It was around 1978, just before everything started to change in Iran. Even as a child, I could feel something was changing, something uneasy in the air, though I didn’t yet have the words to describe it. This was long before the world we know today, before the internet, before information could be freely distributed. We lived by what we were taught, and what we were taught became our truth.
In the evenings, we would sit in front of the television and watch everything on that black and white screen. Crowds in the streets. Voices rising. A kind of chaos that seemed far away, but somehow close enough to reach our home. I had no words for what I was seeing, but I could feel it. Something was changing around us.
And in the midst of it all, something was changing inside me too.
A deep fear had taken root in me, quietly but steadily.
After that, life did not suddenly make sense.
Nothing became easier. If anything, everything became quieter inside me.
I learned not to speak too much. Not to question. Not to expect. I adjusted. That is what people call it. Adjusting. But it did not feel like adjustment. It felt like disappearing.
Days passed. Then months. And somewhere in that time I stopped looking for someone to understand me. Because no one ever did.
I carried everything inside. The anger. The confusion. The hurt I did not even know how to name. And on the outside I became what I needed to be. Quiet enough. Acceptable enough. Invisible enough not to cause more trouble.
But inside there was always something unsettled. A question that never left me.
Is this what life is supposed to be? Is this all there is?
I did not have answers. So I kept living. Growing older but not really growing free.
I made choices. Some I understood, some I did not. Some came from strength, but many came from that same place inside me that had been silenced years before.
And without realizing it, I began walking a path that was leading me somewhere I could not yet see. A path that would eventually break me open.
And then, somehow, lead me home.
I want to pause here for a moment. There is so much more to this part of my life, more details, more people, more pain, more joy, than I can fit into these pages. But this book is not really about me. It is about God, and what He did, and what I witnessed with my own eyes. My life story is simply the road that led me there, But for now, I am keeping to the path, and the path leads somewhere much bigger than I am.
