"We are the flour between two millstones"

Struggling to build a new life in the United States, a Times reporter examines how a traumatic year changed lives both physically and emotionally.

We have a saying in Afghanistan: people age by the grief they experience, not the years they live.

A year after Kabul was evacuated as the Taliban swept through the city I had called home for nearly a decade, those words come back to me every time I look in the mirror. My hair has turned gray, the wrinkles on my forehead are deeper. When I send photos of me to my mother, who still lives in Afghanistan, she writes: "What have you done to yourself?"

On August 15, 2021, the morning started out as a normal working day, but within hours my family and I had to pack our lives into a few backpacks and leave the country. We left everything behind, from diaries to books to family photos.

My life and the lives of millions of other Afghans have been turned upside down.< /p>

We are still trying to figure out what happened. Our physical selves are the most visible reminder of how our lives changed so abruptly one summer day – reminders that we still exist even though we feel so alien in these new lands that feel nothing like home. that we fled.

I'm in the United States now, and while I'm physically safe, my psychological well-being is anything but. Everything is so different here, and I have no idea how most things work: where do I park my car? How do I pay my bills? And, by the way, how does American health insurance work?

As we boarded this huge American cargo plane that seemed to scream as it took off from the international airport from Kabul, the American troops on board told us where to sit but did not reveal how difficult our lives would soon become.

ImageThomas Gibbons-Neff, Mr. Abed, Fatima Faizi and Mujib Mashal after arriving from the US side of Kabul Airport in August 2021.Credit...TK

So now I have to work hard to avoid missing my rent payment, otherwise I won't be able to rent a house anymore. Did you know that when you rent a house or a car, they check your credit score? But when you're brand new to the country, you don't have one.

A feeling of loneliness hangs over me, and I think it might be there for a while. Life in America seems so centered on the individual. The people I see walking the streets are happy to be alone. They don't have big families like we had in Afghanistan. They don't see their loved ones as much as we do. They seem so busy - too busy to make a meaningful connection with someone like me.

In Afghanistan there are greeting customs that everyone follows before to have a conversation. "How are you? How is your family? How is your work?" We always laughed about it in Kabul, but now I miss it so much.

It has been a year of anxiety, worry and heartache for so many Afghans. And with the distance between my new American neighbors and myself almost tangible, I reached out to my Afghan friends who have been scattered around the world.

They , like me, invested so much in a government and a way of life that we never expected to collapse, or that the United States would leave behind as the Taliban closed in.

When I asked my friends how they were doing a year after we fled, their answers made me cry. I was never known as an emotional person and was almost proud to always be stoic. Even when I was a kid, my parents used to take me to the doctor because I...