Category: Thoughts Page 1 of 3

I used to see moving abroad with such rose-tainted glasses before. Thought I’d come here, have a good job, friends, learn the language, and be at peace. I thought I’d feel one with the world.

But I feel like perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps people discriminate against me because I’m not from here. Perhaps it is hard for me to make friends here. Perhaps my life has been too hard to ever fit in anywhere.

These perhapses, more than anything, drive me crazy. They make me question if I’ll ever find the things I’m looking for, and experience the life I’ve dreamt of. So far, everything has constantly been so much worse than I ever thought it would be. So perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps my life will always be terrible.

I am 26 and a half now. But I feel like for years, I’ve only managed to stay afloat. To survive. I’ve done everything to feel a little free. But in the end it hasn’t been like that. In the end I’ve always been the prisoner of circumstances and worse, other people’s lack of care. Every time I have tried to change something in my life, even if I’ve succeeded, it has only brought a new wave of pain and suffering. And nobody has ever been there to help me with it, except superficially.

I used to have parents who at least cared a little bit, who at least did a little bit to improve my life, even if they themselves were causes of this prison around me. But I lost them too soon, and I have no frame of reference as to what happens to people like me. What happens to this weight of loneliness and never-ending responsibility regarding my own life. I have no idea how many more years I can try alone before giving up. Sometimes I would rather cut it short sooner anyway. Not that anybody would do anything to stop me.

When I was a child, my dad sometimes took us on these trips to places I still don’t know. There was a village near a river which we went to twice, which never had any tourists other than us. There were chickens with their babies walking around, and once one of them got stuck on a pile of cow poop. It was hilarious and sad. Another was a vast, green space close to a road, where we camped under the trees and ran around as kids. And I never learned where these places were.

There were also times back then when I interacted with people I don’t remember. There was the girl in a park in a small town we stopped at on the road, whom I was mean to. And then there was the girl who gave me a kiss on the cheek in kindergarten, which made my mother laugh, one of the only times I remember her genuinely laughing before the accident. Perhaps the only time.

I often wish I could go back in time and write about these memories, or take pictures of them, or make videos, or post Instagram stories. But back then life was different, and now it seems like a dream. My past always feels like a dream.

It’s been over two and a half years since I left Iran. The images I have of it now are of a different world. A world I’m aftaid of revisiting, although I certainly will again, once I have enough money, and enough courage. Because you need courage to leave the place that gave you the safety to figure your shit out to see the place that puts a weight on the back of all its residents.

Iran is always different. There is nowhere in the world whose streets, as plain as they often are, will give the same feeling. Its isolation creates a barrier away from the crazy of the international world, to create a crazier local world. Its people are free in such an odd way, and suffering so silently. Its poverty is so normalized. Its mountains so tall, and its soil so sad.

It is a land that deserves the best, but has so often gotten the worst. Its people are so accepting of the suffering it seems, because it’s become part of who we are. And so we find joys in suffering.

Yet I wished we didn’t have to. I wish we were always a little isolated, because the rest of the world is mad, but also prosperous and happy. I wish we all had houses and food and safety, and freedom to live how we wanted. I wish life wasn’t such a gloomy affair for us, as we went about our days. I wish the government workers were all happy, like the ones in Quebec, who don’t have to put on the ugly black “maghna’e” or get shit salaries to deal with sadder people than them. And I wish the metros weren’t always so full of hopelessness. And I wish a kilo of chicken hadn’t become so expensive.

But I can’t do anything. I never could. That’s how useless I’ve always been.

Recently I accepted a full-time position for a job I had already been working part-time. When they asked me if I wanted the morning 8-4 hours or the evening 1-9, I asked for the latter. Why? I’m not sure.

My first reasoning was that I’ve never been able to wake up that early since I finished high school. But then I thought, well then I was able to do it for 12 years of schooling. So why does it feel like torture now?

And I think I had my answer in the question. During the 12 years of schooling, I was at home, and life was terrible, so I often stayed up late when everyone was asleep to have hours and hours of alone time, the only time that was for me. That was the only way I could be a little bit happy. In my own world of imagination. I needed that, even at the cost of sleep.

Now, that time has passed. I live alone, and no matter what time I wake up, I’ll be alone. But still, nights are my time. The time when my pain is mine. When no one is jogging in the park, no one is chatting cheerfully in the cafes. Because no sane person stays up so late. So it’s for the insane.

Or maybe it’s just that we all have different natural waking hours. But that’s a boring explanation.

The life I had before the age of 11 was very different for me than anything else I experienced afterwards. My dad was alive, and my mom was healthy, at least physically. There was much more snow in my hometown, and home was mostly safe. Life felt cold, but along with the deep sensations of childhood, it left an impression in me that still persists today, when I’m in Montreal, a city so similar sometimes.

When people speak here with their Québécois accent, when they take pictures and put them on their instagram and somehow make it look like what I’ve always felt as a child, such as the photos that my favorite barista posts on hers, with a coldness that is so beautiful. I do love that coldness. And I wish I could connect with it more, because that is my reality.

The coldness feels like a lonely beach, with none of the colours too strong, none of the characters too important, none of the love too real. Everything a little bit faded, because life is such. There is nothing glamorous, but existence itself.

I remember it as the dark street beside the big fenced off park in Tabriz whose name I never learned because I never went there after my dad died. The liver shop we went to at night, which we loved but only went to very occasionally. The old, plastic chairs, the curious park that I had to watch from the outside, the movement of the animal there whose species my kid brain couldn’t figure out in the darkness. The liver that was always so delicious, which my dad sometimes gave me a raw piece of, with salt, to enjoy, because raw liver is so enjoyable. The family, faded in the dark but there. And my heavy, lonely heart. Though not as heavy as now that none of it exists.

I watched this video a couple of days ago, and it struck me how odd the world is right now. Everything is dismantling, and we don’t know how to react. We feel alone, because dating is no more, friendships are no more. We are all alone. But we want to be alone. It’s freeing to be alone.

But if loneliness is just a feeling, then it’ll go away, like other feelings. Eventually, that is. But we mustn’t fight it. We must accept it, accept its pain, its headache. Accept that the world is going to take the path it takes. We do what it takes to improve it, in a moral, constructive way, but we stay detached from the results.

Because loneliness and melancholy will be there occasionally, even if we have the best of friends. Even if we have the best relationship, the best pet, the best life. So if we can’t be okay with that feeling, we will constantly be anxious, trying to fix it, annoying everyone around us, until we hurt them or they hurt us.

A couple of years ago, when I moved to Canada, I decided to destroy everything and build it all up again. I didn’t actually destroy everything, and I didn’t actually build it all up. I’m still me. But everything looks new. Mentally, I’ve become an infant. And it’s amazing, sitting at the park, watching the ducks and pigeons. Even a real infant came to check out the ducks, and she smiled at me and I smiled at her, but only once because more would be too many. Then she disturbed the ducks’ peace by chasing a couple of them, just as I wished I could show her how to sit still and let them get close to her.

The noise of humanity is too much, its insanity, its evil. But life is grand, and there is a breeze, which is a gift. Faces are so pretty. And peace does exist sometimes, though we are animals fighting like little shits. When we frown, and go deep into the darkness, hating and hating. But the breeze takes us somewhere different, where reality is sincere. It feels cold inside me sometimes, but when it encompasses me, I’ll become one with the world.

Looking at the world, it seems to me that everything is changing very quickly and not all of us will survive. Especially in the first world countries.

By survive, I don’t mean that we’ll die, or even necessarily be jobless. I mean that we will not have children. Not because we hate having children, but because for the first time, we all have access to so much information, and know that the way we’re feeling is often terrible, and that we wouldn’t be able to have kids and raise them the “right” way, with enough love and resources, unless we can fix a million problems in our lives.

Some of us will get through it, go to therapy, get good jobs, develop social circles of true value, become fully secure in ourselves. But many of us won’t. Many will fall behind, not finding the right time to have kids until it’s too late, or never. This is why we’re all so bitter. We see our impending doom. We see that our bloodlines will not continue.

For those of us that succeed, life will have a million challenges. Raising kids is the hardest thing in the world. Keeping yourself sane, keeping your relationship healthy, your career safe, your kids happy, their future bulletproof. So life will be terribly hard, and we must make sure we’re ready for it.

And for those of us that don’t succeed, don’t have kids, and know that we will never see our offspring, we should know that it’s okay. Our genes aren’t that important, and technology will hopefully improve enough for us not to need such a large next generation to care for us. We can still live productive lives, helping drive these technologies forward, or care for our fellow citizens, including the children of the overwhelmed parents who will definitely need it.

But we must remember that this is a transitional period, and life after this generation will never be the same.

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.