I don't cry anymore

Hope as an antidote to fear

Photo by @photo.by.hosna on ig This is the oldest plane tree in the world, 1700 years old, in Khameneh, East Azerbaijan, the ancestral residence of Agha. I thought about putting the image of the 5000 year old cypress in Iran, but settled for this tree. It is hollowed out, but still alive. Locals have reinforced the trunk with bricks. They will not let it perish.

I don’t cry as much these days. Not because the world has become any saner or my grief any easier to bear. It feels between anticipation and numbness. The skin that expects the blow and convinces itself it can no longer feel.

For as long as I remember, I have cried in an ugly way. I remember watching A Cruel Romance, an old Russian film, ages ago and wishing to be Larisa Guzeeva. Not only because she was so beautiful, but because she cried in such a beautiful way. My tears have always come violently: with some sort of involuntary spasming of the larynx, a genuine inability to breathe properly, inability to form a sentence for lack of air. I’ve dubbed that “emotional chorea” – it makes it feel less ugly when I give it a medical sounding name.

When I cry I fall apart. But it’s not cinematic, not curated. It’s the sort of emotional expression that leaves most men confused and repulsed, perhaps even frightened. It doesn’t inspire protective feelings. I hate the way I cry.

So, not crying as much is a relief.

There are points in my life that are eternal wounds. Some dear, departed people. Childhood memories. Pets I lost before their time. Big disappointments that fundamentally changed the way I view the world. Losing parts of my own body, irretrievably.

And then, there is the 12 day war. I can tell you about the morning I woke up, June 13^th 2025, and I realized the war had started. I remember the first bombings in Tehran and that was shocking. I saw the cars flying around Tajrish square at some point and my reality broke down, even though I merely saw it on a screen. These scenes were always things that happen somewhere else, not in my world. Not in the streets that still carry traces of me on some molecular level. You can become psychotic in these sorts of moments, when the internal and external reality depart from each other so much it’s near impossible to continue as a single mind.

When I think back to the 12 day war, I remember mostly being in a deep state of shock, and crying all the time. I couldn’t speak a single sentence without my eyes doing their thing and getting the laryngeal spasms. There were moments when well-meaning but clueless people seriously and firmly suggested I seek urgent psychiatric help because I looked like I was totally falling apart.

Because I was! My city was on fire, my family in danger, and there is no western shrink who can fix that.

It only lasted twelve days, obviously, but what remained was a profoundly broken psyche, and an equally broken social contract. Relationships fell apart. The communities fractured alongside ideological lines. I became truly radicalized, politically, because I could no longer even be in the presence of people who justified the murder of our countrymen, for any reason.

The grief of that too was profound. I survived the 12 day war psychologically by a thread, and by the shovels of diazepam and bromazepam I drowned my system in. The aftermath broke lifelong friendships. Even the relationship with my best friend didn’t survive.

She hadn’t called. For the twelve days.

And we were done.

In my mind, people immediately started sorting themselves into categories. For disposal, for heightened attention, and for keeping. I tell you, very few remained in the third category. Silence was a disqualifying factor, so were self-serving messages. If it took too much energy to ask if my family was still alive, they had forfeited their right to be in my life.

You all met me after this. And the person who emerged on July 7^th to write these essays for an English speaking audience is not the same person from before June 13^th. I was softer then. Weaker, perhaps. Perhaps stronger in other ways. I had both more and less patience. I could still sit on fences, however uncomfortable the balancing.

The war took away my ability to lie by omission. And what came out were things I needed to say but had nobody willing to hear who didn’t already know. What use is it speaking to people who already know every turn of thought because they have been on these mental roads themselves? You can get a shared recognition, but that is all. There is no catharsis. Perhaps it is because I’m Iranian, I genuinely can’t access catharsis, our foundational tradition is not Aristotelian, tragedy doesn’t cleanse anything. We are always in a state of eternal longing and anticipation by design.

Whatever the cause, there is no purification. I still haven’t found it. I do this because I have to. Otherwise it will simmer inside me and turn putrid.

There is guilt in writing these lines. After all, I wasn’t there. I don’t want your sympathy, I think I’ve made that abundantly clear. Any expression of sympathy towards me personally, insults me. I wish I could eloquently explain why that is, but I really can’t. I don’t see myself as a victim. I’m in no need of such affectations. When it rained bombs, I wasn’t there, I was falling apart in a park, just outside my house, because being in my house felt intolerable, and then being in public was even more intolerable. I know my grief is real, I don’t need a PhD in Instagram reels psychology to tell me that, but when it mattered – I wasn’t there. Do I have the right to still write about the experience? Of course, because it’s mine. It belongs to me.

What I did, while putting myself together, was writing this thing. Taking care of my body, as much as I could. Going back to Iran, at the first opportune moment, to reassure myself the axis of the world had not shifted. That helped. That was the balm.

I returned from Iran early in the second week of January, 2026. As the street riots were going on. Now, I was on those streets, even at the Grand Bazaar on January 7^th (of which I have so much photographic evidence, though mostly of bazaar stuff, candied fruits, nuts galore, cats, textiles, kabab etc) when supposedly government forces shot tens of thousands of people. I know that this is a lie, because I am an eyewitness, and there were absolutely no riots on the Bazaar on the 7^th. What happened in other parts I can’t say with such certainty, but this I can, and I have the photos to prove when and where I was. There was a sizeable police presence and the Basij, but no clashes. I ate jujeh kabab in one of the restaurants and bought all sorts of herbs for tea.

When I returned, I was immediately promoted into the role of a martyr who escaped certain death (what?). And required to give eyewitness testimony of atrocities I didn’t see or experience. There had been such a media frenzy outside Iran, due to some information that we now know came out of Fairfax, Virginia while our internet in Iran was shut down. I had no clue about this, because as I said - I didn’t have internet back there!

However, once I started offering my perspective, what I actually saw and did, and the pictures I took, which you can very clearly see the date they were taken…. Nobody gave a shit. It contradicted the BBC, so I was all of a sudden, a liar. I, the non-hijabi, secular woman, became the enemy just because I didn’t accept some think tank’s information overriding my own eyes.

This begs the question: wait a second, now – I’m perfectly acceptable when I’m your token brown person, who conveniently isn’t brown at all, but when I speak of my own experience I’m disbelieved, discredited and relentlessly attacked? What aims is that solidarity serving then?

Would it be nicer if tens of thousands of Iranians actually died that day?

Is that what would satisfy those hungry eyes?

How much more of our blood has to be spilled to satisfy this fetish?

And you already know what came next.

In the morning of February 28^th, 2026, I woke up on a couch in a relative’s house. We sat together in the morning to drink our morning coffee, and continue to talk because we don’t see each other as much lately. Given the bad habit I’ve picked up during the 12 day war, the first thing I did was check the news. Within a few minutes, I had understood that something really bad was happening. That the war had started again. And during that same morning, I remember, I read about a school being struck, but not where it was. And then second by second: Hormozgan. Minab. Five dead girls.

No, eight.

No, fifteen.

By the next hour, there were 22.

Within hours, 55.

Within hours, undetermined.

I returned home, turned off mobile data and the internet at the router.

When I turned it back on:

115.

148.

150.

153.

What came later is hard to describe.

The next day, it was sometime before noon, I sat on the couch in my own house and convulsed in tears because the confirmation came that the Supreme Leader had been killed the day before.

Let me repeat that to you: I, a person who has not once in my life cared for internal Iranian politics to this emotional extent, sat down and disintegrated into a convulsive, snotty mush of a human being, because he was no more, and because a great and bone-shattering fear engulfed me, for what was going to happen next.

Do you remember the night I reported on the strikes on the Gandhi hospital’s neonatology ward? I did that on the bicycle.

That bike saved my life. For the duration of the war, I biked like a nutcase, because I effectively was one. I biked at breakneck speed, through crowds of people, and occasionally shouted abuse at them, in Farsi, words they couldn’t understand. I reported from the bicycle. I read news on the bicycle. I lived, for a good majority of my days, on that bicycle. The only thing that could keep me together was the necessity to spin those pedals, and keep them spinning.

I have lost 15 kilograms since.

Battering my body on that thing was the closest to relief I could get.

Imagine this scene. You are in bed, but can’t sleep. The world is moving according to its own schedule. You have to be at work in the morning, nobody gives a shit about your experience. Your ironed trousers and shirt await, and the agenda is set. At 1 in the morning, CET, you receive a call from your aunt who, interrupted by the sounds of explosions, rather close from what you hear, informs you that your street has been bombed, but that your family is alive and well, unharmed, so you wouldn’t FREAK OUT in five hours, when you immediately see this factoid reported on one telegram channel or another. Now go back to sleep, and trust that when you read about your street in the morning, the reality that they’re all still alive will remain unchanged.

And then, tomorrow, confront yourself with a colleague who watches monarchist Instagram accounts from LA who claim no civilians are dying in Tehran, and it’s all lies. Try to remain professional. Try not to get fired.

And do this for forty days.

I was totally wrung out. From rage, from pain, from helplessness. I even took my well-meaning loved ones up on their offer and went to see a Western shrink. We talked for 45 minutes and not a second over that. He mostly wanted intel on the war. He told me: “You don’t seem afraid, you seem more… angry?” I wanted to hit him in the face. He asked me, since I wasn’t depressed or petrified, what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to go to Iran. He asked why. I said, to be useful. He told me that this is then what I should do, and concluded that he wouldn’t recommend medications.

I paid 70 euros for this privilege.

I wrote about all this stuff, one way or another. Perhaps not as openly, perhaps not as clearly. But you can read these stories, from the bike to the shrink. They’re in the archive.

Since the ceasefire, I haven’t cried much. Only once, actually, in the beginning of June. For a reason that was so stupid it barely merits mentioning. I had to wait for a long time due to poor organization of some work-related event. I overheated. And when I came home there were other minor irritations, so I did my convulsive-puddle-human thing.

But that’s once.

I don’t really know if I have tears left to spend. It feels sometimes like my tear glands have stitched themselves shut. Like I really have nothing left to give.

So I don’t cry as much anymore.

But in that place I have rage and hope. So much of it, it feels like it could be a legitimate renewable energy source and light up the entire planet. Hope that fills me up and gives me courage. It makes me stand taller, however tiny my frame and face this world head on. It makes me say the words “Iranian” with a different cadence, not fear, not the expectation of rejection, but pride. I am of a people that have risen.

The millions on the streets back home, during bombardment, gave me no excuse for weakness. The women, hijabless and hurling the flag, on motorcycles. A new Iran was born from all this blood and rubble, one I couldn’t even imagine a year ago. An Iran I can fully belong to. In these past days, we saw the majesty of Agha’s funeral. I assure you that a good portion of the tens of millions who came to pay their final respects used to curse the government and system just a year ago. But this was fundamentally different, it was unity. It was a people uniting to say, in no uncertain terms, that they will not be defeated. Therefore, in this terrifying pride, in the tremor that engulfs the body, I found not consolation, but the living spring of a different sort of hope.

I have trust in my countrymen. They are awake.

So, I don’t cry as much anymore.

Tears are cheap. They cost a bit more if they belong to Larisa Guzeeva. Someone should make a statistic of the hectoliters of tears Palestinian and Lebanese women have wept in the past years. Now, us too. In the grand scheme of geopolitical chess they are entirely irrelevant.

Don’t waste your tears on us. If there is any humanity left in you, turn it into hope and rage.

You, my dear western friends, have not nearly raged or hoped enough.