Scope:

I want to ask you to imagine yourself in the following scenario:

By the time you’ve finished reading this, you’ve made a life-changing decision. By the time you’ve finished up this workday, you’re on a plane, heading somewhere unknown, leaving everything you’ve ever loved behind.

That’s the situation my writing mentee, Sara Mosavi, found herself in. Sara was only fifteen when her entire family had to flee Afghanistan. It was August 2021. The Taliban had taken control of Kabul after US troops departed, and thousands of people were trying to escape with their lives.

This is not a political scenario I’m asking you to imagine. This is not a left or right, conservative or liberal scenario I’m asking you to imagine. I’m asking you to imagine being fifteen, and your mother is telling you that you can only bring one thing with you. One object from your entire life.

In Sara’s case, it was either a doll or a notebook. The doll was a beloved heirloom, filled with memories of playing with her aunts and warm, cozy sleepovers at her grandma’s. The notebook was a space where she dreamed and imagined. She was beginning to write a story called “Traveling with the Wind.” It was about an elderly couple, still very much in love, even as all their children had grown up and flown away.

Sara chose the doll. She tells me this story after we’ve been working together for the past nine months. She’s telling me the story with tears in her eyes, and I’m crying too.

At the last possible minute, Sara put the doll back. She chose the notebook. Through the long drive, the devastating scenes of desperation at the airport, the journey in the sky across an ocean, arriving in a strange land, starting life over in a refugee camp and sleeping on cots, the notebook came with her.

And a year later, a year I can’t even begin to imagine as someone who has never experienced being a refugee, Sara began to fill the empty pages of her notebook. She continued writing the story, “Traveling with the Wind.” Except this time, it was her story. She tells me that it wasn’t until she began writing this book that she began to feel happiness again.

There are 19 days left to support Sara’s crowdfunding campaign so we can publish her book and make her dreams come true. After all she’s been through, she deserves that experience of holding her own powerful, beautiful story in her hands.

Working with Sara has been the ultimate reminder of why I love writing and why it’s such an honor to do every day. Words connect us. Words can travel space and time. Words can remind us of what we lost and anchor us in what we hope for. For Sara, and for so many who will read her beautiful book, words can be a life raft.

So by the time you’ve finished reading these words, you’ve had to make a life-changing decision. Are you choosing the notebook?