Missed Dreams , A silent tragedy of millions of girls

Declaration :

The story of the girl in this article is drawn from real-life tragedies I have witnessed and is based on the lives of girls I personally know.

 In the real story, both girls are victims neither was granted the privilege to pursue her dreams.

 I was perhaps the fortunate one, merely watching from afar, receiving in my life what they were denied, and wondering why opportunity was given to me and not to them.

Their story is not unique. It reflects the struggles of millions of girls around the world, silenced and constrained simply because of their gender.

 In writing this story, my hope is to give their lives a voice, to shine a small light on the injustice they face, and to remind the world of the potential lost when girls are denied education and freedom.

"If you educate a man, you educate an individual; but if you educate a woman, you educate an entire generation"

Do you know the feeling of being hungry, yet forbidden to eat?

I don't mean the ache of an empty stomach, the kind that food can heal.

I'm speaking of a sharper hunger : The hunger of the mind. It gnaws at you silently, leaving behind not just emptiness, but shame, injustice, and a strange loneliness.

It is the hunger to know, to ask, to learn, to hold a book and let its words carve light into the darkness. 

It is the hunger to step into a classroom and feel your world expand beyond the walls of your home.

But for me, that hunger was declared a sin. My own family , the very people who should have been my protectors, my encouragers , chained me to a destiny of silence and illiteracy. 

Not because I was incapable, not because I lacked dreams, but because they feared the whispers of others, the weight of judgment, the poison of "what will people say?" My right to learn was bartered away for their comfort.

And that is not even what hurts the most.

What stings deepest is that under the same roof, in the same room, sharing the same air and the same blood, another girl my age - my cousin - was allowed to cross the threshold I was denied.

Every morning she left with a satchel heavier than her small shoulders, but inside it was treasure : books filled with words I could not read, notebooks scribbled with lessons I could not understand. And every afternoon, she returned carrying stories of strange lands in geography, numbers that built invisible ladders in mathematics, names of poets and scientists who once dared to ask questions just like I wanted to.

She spoke of experiments, of multiplication tables, of rivers I had never seen, of cities I had never heard of. She knew how to make sense of the world, while I was left only to wonder about it. I listened, wide-eyed, nodding at her excitement, smiling at her triumphs but deep inside, I was shrinking. Every new word she learned was a reminder of what I had lost. Every fact she recited felt like a door closing behind her, leaving me outside, knocking with bare fists.

But why her and not me?

We were born into the same family, raised under the same traditions, breathing the same air of a faraway rural village where life moved slowly and quietly.

In our world, anything a woman did outside the narrow frame of patriarchy was marked as rebellion, as shame, as something forbidden. Girls were raised not to dream but to obey. We were taught that our value rested in silence, in endurance, in service.

The difference between us was not in our abilities, nor in our dreams but in our mothers.

Our fathers, brothers by blood, shared the same beliefs, the same ignorance, the same unshakable conviction that daughters did not belong in classrooms. For them, women's destiny was already carved in stone: to master domestic skills, to cook and clean, to manage a house, to serve and please a husband. To seek more was to defy nature itself.

When the decision was declared "our daughters will not go to school" silence fell in one household, but not in the other.

My aunt, my cousin's mother, did not accept. She was a woman shaped by pain, by the bitter taste of "not knowing," and she refused to let her daughter inherit the same emptiness. She had a voice, sharp and unyielding, and she used it. She did not beg, she did not plead. She threatened.

She swore that if her daughter was denied her right to education, she would leave her husband's house without hesitation. And he knew she meant it. He knew her words were not empty threats, but a declaration of war. He knew that behind her fragile body burned a fire of ambition that no silence could extinguish.

It was her defiance, her courage to challenge him in a world where women were expected to bow, that broke the chain. My cousin went to school, not because the men in her life believed in her, but because the women refused to let her be buried alive in ignorance.

And me? I stayed behind, condemned to illiteracy. Because my own mother swallowed her words instead of spitting them out, carried her pain instead of throwing it back, obeyed instead of resisted.

My cousin's life was rewritten by a woman's courage. Mine was sealed by a woman's silence.

And what happened next? I was condemned to watch her become the person I had always dreamed of being, the life I had longed to live but was never permitted to reach.

We grew together, yet differently. I grew in body only, my bones stretching, my face changing, but inside, my mind was trapped, my curiosity starved, my imagination fenced in by invisible walls.

She grew too, her mind, her knowledge, her confidence expanding every day into spaces I could only glimpse from afar.

I listened as she spoke of choices, a banquet of possibilities laid before her high school graduation and yet, even she hesitated. Medicine? Architecture? The world was hers to shape, yet she felt the weight of deciding. And me? Poor me. I had no choice. My path had been carved before I could even speak it aloud. I did not know the thrill of deciding, of dreaming, of risking. My destiny was assigned, and it was as final as a lock slammed in my face.

At first, I tried rebellion. Every marriage proposal that came my way, I refused. No reason, no explanation, only a quiet, simmering protest.

If I cannot follow my own destiny, then I will not step into the destiny chosen for me.

It felt like justice, like a fleeting reclaiming of power. But life is crueler than I had imagined. The same hands that denied me education, the same walls that confined me, could also bend me into submission. A little pain, a little force, a little fear and suddenly, resistance was futile.

I got married carrying a huge weight of shame, illiteracy, stupidity, and failure.

In the end, she became a doctor, and I became one of her many patients of domestic violence.

How cruel life can be.