Category: Thoughts Page 2 of 3

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.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I want my life to be. What is it all for? I don’t know.

I feel alone. Not in the sense that I don’t have friends, but in the sense that nobody will ever understand me. I’m not sure where everything I’m doing will lead. A career? A family? A few decades of having fun and exploring? Art? Literature? Love?

There’s no meaning to life. We all know that. But it’s not about an intellectual meaning, is it? It’s about a feeling of not being lost. So how can we create a feeling?

They say relationships are the only real meaningful thing in life. That I agree with. But god, in this digital age, even that seems impossible. You get married, you have kids, you invite your friends over, all of you in the living room you worked decades to pay for, and everyone is on their phones. Is that meaning?

So, music. It’s such a raw and complicated thing. I love it and I hate it. So ephemeral, so indescribable. So different from words. Words and books and writings have existed for thousands of years. Music has too, but the old ones are gone. And we think we know so much because we’ve been able to record and transcribe music for a few centuries. Fuck that shit.

But it does go to the heart. And for me, it represents certain stages of my life. The younger years, of course, it was haphazard. My dad would play us Persian pop music on our trips for us to dance and sing to in the car. I tried listening to Persian rap when I was in primary school. Then I listened to American pop in middle school. Then in high school, a lot of indie rock. Then in university, a fucking flood of new music came through.

I listened to so many new things, mainly because the people around me were sharing them with me. It was anything and everything, prog rock, jazz, folk, indie, metal, whatever. And I listened to them avidly, trying to understand the people around me. Then that time passed too and I moved to Canada.

Here, everything went fucking crazy in my life. I was so alone, and everything was so horrible sometimes. But music was there, and I started making playlists for the first time. I discovered so much music from my native language, and that was the first playlist I was proud of. Then came other ones, and each one I listened to a lot while I was making them, not because I was trying to make a playlist, but because they were helping me understand my damn complicated life and feelings. So they became memories of feelings and people and places that often no longer existed. They gave form to the ache in my heart. A virtual, abstract, untouchable form, sure, but a form.

The Turki playlist reminded me of my childhood in Tabriz. The Azeri jazz playlist reminded me of my dad and his freedom of spirit. The Streets of Life Persian rap playlist reminded me of my lonely years in the crowdedness and dirtiness of downtown Tehran. Then there was a playlist I had just for all the childhood I lost when my dad died, the feelings of joy that took me a decade and a half to even mildly experience again. There was the Persian rock playlist that reminded me that Iran wasn’t all hell, that this music could make it worth it to be Iranian. At some point after I graduated, my mind was all over the place, and so classical music seemed to make that better, and I made a playlist for that. For a few months, I was so angry, so burnt-out, that I could only listen to metal and shoegaze, and I made a long playlist for that which helped me revive and survive. Then the sadness of many lost relationships hit again, and I made a playlist for melancholic rock. And now, I feel somewhat connected to life again, or at least feel like I’m reconnecting slowly, and a prog rock playlist, a genre I hadn’t really listened for a couple of years, is being made in honor of that.

So yeah, maybe music is not such a mess. Maybe life is. And maybe future playlists will keep on capturing memories of my life.

Often, I can’t really understand why there has to be so much suffering in this world. Why poverty, cruelty, oppression, and abuse should exist. Why people should be so hurt. Why powerful people should be so selfish and why the powerless so powerless. It really isn’t even about the lack of justice for me, it’s more that my mind literally cannot comprehend it. How can it even be possible? Perhaps this lack of comprehension is why people end up supporting dictators and bullies. Not because they’re bad, but because, like me, their minds cannot accept the reality of this cruelty. Maybe it’s too painful. Maybe it would push us into a depression that can never be cured. And then, what is life, if so dark? Maybe the next generation will figure it out. Things are moving fast in these decades and centuries, so who knows. But I doubt it. Because the people I grew up with, they definitely also know how to be cruel, selfish, and abusive. People are monsters and the world is hell. And no matter how much we trick our brains, this is a fact that will never change.

Well, apparently I’ve got something called Recurrent Corneal Erosion. It’s when your eye gets dry at night, and when you open it in the morning, a thin layer gets pulled off of the eye. It’s painful and horrible and I hate it.

HOWEVER, the experience has been interesting. The pain causes you to want to sleep until your eye heals itself enough for you to be functional, usually in a few hours. In those hours, the foggy pain goes to the back of your head, and everything feels so odd, lonely, and old. You realize the importance of love. You realize that you wish you had someone with you, like the divorced middle aged man in House MD whose wife and kids come to him while he’s sick but then he leaves them again when he gets better. But you’re a better person, so you remember the pain even when it’s gone. You know that what you felt was real, that it says something. And fuck it you don’t want to be alone the next time it happens.