NASSIM ASSEFI

Life as a Thrillionaire

“Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth,” says novelist Dorothy Allison. For years writing novels has been my vehicle for exploring complex issues, taking my own pulse on how I feel about intense experiences or the stories of others, particularly the vulnerable and courageous immigrant women who populate my medical practice. So it is with trepidation and awkwardness that I write an autobiographical essay about what it means to be a thrillionaire. By sharing my story, I hope to make some of you realize that you, too, are thrillionaires.

When people come across the term in my biography, they often assume it means that I am an adrenaline junkie who gets high from life’s adventures. I must admit that this meaning resonates with my personal history.  I’ve been the target of a Molotov cocktail and a shower of bullets in Afghanistan, was followed by police while tracing the footsteps of British explorer Freya Stark in Southern Syria, recorded a CD in an underground music studio in Havana, decided on a whim to meditate in a cave for a 10-days after a week of hiking in the Tibetan Himalayas, hitchhiked to Samarkhand in the freezing cold one New Year’s Eve, and once did a stealth medical exam of Fidel Castro. However, in labeling myself as a thrillionaire, I do not mean to draw attention to my thrill seeking side.

I first encountered the term “thrillionaire” upon meeting Ruth Ann Harnisch--journalist, life coach, and philanthropist--at the TED Global conference in Oxford, England last summer. “Everybody has gifts to give -- gifts of money, talent, time, ideas. Thrillionaires know that the thrill is in the giving, not the gift,” she writes on her blog, thrillionaires.org.

I was not raised with a religious call to service or a tradition of volunteerism. However, I came to realize early in adulthood that I had won the lottery of birth–in North America to educated and supportive parents, at a time in history when women in the US have the potential to thrive in all ways—and this perspective has fueled my deep desire to give back. While at Wellesley College, I nominally engaged with its motto non ministrari, sed ministare (or its modern adaptation adopted by many educational institutions: “Enter to learn, Exit to serve.”), but it took some time before I figured out my unique thrillionaire path, and I continue to hone my professional calling.  That discovery required a degree of self-knowledge that I was only just beginning to acquire at Wellesley, one that further developed by doing women’s health fieldwork in the Middle East.   

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has transformed my home-town and current home-base of Seattle in large part due to the core value: “To whom much has been given, much is expected.''  The idea that it is a moral obligation of the more fortunate to assist the less fortunate is one that is normative in all major world religions, not just the Wellesley College motto.  Many—from President John F. Kennedy, founder of the Peace Corps, to the Harvard doctor and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes—have preached some version of this.  What I find often missing in this dutiful call to service is the joyful reward that the giver receives from helping others and the marvelous consequences of freely sharing their gifts. The poet and cultural scholar Lewis Hyde hints at this in his book The Gift, which explores the non-commercial benefits of making art: "When a part of the self is given away, community appears."

“The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose,” wrote 17^th century British playwright Hada Bejar, but that doesn’t mean that thrillionaires don’t burn out, develop compassion fatigue, or shift focus. We should be clear-eyed about what and how much we can give, and we need to be vigilant about giving back to ourselves.  As flight attendants say, “Put on your oxygen mask first before assisting others.”  To stay healthy, I take good care of myself—exercise, eat right, indulge my passions, take a sabbatical every four years, do retreats in solitude, and distance myself from energy vampires.  One must feel replenished on the inside to be able to give in a happy, effective, and sustainable manner. 

Since I am prone to exploring subjects through fiction, my forthcoming second novel, Say I Am You explores what it means to be a thrillionaire in the face of unjust distribution of privilege.  Survivor guilt transforms into humanitarian impulses for the two protagonists--young women who’ve escaped wars by leaving their countries of origin. Zayneb is an Afghan, a Hazara minority and Shiite Muslim in a predominantly Sunni country, whose family flees to Iran when the Soviets invade in 1979.  Being in Iran gives Zayneb a fresh chance at life in a country with far more opportunities for women than Afghanistan.  Zayneb gets an excellent education in Tehran, is not married off in her twenties like most of her Afghan peers, and becomes a respected journalist telling untold stories.  Mirroring Zayneb’s life story and even her name, Behnaz is also a young child when her family emigrates from Iran at the start of the Iraqi invasion to begin life anew in Los Angeles.  Behnaz excels at school, and fulfills her parents’ version of the American dream when she attends Ivy League universities and becomes a physician.

Zayneb’s and Behnaz’s parents and siblings adopt their new host country and have no desire to return to their homeland. However, both Zayneb and Behnaz yearn for their countries of origin and find themselves reversing their parents’ migration, moving West to East as they each turn thirty.  Defying the wishes of their families and friends, Zayneb and Behnaz converge in post-Taliban Kabul determined to do their part to improve the lives of Afghan women using the education and skills they acquired abroad. Zayneb becomes the first Afghan woman journalist to report on intimate issues that impact women—from self-immolating brides escaping domestic violence to the Taliban’s continued destruction of girls’ schools—at great cost to her personal safety.  Behnaz joins Americans for World Health, a US-based non-governmental organization, in charge of constructing health care in Afghanistan, and leads efforts to reduce the high rate of maternal mortality. 

Behnaz and Zayneb finally meet at a place where neither of them is supposed to be--an internet café.  Behnaz sneaks out of her house to connect with the outside world when she is supposed to be in “lock-down” because of a suicide bomber threat. Zayneb also furtively enters the cybercafe because she knows that Afghan society will judge her for going to a place where Afghan men often surf porn.  Unfortunately, the suicide bomber is also in that café. 

Say I Am You, the title of a mystical poem by Persian and Afghan poet Jelaludin Rumi as translated by American Southerner poet Coleman Barks, traverses many themes: courage in female form; international brain drain and recent efforts at its reversal; the diversity of the global Muslim community; the risks taken by journalists and aid workers in post-conflict zones; the colorful mélange of missionaries, mercenaries, and misfits that find themselves doing aid work; and what it means to be a thrillionaire in a “post-conflict” country.  

For those who believe that it is only the lucky, wealthy, or privileged who can be thrillionaires, I leave you with the example of Oseola McCarty.  This humble African-American woman was forced to drop out of school in the sixth grade due to family circumstances, started a washing and ironing business, and donated $150,000 of her savings to the University of Southern Mississippi so that others could be educated. 

Former Wellesley College President, Diana Chapman Walsh, beautifully described what thrillionaires do when she handed out the UN Declaration of Human Rights to each graduating senior from the class of 2000: “With rights come responsibilities to preserve the institutions of freedom; with privileges come duties to others less fortunate than you; with wisdom comes an obligation to use your knowledge in the cause of justice; with power comes the opportunity to remove that which subverts love.”