They always ask me where I’m from.
I say, “Do you want the short story, the long one, or the one I tell when I’m tired?”
I am Afghan by blood, refugee by chance. I am from Afghanistan. But I am also from exile.
From long lines and temporary shelters. From border crossings. I am a girl of many and multiple belongings, and some days, no belonging at all.
A piece of me still lives in a house that doesn’t exist anymore. Another piece in a tent that smells of dust and cardamom. Another in the pages of a book I had to leave behind because there wasn’t enough room when we fled.
People call us refugees like it’s all we are and nothing more than that, as if it’s too big that leaves no space for anything else. But we are also daughters, poets, students, fighters, believers. We are nomads, carrying whole worlds in our bags and in our bones.
And oh, schools.
How many doors have I knocked on?
Some had signs that said “education for all.”
Except, of course, girls like me.
I’ve seen more closed gates than open ones. I’ve learned to read through the cracks, to study from half-burnt notebooks, to whisper science formulas in the dark as if they were prayers.
That is what girlhood looks like in the margins: half-child, half-warrior.Missing home, missing school, but hopefully never missing courage.
We grow up too fast, they say.
We don’t.
We are forced to.
Note: something the world often forgets…girlhood is not a weakness. It is resistance and it remains that. It is like finding light to see.
Yes, the world is burning. Not just mine. Yours too. Ours.
War in one country, silence in another.
Floods, famine, forced marriages, child brides, forgotten names, untold stories.And still, girls rise. In Congo and Kabul. In Gaza and Karachi.
In refugee camps and hidden classrooms. Girls are standing on the frontlines, not necessarily because we want to, but because we should.
We are not waiting for invitations to lead.
We are already doing it—quietly, relentlessly.
And we are not alone.
There is a sisterhood rising across the world, a girl in Brazil passing her voice to a girl in Syria, a girl in Kenya holding space for a girl in Iran, a girl in a detention center in Greece dreaming for all of us.
This is the power they never counted on.
We are not scattered. We are connected.
Not by nation or passport or blood, but by story, by struggle, by the fierce knowing that we deserve more and better.
-Tahera K.
Guest Writer
Girl Museum