These Walls
"his blog looks depressing" was what a friend of mine told my other friend about my blog, which reminded me of a reality that I've been trying to overlook for the last two years: no matter what you do and where you are, you'll always be seen as an West Asian (yes, I'm becoming more and more exhausted of the term "middle east"). Truth is, I never tried to bypass that, but the more I interact with my friends from Europe, the more I understand how different our lifestyles, our ideals, our struggles, and our privileges are. Generally, that's not a huge case as we are all born with unavoidable disparities to each other, and I never saw it as a rationale to befriend someone or not, but it gets back at me from time to time when I notice how we see each other's backgrounds. While it's painful that for most of my life I had to deal with news on war, censorship, prison, and awful inflation, though I'm not even coming from a poor family, I still found ways to "live" and "survive" amid all the catastrophic circumstances we witness regularly in Iran. Coming from a region that countries are in a constant war, people standing up against dictators after dictators, exploitation by the West, and even when they go abroad, have to overcome racism and discrimination, women restricting from very basic rights that a Westerner can't even think of, made me care about these matters without fully comprehending how "depressing" it might be for someone who lived with the privilege of being in a part of world that hardly faces these sort of issues. For sure, everyone has their own difficulties and we're not doing a stupid "who's having worse traumas" competition, but one thing that I noticed is the subtle incline towards not caring about people's lives outside of our small bubble. I could presumably have a happier life not checking the news and what's going on in Sudan, Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza, but at the same time reading about them and trying to gain knowledge about people's struggles encouraged me to be more compassionate towards those who undergo the misfortune of not being born in a chill green land with basic rights of living.
I don't think everyone has to do what I chose, and I don't think I'm moving mountains with what I'm doing, but recent conversations I had with some friends showed me how amazing it is to have a human image of where you are from and care about the people with whom you share a similar culture. I've never been more proud of being an Iranian, and I won't feel depressed solely because I care about what's happening around me.