Month: July 2025

Being from Iran, unfairness has played a big part in my life. No real social safety net, difficult economic advancement, terrible inequality in general, in addition to just generally terrible conditions of living that make everything worse. You have a classmate that goes to Europe every year, when there are people in the city that have never been to a Persian speaking city in their lives, being ruled by said Persian speaking cities.

And of course there was my family. There was so much wrong in my family, and my dad had died too. These aren’t experiences that I could ever really explain to any of my friends. So, they often slowly stopped being my friends, since they never really knew me anyway.

Then there was UWC. An opportunity that I thought I had for a better life. And each time that I applied, the more privileged kids from already pretty well-off and healthy families were the ones that were accepted. Me? They knew my story. And they didn’t care one fucking bit. I didn’t fit in their criteria, so I had to fix everything myself. And I had to watch the Instagram stories of the people who had gotten accepted, living the life I had dreamed of, except worse, because they couldn’t make as much of it as I would have been able to. And there was definitely nepotism in their selection process too.

So, for years, of course, I have been angry. As anyone would have been, if they had dreamed of the possibility of a good life as much as I had in the midst of the actuality of shit that I was living in. Now, I still feel angry and hateful. So I wonder if this will ever end, and if I’ll ever be able to let go. But then, how can justness be brought to world if people just let things go? And then again, how much can I ever change anything?

Getting over unfairness is such a difficult thing. Anger is rightful, you know it. Those people who hurt you deserve to be cursed. But as you curse them, doesn’t your soul blacken a little bit? Maybe it does. Maybe some people are fine with their soul darkening, if they know that something will improve because of it. Am I? I think my soul is already as sullen as a really terrible tattoo that’s there to stay.

My mother was a cold woman. She was obviously traumatised, and her whole life was this routine that she kept doing. She so obviously hated her life, and I often wonder me, but didn’t dare say anything. Why? Because our society was so, so deeply patriarchal. My hometown even more so. I didn’t even know divorce was normal among Iranians until two of my aunts had divorces. But not my mother. Probably especially because she was also religious.

Then of course the accident happened and she lost everything. We all did. That was the one incident that left everything incomplete.

Now I often wonder, what would have happened without the accident? Would my parents have gotten divorced? Would their relationship have improved? Would it have stayed the same, with the mild coldness running ever deeper into my veins?

The problem is, I’ll never know. It’s like an unfinished book. And I have to be okay with leaving it unfinished. I have to stop obsessing over it.

When I was eleven, my parents were in a car accident. My dad died and my mom was severely injured. She went into a coma for a few months and then was brought home to stay with us.

She was bedridden. A lot of physiotherapists came to our house to help her. Most were really rough, and hurt her a lot. She had become so angry from the pain and would often curse everyone around her, including the nurses that each spent only a few days with us before leaving or being ler go. Her bed was right in front of the door to my bedroom, the bedroom which I spent most of my time in now.

One time, during one of these physiotherapy sessions, she was so in pain that she grabbed my hand and yelled “kill me, kill me”, begging me with her eyes.

There are scars that don’t leave you. You wonder if what you experienced was real. You wonder if any of it meant anything. You wonder if she was, in fact, better off dead. Because if that happens to me one day, and I’m bedridden for the rest of my life, or bound to a wheelchair, as my mom later was, unable to live my own life independently, I’d rather die. Such degree of unwanted pain can never be meaningful.

When I was around 15, I wanted to leave Iran. Life at home was terrible, with my dad having died, and my mom incapable of doing much physically or mentally. I was disocciating from the terrible environment, the terrible boys-only school, the pain in my heart, and then found out about a school that might make me free.

I would look at its pictures, with kids my age running around making music videos in Italy or Armenia or Norway, along the fjords or the mountains, and realized that there was a chance for me to be among them. It was called United World Colleges, or UWC. I just had to apply and be good enough.

I applied, went through all the forms meticulously, no one to help me out, wrote them a bit about my life story. I was invited to the interview in Tehran. There I met people happier than me, and with them worked on projects to prove our worthiness.

And I was rejected. My dreams broke like a pane of glass. I hadn’t been good enough. And no one cared.

They gave me the opportunity to go to a two-week short course in Turkey though. Felt like peanuts compared to changing my life, but I took it anyway. And there, again, I met people so much freer, so much happier than me. I was reminded again and again of the sadness of being me.

Next year, I applied again. Went through all of it again, and was rejected again. Nobody had ever cared about me, had they? Can’t a teenager be fucking free?

So with a broken heart, I went through what many Iranians end up doing. Study to get accepted to a good university, study and work to one day apply to come to Canada. It ended up working, but god, 23 was so different from 16. My heart was broken and every year it had broken a little bit more.

I could be optimistic and say, perhaps there’s positives to it. Perhaps I got to learn something, to grow. But it would be a lie. My life had been shit. I was where I didn’t want to be, and I still think that I deserved to be selected, and that the only reason I wasn’t was that I wasn’t privileged enough. And that they didn’t give a shit cause they wanted people like themselves in that school. I didn’t fit the bill with all my traumas.

There was no meaning. Those people in the committee had the power to choose who gets a better life, and for me it would have been so wildly better, but they didn’t choose me. They never even responded to me afterwards, or reached out. They genuinely didn’t give a fuck. It was a hobby for them.

Now, at least, I know that what I have is what I built. I know that this scar will never leave, like many others. I also know that the world is a shit, unfair place. Since then, it bas been proven to me again and again. But there’s no one to punch and yell at.

Everyday I think about my life when I was in Iran. The eighteen years I spent in Tabriz, excruciatingly lonely, getting hurt without a solution. And the five years I spent in Tehran, lonely again, and always running around looking for a fix. Girls that didn’t want me, friends that didn’t like me, apartments that were so expensive and lonely. And often no one to talk to. Lost in the unbelievably unequal city. I even knew a friend who killed herself. One of the only people I could genuinely call a friend, and she killed herself.

I often try to understand what it all meant. I know that I grew because of those experiences, sure. I know that some people I knew also try to make sense of their relationship with me and understand what the fuck it meant. But I also know that it didn’t have to be this way if some things were different. If my parents hadn’t been in an accident, for instance. If I had a father, things would definitely have been different.

Things don’t have to suck but they do. So I guess pain is meaningless. It happens because it happens. And life sucks ass.

Finally, I’m becoming more comfortable reading and listening to French material. I can watch interesting videos on Youtube and read short stories while looking up only a few words. And that’s fucked up.

I’ll tell you why. It’s because this is the fifth language I’ll be knowing. I grew up in Tabriz, where I spoke Azeri (Turki, if you’re from there), and knew Persian as well. I grew up with Turkish TV shows, with their own world of wonder and amazement, in the poor streets of Istanbul and among the policemen and prostitutes of the streets. I went to university in Tehran, a city seen as a different, richer world from Tabriz, where everything was happening all the time in the midst of the polluted air. And now I’m in Québec, in a bilingual city itself stuck between North American values of work hard bitch and the European mindset of chill dudeee.

Now that I’m learning French, there’s a new way of thinking opening up. A new set of values, a new universe of how to think. And this will be the fifth one. It won’t be the conservative Tabriz way of thinking, it won’t be the odd, big city Tehran feeling, it won’t be the Turkish world of amazement, it won’t be the Anglophone North American way of life. It’ll be a whole new universe, so huge and so amazing. And it’ll tear me apart.

Every one of these places, these cultures, I’ve come to love. The carrot shops of Tabriz, the city with its distinct vibe, lost between the Caucasus and Persians. Tehran, always fighting for freedom, for a breath of fresh air. Istanbul, figuring itself out through a billion cultures and people with the Turkish kindness, smell of the sea, and fish sandwichs. And Montreal, North American yet Québécois and proud. All the languages tying them together, but their values and differences pulling them apart.

Each one is different, sometimes opposites in certain ways. One cannot be in Tabriz the way he is in Montreal. One cannot be in Istanbul the way one is in Tehran. You have to adapt, to change, to accept and absorb the people and their ways of life and thought. And then it becomes so easy to lose yourself.