On self-immolation

There's a word you don't hear every day. Did you know that 59 women (if someone between the ages of 13 and 25 can be called a woman) have committed suicide by setting fire to themselves in Herat in the past year? Before I read Christina Lamb's article in the Sunday Times, I would have been wrong if I'd said I knew what self-immolation really was. I thought it had something to do with harming yourself in the way that I've been doing lately, lifting heavy pieces of set and bruising myself on the furniture in my madcap show. Every new day, a new bruise. But how could I even compare the pain of a scraped shin to a strangled soul, so despairing and hopeless that flames seem a peaceful way out? I can't. It chills to think that as I type this, there are women and girls out there under a foreign sky who could only dream of being able to write away their miseries, or lose themselves in a good book as I am privileged to be able to do. There are somethings I believe a human being should be able to take for granted.