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.
The Shared Atmosphere
Human beings are limbs of one body,
Made from the same essence, shaped from one soul.
When one limb is afflicted with pain by the trials of time,
The others cannot remain at ease.
If you feel no pain at the suffering of others,
You do not deserve to be called human.
— A literary translation of Saadi Shirazi’s Farsi poem
When danger lasts long enough, it doesn’t stay contained within individual lives. It moves into the space between people, into conversations and silences. It becomes part of how a society breathes.
This is what continuous traumatic stress looks like at scale: when it spreads beyond individuals and settles into the collective.
A society begins to organize itself around threat, much like an individual or a nervous system does.
In Afghanistan, war did not always arrive as a single catastrophic moment. And so it reshaped ordinary life from the inside.
People learned, together, how to move through streets. How long to stay outside. When to speak and when silence was safer. When to answer the phone, and when not to.
Which vehicles to keep a distance from.
Which crowds to avoid.
When to send a short message – All OK? – which could carry entire worlds of meaning. Any reply, however brief, was better than the silence everyone feared.
Over time, an unspoken agreement forms around what not to say and name, because naming it might make it heavier, harder to carry, or harder to survive. Especially in front of children, elders, or those already stretched thin.
Most people did not fall apart in public. They kept things going. Because stopping was not an option. Functioning became the shared goal. Endurance became collective.
It wasn’t heroic.
It was necessary.
Human beings are limbs of one body,
Made from the same essence, shaped from one soul.
When one limb is afflicted with pain by the trials of time,
The others cannot remain at ease.
If you feel no pain at the suffering of others,
You do not deserve to be called human.
— A literary translation of Saadi Shirazi’s Farsi poem
When danger lasts long enough, it doesn’t stay contained within individual lives. It moves into the space between people, into conversations and silences. It becomes part of how a society breathes.
This is what continuous traumatic stress looks like at scale: when it spreads beyond individuals and settles into the collective.
A society begins to organize itself around threat, much like an individual or a nervous system does.
In Afghanistan, war did not always arrive as a single catastrophic moment. And so it reshaped ordinary life from the inside.
People learned, together, how to move through streets. How long to stay outside. When to speak and when silence was safer. When to answer the phone, and when not to.
Which vehicles to keep a distance from.
Which crowds to avoid.
When to send a short message – All OK? – which could carry entire worlds of meaning. Any reply, however brief, was better than the silence everyone feared.
Over time, an unspoken agreement forms around what not to say and name, because naming it might make it heavier, harder to carry, or harder to survive. Especially in front of children, elders, or those already stretched thin.
Most people did not fall apart in public. They kept things going. Because stopping was not an option. Functioning became the shared goal. Endurance became collective.
It wasn’t heroic.
It was necessary.
How Fear Was Distributed, and Who Had to Carry It
When a society adapts to prolonged danger, it does not do so evenly. Fear, responsibility, silence, and exposure are distributed according to roles shaped by culture, expectation, and necessity.
These patterns were neither universal nor were they fixed. Individual personalities, family structures, and circumstances always mattered. But over time, certain roles became more common because the conditions demanded them.
This is not about whose suffering was greater.
It is about how survival labor was allocated.
In many Afghan communities, men were more likely to absorb danger through visibility: through movement, provision, negotiation, and presence in public space. Someone had to cross the street, answer the knock, pass through checkpoints, keep earning, and keep things moving.
Their fear had to be managed while remaining outward-facing, alert, decisive, and steady. Strength was measured by the ability to act despite risk.
At home, this often translated into silence, irritability, or a seriousness that children learned not to question.
Fear had no language, only posture.
We may remember men who rarely smiled.
Who brought humor home only in fragments, if at all.
Whose foreheads carried lines long before age could explain them.
When a society adapts to prolonged danger, it does not do so evenly. Fear, responsibility, silence, and exposure are distributed according to roles shaped by culture, expectation, and necessity.
These patterns were neither universal nor were they fixed. Individual personalities, family structures, and circumstances always mattered. But over time, certain roles became more common because the conditions demanded them.
This is not about whose suffering was greater.
It is about how survival labor was allocated.
In many Afghan communities, men were more likely to absorb danger through visibility: through movement, provision, negotiation, and presence in public space. Someone had to cross the street, answer the knock, pass through checkpoints, keep earning, and keep things moving.
Their fear had to be managed while remaining outward-facing, alert, decisive, and steady. Strength was measured by the ability to act despite risk.
At home, this often translated into silence, irritability, or a seriousness that children learned not to question.
Fear had no language, only posture.
We may remember men who rarely smiled.
Who brought humor home only in fragments, if at all.
Whose foreheads carried lines long before age could explain them.
Women, meanwhile, were often expected to absorb fear through containment. For many, leaving danger was not an option; survival had to happen where they already were.
They became the emotional stabilizers of households and extended families, not because they were naturally calmer, but because panic had nowhere else to go.
They regulated children and the elderly. They maintained routines, meals, prayers, and continuity when nothing else felt stable.
Years of war also meant that many families no longer had men to depend on at all, or had men who returned injured, disabled, or changed by what they had survived.
In these households, women and, sometimes, children carried not only emotional labor but also the responsibilities of providing, decision-making, and protection. Often without recognition. And without relief.
We may remember women with scarves tied tightly around their foreheads almost every day, not for style or modesty, but to keep constant headaches at bay. Others with near-constant pain in the neck, shoulders, and back, bodies carrying what could not be spoken.
This was role-based survival, learned under pressure and carried at real cost.
From Memory: The Gas Cylinder
I saw this kind of calculation everywhere, but this is one of the moments that stayed with me.
Some years before the collapse, there was an attack on an NGO near our home in Kabul. Suicide bombers stormed the building. We could hear the blasts and gunfire. The area went into lockdown.
I noticed one of the helpers at home, an older man with partial hearing loss, as he was preparing to go out. He was strapping a gas cylinder to his bicycle.
I had to run after him to stop him.
“Do you know there’s an attack happening?” I asked.
He nodded calmly. “Yes. It’s been going on for a while.”
“It’s not over,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“To fill the cylinder. And get groceries.”
He gestured toward the street, explaining that others were outside too, going about their day. If they could, so could he.
I had to argue to convince him to wait. Eventually, he did.
I didn’t know what to call it – bravery, resignation, or something in between. What struck me was how ordinary the decision felt to him. This wasn’t recklessness. It was calibration, a way of measuring risk learned over years of living with danger.
When survival becomes routine, fear does not disappear. It folds into daily decision-making.
It moves from individual decisions into something societal. People learn what is worth stopping for, and what is not. I saw versions of this everywhere: markets reopening too soon after an attack, errands run during lockdowns, life resuming before the dust had settled.
That adjustment wasn’t individual. It was shared, absorbed collectively, and quietly passed on.
I saw this kind of calculation everywhere, but this is one of the moments that stayed with me.
Some years before the collapse, there was an attack on an NGO near our home in Kabul. Suicide bombers stormed the building. We could hear the blasts and gunfire. The area went into lockdown.
I noticed one of the helpers at home, an older man with partial hearing loss, as he was preparing to go out. He was strapping a gas cylinder to his bicycle.
I had to run after him to stop him.
“Do you know there’s an attack happening?” I asked.
He nodded calmly. “Yes. It’s been going on for a while.”
“It’s not over,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“To fill the cylinder. And get groceries.”
He gestured toward the street, explaining that others were outside too, going about their day. If they could, so could he.
I had to argue to convince him to wait. Eventually, he did.
I didn’t know what to call it – bravery, resignation, or something in between. What struck me was how ordinary the decision felt to him. This wasn’t recklessness. It was calibration, a way of measuring risk learned over years of living with danger.
When survival becomes routine, fear does not disappear. It folds into daily decision-making.
It moves from individual decisions into something societal. People learn what is worth stopping for, and what is not. I saw versions of this everywhere: markets reopening too soon after an attack, errands run during lockdowns, life resuming before the dust had settled.
That adjustment wasn’t individual. It was shared, absorbed collectively, and quietly passed on.
Silence as a Shared Discipline
In Afghan society, fear was not always denied, but it was rarely named.
Silence became a form of strength. People learned not to ask too many questions, not because they didn’t care, but because questions could make fear spread. We reminded one another to be patient, to endure, to keep going.
Over time, unspoken rules took shape.
Don’t panic in front of others.
Don’t cry too loudly.
Don’t ask why someone left so suddenly.
Don’t speak about what you saw if no one else around you saw it too.
These were not written rules. They were learned through repetition, through watching what unsettled a room and what helped it hold together.
We called this patience. Dignity. Faith.
Emotion became something managed collectively. People learned to regulate not only themselves, but one another, by softening language, withholding details, and presenting calm even when fear was loud inside.
Muting oneself became a way of protecting others.
This discipline helped society function under pressure. But what went unspoken did not disappear. It settled into bodies, relationships, and memory.
This, too, was survival.
In Afghan society, fear was not always denied, but it was rarely named.
Silence became a form of strength. People learned not to ask too many questions, not because they didn’t care, but because questions could make fear spread. We reminded one another to be patient, to endure, to keep going.
Over time, unspoken rules took shape.
Don’t panic in front of others.
Don’t cry too loudly.
Don’t ask why someone left so suddenly.
Don’t speak about what you saw if no one else around you saw it too.
These were not written rules. They were learned through repetition, through watching what unsettled a room and what helped it hold together.
We called this patience. Dignity. Faith.
Emotion became something managed collectively. People learned to regulate not only themselves, but one another, by softening language, withholding details, and presenting calm even when fear was loud inside.
Muting oneself became a way of protecting others.
This discipline helped society function under pressure. But what went unspoken did not disappear. It settled into bodies, relationships, and memory.
This, too, was survival.
Some Things Changed, and Some Held
As time passes, shared danger reshapes social behavior. Under continuous threat, people begin to assess risk not only in moments of crisis, but in everyday interactions. In how trust is extended, how closeness is negotiated, and how much of oneself is revealed to others.
These shifts showed in ordinary social habits.
Hospitality, long central to Afghan culture, is one example.
Afghans are known for never turning a guest away, even when the guest is a complete stranger. Guests are considered friends of God, deserving of care and respect.
Years of war complicated that openness. Armed fighters sometimes arrived disguised as visitors, or entered homes without regard for cultural protocol. A gesture of welcome could turn a home – or an entire village – into a battleground.
Warmth did not disappear, but it became moderated. Caution became practical. Suspicion was not cruelty; it was assessment.
We did not stop being kind. The conditions under which kindness was offered changed.
Years of conflict interrupted how culture was carried forward. Some traditions continued intact. Others were practiced quietly, or only partially. What once flowed easily began to require vigilance. Even connection had to be managed.
And still, some things held.
The calls we made after an explosion to make sure everyone was safe.
The friends or relatives who arrived despite lockdowns to take you elsewhere.
The neighbor who showed up with food after one of those days.
The shops, offices, schools, or cafes that reopened too soon after an attack.
Weddings that went on anyway.
Funerals people risked their lives to attend.
These were not acts of defiance or optimism. They were continuity.
People held the social fabric together because they did not want to let it tear completely. Often, what was offered was not advice or reassurance, but presence.
This is not only a story of loss. It is a story of a society that adapted together.
Survival did not erase dignity. Even under sustained pressure, people found ways to construct something that resembled a life.
There was pride in that – quiet, stubborn pride.
If this essay felt recognizable, you may be noticing what happens when people adapt together under continuous threat.
You may recognize yourself in the calm voice.
In the decision not to alarm others.
In the instinct to keep things going.
That wasn’t denial.
And it wasn’t weakness.
It was a shared adaptation to a shared condition, a common fate at the time.
You may recognize yourself in the calm voice.
In the decision not to alarm others.
In the instinct to keep things going.
That wasn’t denial.
And it wasn’t weakness.
It was a shared adaptation to a shared condition, a common fate at the time.
By Sadia Fatimie
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