tried to mask it with scented candles, air fresheners, perfume sprayed a little too generously, orange peels placed on heaters, and coffee beans resting in small dishes. None of it worked for long.
Eventually, we stopped noticing the smell. Not because it disappeared, but because we adapted.
Then you’d travel abroad. Open your suitcase. And suddenly, there it was: sharp and unavoidable, clinging to every piece of clothing.
That’s when it became clear: the smoke had always been on us.
We had just learned how not to smell it.
“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”
— Margaret Atwood
Danger worked the same way. It didn’t arrive as a single moment. It lingered. It stretched. It learned how to stay.
In places like Afghanistan, shaped by long wars and conflict, instability was not an interruption to life; it was the condition under which life happened. There was no clear “before,” and certainly no “after.” Just a long stretch of adapting to what didn’t resolve.
Most people didn’t experience this as “trauma.” It just felt like life adjusting itself around danger.
This is where continuous traumatic stress becomes a useful way of noticing what was already there.
Most conversations about trauma are built around events: something happened, then it ended, and the body and mind were left to process what came after.
Continuous traumatic stress describes something different. It names what happens when danger doesn’t end, when the threat remains present, unpredictable, and unresolved.
You don’t brace once for something that keeps happening.
You adjust your entire posture.
In Afghanistan, threats came in waves. A bombing here. A brief period of calm. Another attack somewhere else. A warning. Then daily life again, until it wasn’t.
Over time, this state of emergency became a baseline. But we didn’t name it. We just lived it.
As months passed, danger stopped being something you reacted to and became something you quietly calculated around.
Which road felt safer today depended less on traffic and more on rumors and gut feeling. A wedding invitation, a conference, or a social event came with unspoken questions: How crowded will it be? Are participants security searched? Is the venue well protected? Questions that rarely needed to be said aloud.
Parents listened to their instincts and the news before deciding whether school felt worth the risk each day, sometimes deciding in the morning, and reconsidering again by noon. Phone calls unanswered for too long tightened the chest.
None of it felt dramatic. That was the point. These weren’t emergency decisions. They were daily ones. Made calmly and repeated endlessly.
Eventually, this way of thinking stopped feeling like fear. It felt like common sense. Like adulthood. Like responsibility. It began to feel normal.
Not safe, just normal.
— Margaret Atwood
Danger worked the same way. It didn’t arrive as a single moment. It lingered. It stretched. It learned how to stay.
In places like Afghanistan, shaped by long wars and conflict, instability was not an interruption to life; it was the condition under which life happened. There was no clear “before,” and certainly no “after.” Just a long stretch of adapting to what didn’t resolve.
Most people didn’t experience this as “trauma.” It just felt like life adjusting itself around danger.
This is where continuous traumatic stress becomes a useful way of noticing what was already there.
Most conversations about trauma are built around events: something happened, then it ended, and the body and mind were left to process what came after.
Continuous traumatic stress describes something different. It names what happens when danger doesn’t end, when the threat remains present, unpredictable, and unresolved.
You don’t brace once for something that keeps happening.
You adjust your entire posture.
In Afghanistan, threats came in waves. A bombing here. A brief period of calm. Another attack somewhere else. A warning. Then daily life again, until it wasn’t.
Over time, this state of emergency became a baseline. But we didn’t name it. We just lived it.
As months passed, danger stopped being something you reacted to and became something you quietly calculated around.
Which road felt safer today depended less on traffic and more on rumors and gut feeling. A wedding invitation, a conference, or a social event came with unspoken questions: How crowded will it be? Are participants security searched? Is the venue well protected? Questions that rarely needed to be said aloud.
Parents listened to their instincts and the news before deciding whether school felt worth the risk each day, sometimes deciding in the morning, and reconsidering again by noon. Phone calls unanswered for too long tightened the chest.
None of it felt dramatic. That was the point. These weren’t emergency decisions. They were daily ones. Made calmly and repeated endlessly.
Eventually, this way of thinking stopped feeling like fear. It felt like common sense. Like adulthood. Like responsibility. It began to feel normal.
Not safe, just normal.
This kind of stress doesn’t announce itself dramatically. It seeps in. It reshapes how you plan, how you move through space, how much you allow yourself to hope. The nervous system doesn’t get a chance to stand down. There’s no clear signal that says, you’re safe now. So adaptation replaces resolution.
Life continues, but always slightly angled toward what might go wrong. Many people living inside this kind of threat don’t look distressed at all. They fall in love, work, study, raise children, host guests, and build careers, sometimes with impressive competence.
Not because they aren’t afraid, but because stopping feels more dangerous. Functioning becomes a way of surviving an environment that doesn’t stabilize. Calmness becomes proof that nothing is wrong.
But calm here doesn’t mean relaxed. It means controlled. Held together. It means knowing how to keep going without expecting relief.
In Afghanistan, this kind of functioning was often praised. You were called strong, reliable, and brave if you didn’t fall apart. The cost of that reliability rarely entered the conversation.
This isn’t denial. And it isn’t strength in the way we often praise it. It’s closer to a narrowing of attention, feeling just enough to function, and no more than that. It’s what we do when the threat doesn’t leave.
Life continues, but always slightly angled toward what might go wrong. Many people living inside this kind of threat don’t look distressed at all. They fall in love, work, study, raise children, host guests, and build careers, sometimes with impressive competence.
Not because they aren’t afraid, but because stopping feels more dangerous. Functioning becomes a way of surviving an environment that doesn’t stabilize. Calmness becomes proof that nothing is wrong.
But calm here doesn’t mean relaxed. It means controlled. Held together. It means knowing how to keep going without expecting relief.
In Afghanistan, this kind of functioning was often praised. You were called strong, reliable, and brave if you didn’t fall apart. The cost of that reliability rarely entered the conversation.
This isn’t denial. And it isn’t strength in the way we often praise it. It’s closer to a narrowing of attention, feeling just enough to function, and no more than that. It’s what we do when the threat doesn’t leave.
From Memory: The Carpenter and the Glass
We lived in Karte 3 for a few years, near Darulaman Road, on the way to the Parliament building. During those years, that part of the city saw more than its share of attacks. Rocket fire. Car bombs. Complex assaults.
The pressure from the blasts often shattered windows and caused damage to nearby buildings.
There was one door in our living room, and the windows around it, that always took the hit. After each explosion in the surrounding areas, we called the same carpenter. He’d fix the glass and reset the hinges.
Then one day, after yet another blast, he came in and said, kindly, “Why don’t I just install clear plastic sheets instead? The glass will break again. You also know it will.”
He wasn’t wrong. And he didn’t mean it cruelly. We kept replacing what kept breaking.
What stays with me isn’t just the broken glass. It’s how practical the conversation was. No grief. No anger. Just adjustment.
Sometimes I think about it when I’m not thinking about doors. How many things did we keep trying to fix, knowing full well they’d break again? How many times did we rebuild and call it life?
That’s what living inside continuous danger can look like. You don’t wait for safety. You work around its absence.
With repetition, it wears on you. Quietly. You keep rebuilding, even as certainty thins.
At some point, rebuilding stops being about faith in a future and becomes something else entirely, a refusal to disappear. A way of saying, I am still here, even if nothing around you promises to last.
From the outside, that can look like hope. From the inside, it often feels closer to endurance.
We lived in Karte 3 for a few years, near Darulaman Road, on the way to the Parliament building. During those years, that part of the city saw more than its share of attacks. Rocket fire. Car bombs. Complex assaults.
The pressure from the blasts often shattered windows and caused damage to nearby buildings.
There was one door in our living room, and the windows around it, that always took the hit. After each explosion in the surrounding areas, we called the same carpenter. He’d fix the glass and reset the hinges.
Then one day, after yet another blast, he came in and said, kindly, “Why don’t I just install clear plastic sheets instead? The glass will break again. You also know it will.”
He wasn’t wrong. And he didn’t mean it cruelly. We kept replacing what kept breaking.
What stays with me isn’t just the broken glass. It’s how practical the conversation was. No grief. No anger. Just adjustment.
Sometimes I think about it when I’m not thinking about doors. How many things did we keep trying to fix, knowing full well they’d break again? How many times did we rebuild and call it life?
That’s what living inside continuous danger can look like. You don’t wait for safety. You work around its absence.
With repetition, it wears on you. Quietly. You keep rebuilding, even as certainty thins.
At some point, rebuilding stops being about faith in a future and becomes something else entirely, a refusal to disappear. A way of saying, I am still here, even if nothing around you promises to last.
From the outside, that can look like hope. From the inside, it often feels closer to endurance.
What We Learned to Live With
“Zhwand che mo badrang dai, jang dai – jang dai”
If our lives have become ugly (unbearable), it is because of war - war.
— From a chant during the Helmand peace march, Afghanistan, 2018
What we circled here isn’t fear itself, but its repetition.
Danger wasn’t a single rupture. It was something you learned to account for. Something you planned around. You didn’t wait for safety to return, because waiting would have meant stopping, and stopping was rarely an option.
So life went on, with adjustments. Hope was measured carefully, so it wouldn’t hurt too much if it had to be put down again.
One of the subtler effects of living this way is how it stretches time. What was supposed to be temporary becomes extended. A few bad months turn into years. Then decades. Children grow up inside what adults once thought would be a phase. Adulthood unfolds without a clear marker of safety ever arriving.
You stop waiting for things to end. You stop imagining an “after.” Life becomes something you manage in the present tense, indefinitely.
This is what living inside continuous threat does. It doesn’t always overwhelm you. More often, it teaches you how to function without relief, to normalize what should have been temporary, to call adaptation “just life.”
What that kind of living does to you isn’t always visible while you’re inside it.
“Zhwand che mo badrang dai, jang dai – jang dai”
If our lives have become ugly (unbearable), it is because of war - war.
— From a chant during the Helmand peace march, Afghanistan, 2018
What we circled here isn’t fear itself, but its repetition.
Danger wasn’t a single rupture. It was something you learned to account for. Something you planned around. You didn’t wait for safety to return, because waiting would have meant stopping, and stopping was rarely an option.
So life went on, with adjustments. Hope was measured carefully, so it wouldn’t hurt too much if it had to be put down again.
One of the subtler effects of living this way is how it stretches time. What was supposed to be temporary becomes extended. A few bad months turn into years. Then decades. Children grow up inside what adults once thought would be a phase. Adulthood unfolds without a clear marker of safety ever arriving.
You stop waiting for things to end. You stop imagining an “after.” Life becomes something you manage in the present tense, indefinitely.
This is what living inside continuous threat does. It doesn’t always overwhelm you. More often, it teaches you how to function without relief, to normalize what should have been temporary, to call adaptation “just life.”
What that kind of living does to you isn’t always visible while you’re inside it.
If any part of this resonated with you, there are names for what you may have been carrying.
Terms like continuous traumatic stress, cumulative trauma, and chronic anticipatory fear are sometimes used to describe lives shaped by ongoing threat, rather than single moments of harm.
They help shift the story from what’s wrong with me to what happened around me, and for how long.
You may recognize adaptation without remembering choosing it. You may have learned to function without ever feeling safe. You may have mistaken endurance for wellness.
None of that means you failed to cope. It means your system adjusted to survive.
Later essays will explore what this kind of adaptation costs, and what it takes to begin gently loosening its hold.
For now, it’s enough to know this: what you were responding to was real.
And the way you learned to live inside it made sense.
By Sadia Fatimie
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