SO YOU THINK YOU KNOW IT ALL? BUT YOU HAVEN’T LIVED IN IRAN!

I haven’t written for a while but it doesn’t mean i haven’t been thinking!

The thing is that when you come from the Middle East, let me be more specific, when you are from Iran, your life is how can i say; different from those who are not from Iran.

Yeah, yeah yeah, i know you are saying “well everybody’s life is different from the other, how can you be so sure? Who the hell are you to say this?” and a million other things you might be saying in your head.

 

But i truly believe that growing up in Iran i saw things that at least most of my friends living in the West haven’t seen at aaaaalllll!

 

I’m only thirty, which is not that old; ok it’s not that young EITHER and i know my mom thinks i should be married and bring her grandchildren and my grand mom thinks i have been pickled for life and no man would ever wanna be with me, but in a realistic light, i’m not that old!

My first memories of Iran are those of the war; when people were scared to live in Tehran as there was news that Saddam will severely bomb the city, people fled to the north, south, west and east of the country.

We were in Isfahan, and as a kid i thought “cool, i can hang out with my cousins and not go to school, yoohoo”. But at night when the sound of the radio alert would ring through the streets and homes even i as a kid knew that this might be the last time i see my mom, my baby brother and my cousins, i was always scared that i would die but i was also too proud to let my mom know that i was scared.

People would flee in the middle of the night and go to shelters to stay safe from the bombings.

Sometimes you would go to school and see that there are flowers on one of the benches, you knew she had died in the previous night’s bombings, i remember thinking “will they do the same for me if i die?” I now think it was so unfair that i had to think of death at the age of 7.

The other memories; loved ones who were in prison. News of family members and relatives being executed. You know how family members sit around have dinner and talk about stuff, well in Iran the topic was usually “was he tortured? When will he be released? When will he be executed?”

As a kid again it just seemed normal that whoever we knew had been in prison or executed!

As i grew older and became a teenager and well started wearing makeup and talked to guys, i realised, jail and prison were not that farfetched for me either.

If you were a teenager in Iran; you had most probably been arrested on the street, harassed, and scared shitless just because of talking to the opposite sex. I was once put in jail for a day with prostitutes, drug dealers and a woman who had helped her lover kill her husband, oh and a naked woman who was found naked just like that for the tenth time on the Chaloos road which goes to the Caspian region! I was 17.

 A guy i knew was killed either by accident or whatever at his 19^th birthday party by the police who raided the party; i was 16.

Many of my friends were tied to a bed and whipped 100 times by a bearded Pasdar until they bled and urinated just for being in a party! This is all through my teenage years and University.

Many of my friends became heroin addicts and drug users.

I was 21 when a close friend of mine killed herself, i was twenty three when another threw herself down from the Milad Tower in Tehran.

3 of my friends died in car accidents.

All this before i was even 30.

Now at the age of thirty i still continue to see horrific scenes in my country, but this time i said; i had enough, i will not let you torture me like this anymore! I will live the way i deserve to live! I WANT TO LIVE.