“But you’re a guy’s girl!” A compliment that sent me into a full spiral the other day.

A guy’s girl? Is that really how I come across?

And then I took a moment and realized... well, yeah. That is how I’ve come across. Though it isn’t true for me now, it’s what I once relished in. A guy’s girl. Like I was chosen by men. The one who could hang with the guys. The one who was so chill they saw her as an equal. At least that’s what I thought.

When I was younger, like most girls, I just wanted to feel like I belonged. I moved to America for high school, and I didn’t fit in, no matter how desperately I tried. People knew I didn’t belong, and they made sure I knew they noticed. I was picked on pretty badly. Mostly by girls, because God gives teenage girls one superpower, and it’s emotional terrorism.

So I became friends with the people who were nice to me. Unfortunately, that led me to guys.

I grew up with brothers, so I assumed that was why it came so naturally. I knew their lingo, their favorite shows, the rules of whatever video game they were obsessed with that week. I blended in pretty seamlessly. I considered myself a tomboy, even though I was far from it.

In high school, I wasn’t the cute one or the popular, fun one. I was the friend of the girl you wanted to fuck, so you were nice to me in the hopes that I’d put in a good word for you. I was the brown girl with a mustache who didn’t realize everyone really did notice how hairy I was.I wasn’t friends with the guys because they wanted to fuck me, that came later, when I got hot (shoutout to the pandemic).

In high school, I was just... around. Available. Down for a fun night.

When I moved to New York to attend NYU, I had to start from scratch. The problem was, I didn’t really know how to make friends other than telling people I had Adderall and asking if they wanted to get blackout drunk.

I was always an awkward kid, desperate for friends. I didn’t have some grand motive. I just hoped that maybe one day I’d have a group of friends in New York like the TV shows I loved.

Instead of befriending the kids in my classes, I started working at a dive bar in the East Village that hosted comedy nights. That became my playground. The comics I was around liked to drink just as much as I did—except instead of Adderall, they were doing cocaine.

So I leaned into the tomboy I’d created for survival and became a professional code-switcher. A girl who secretly loved everything feminine shoved that part of herself down and started doing whiskey shots with the boys.

It was a really fun time because I was 21 and convinced this was the New York life I’d always dreamed of or maybe I was just too drunk to notice. The guys I was around were in their mid-thirties, and I remember thinking, Wow, how lucky am I to be friends with older guys? I’m not like the girls at NYU. I’m different.

Funny how that mindset was really just insecurity.

I didn’t put myself out there with my classmates. I isolated myself because it was easier than asking someone my own age, at the same school, if they wanted to be friends. I was scared they’d say no. Scared they’d pick on me the way the girls at my high school had. Thinking I was different because I hung around 35-year-old alcoholics was the biggest cope of all.

That pattern continued for another eight years. I’d befriend the guys who wanted to drink, and the girls who wanted to be my friend I’d get close with for a little while. But the men always took priority because those were my boys, after all!

I’ve had my fair share of friendship fallouts, but the ones that still deeply upset me are the female friendships I let slip away because I didn’t pour into them the way I should have.

I was so used to hanging around men who didn’t need follow-up questions or emotional check-ins that I didn’t know how to sustain a friendship with a woman. And honestly, I didn’t deserve one. I didn’t deserve a good girlfriend because I wasn’t a good friend.

I’d show up for someone, but never consistently enough. I’d want to hear about their lives, but only because it made for good conversation and filled my loneliness. I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to understand the value that other women could bring into my life.

And I’m embarrassed by that.

I’m embarrassed that I’ve lost female friends I truly did love at one point. I’m embarrassed by how immature I was throughout my twenties and how often I let my ego take the wheel instead of choosing the friendship.

I wish I could go back in time, stop the falling out before it happened, stop the neglect before it became resentment, grab my younger self by the shoulders, and say, These women are worth so much more than these men, and you’re going to learn that the hard way!!

But maybe I did have to learn it the hard way. I spent two years enduring harassment and a smear campaign from a former guy friend who assaulted me. I watched my guy friends witness all of it and never once stand up for me.

I’d hear things like, “Oh, that’s just him,” before they’d go right back to hanging out with him. None of them questioned their boy. They only questioned me.

“Why would he spend two years harassing me?” I’d ask.

“He’s just a spazz, and you know, he’s weird with women” they’d say.

Looking back, it makes perfect sense. He wasn’t just trying to ruin my reputation—he was getting ahead of the story. If I ever spoke about what happened, he’d already spent years laying the groundwork for me to be dismissed as the “crazy woman.”

The boys I’d built my life around were always going to choose each other over me, even when one of them assaulted me.

That’s when I realized I’d confused being included with being loved.

This realization has been one of the most beautiful yet isolating experiences of my life. Because I finally understood what being a guy’s girl actually meant.

It didn’t mean I was one of them. It meant I was expendable.

I asked one of my closest guy friends why he never stood up for me when all of this happened. He said, “I’m only responsible for me and my girlfriend.” And just like that, someone I’d considered one of my best friends for eight years was gone. I replied, “No, I totally get it.” Because, for the first time, I actually did.

He would’ve stood up for me if I were one of his boys. I know that because I’d watched him do it time and time again. The boys had each other’s backs without question. But I wasn’t one of the boys. I wasn’t his girlfriend either. I existed in the space between the two—close enough to be included, never close enough to be protected.

I have to add that one of them did stand up for me. He has proven, time and time again, that he is genuinely my friend. He's the one they all admire, the one they all look up to, the one they wish they were, the one whose opinion carries the most weight. And yet, even with him defending me, the others remained silent. That's because their loyalty wasn't to the truth—it was to the social order. They were more concerned with preserving their place among the men than doing the uncomfortable thing and standing beside a woman they knew had been wronged.

I can’t sit here and say that now I’m perfect and everything worked out because we’re all constant works in progress. But I can say that this realization has completely changed how I show up for myself, my friendships, and who I actually let into my life.

I still hold onto my guy friends who have showed up for me and continue to do so. But I’m no longer chasing the validation of the group. Some men were in my life because they genuinely wanted to be friends. Others were there because they were friends with one of my best guy friends. It took me a while to realize that, for some of them, I was never really the destination. I was the access point. They cozied up to me because they wanted proximity to someone else. Through me, they were chasing his validation. They accepted my kindness because it got them closer to what they actually valued: another man's approval.

The rest didn’t end in some dramatic explosion. I just stopped reaching out and so the friendships just... ended. You learn really quickly who cares about you when you stop doing all the work. Friendships that I had placed so much value on, gone without warning. Gone like they were never there.

The people who’ve shown up for me this past year are the people I’ll carry with me moving forward. And yes, most of them are women. Because, of course, they are.

For example, a couple of years ago, one of my guy friends came to my family’s house for the Persian New Year- Norouz. My family welcomed him like family. He joined our card table, listened to their stories, and was really involved in the night. But this year, while Iran was being attacked, he never reached out once. Not to ask how I was. Not to ask how my parents were. Not to ask how my family was doing. That silence told me more about our friendship than any conversation ever could.

And then, inversely, a female friend I’d let go of a few years earlier came back into my life. She asked me how I was doing. She asked how my family was doing. She even remembered their names. And I realized that something as simple as remembering the people you love is worth infinitely more than a room full of men telling you you’re chill.

Being included doesn’t mean you’re valued. I spent years chasing the invite, the party, the feeling of being wanted, without realizing I was surrounded by people who didn’t actually care about my well-being. I collected friendships like Pokémon cards instead of nurturing them.

So now I sit here with a smaller circle but a calmer nervous system. I surround myself with people who check in. People who remember. People who stay.

Turns out, I never wanted to be a guy’s girl.

I was just a lonely kid trying to belong.

Since the holidays, I’ve been back in my childhood bedroom—the place where my teenage angst lived, where my personality first took shape. It felt like regression. Like failure. Like I had somehow made the wrong choices and ended up back where I started, needing my parents to comfort me.

But then the January massacre happened. And then the war began.

And I have never been more grateful to be here.

I am not alone in a small apartment, trying to process this from a distance. I am with my Iranian family, moving through it together. We sit side by side, refreshing our phones, exchanging updates as if our home has become a small newsroom—one sustained by urgency, grief, and memory.

Living with your parents as an adult comes with its frustrations. But I’ve realized, this is exactly where I need to be.

Because while the noise of hate and dismissal floods in from the outside, I am sitting next to two people who know more than any history book could teach.

They didn’t just read about the 1979 revolution—they lived it. They stood in line at the American Embassy as the hostage crisis began. They remember when Cinema Rex burned. Their memories are not theoretical. They are lived, carried, and still aching.

Since January, when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps killed tens of thousands of Iranians, we’ve been glued to our phones. Whether that’s healthy isn’t even a question I have the luxury of asking. I can’t look away.

And when there are no updates, there’s hate. A lot of it. Mostly from men.

I’ve gone from engaging to ignoring. It’s been months, and I’m too exhausted to explain 47 years of repression to people who have already decided not to understand.

We’re over here arguing, and they’re over there dying.

“This is propaganda,” a random man on the internet tells me as I post about my family.

Apparently, whatever my relatives in Iran say is now propaganda. Filtered, dismissed, rewritten by people who have never lived it. Because now, everything is propaganda if it doesn’t align with what you already believe.

When tens of thousands of Iranians were brutally killed by their own government in January, I was told by people who have never been to the Middle East that it wasn’t real. That it was staged. That it was Mossad. That it was all a farce.

So while my cousins were in the streets protesting, witnessing brutal violence and calling me to tell me what was happening in real time, I was expected not to believe them. Not to feel it. Not to trust them.

Instead, I was supposed to ask:

“Are you sure?”
“Is that real?”
“Because a guy who’s obsessed with Reddit told me what you’re living through is propaganda.”

It’s honestly surreal the way people so far removed from what’s happening speak with authority over those actually living it. The audacity of Americans with no connection to these foreign affairs—not just commenting, but asserting, insisting, correcting—as if they know better than the people experiencing it in real time.

Not only are they asserting opinions as facts, they’re actively speaking over Iranians, deciding that the very people affected by this are too “annoying” to be heard. It’s interesting how quickly you label the Iranian diaspora as annoying, yet stay far quieter about a government that imprisons, tortures, and kills their loved ones.

I wonder how you would sound under that kind of repression. How “annoying” you would be if you had to live through it too.

It feels like something shifted over the past couple years. People question everything except their own ideology. They latch onto narratives that aren’t even theirs and defend them like it’s a personal duty. There’s no curiosity anymore, no room for contradiction—just allegiance.

Because those who defend the IRGC are often far removed from its reality. Those who insist it has any moral authority are usually aligned with it ideologically or religiously, and view themselves as morally superior to the West.

But when comparing the IRGC to Western imperialism, one distinction cannot be ignored: one system allows for dissent, and the other kills those who express it.

A government that murders its own people cannot claim moral superiority—no matter the justification, and no matter the religion invoked.

It raises an uncomfortable question: what is the purpose of these arguments?

In my experience, they do not lead to understanding or accountability. They do not change minds. More often, they serve as a form of displacement—a way to engage with tragedy at a safe distance, without confronting its full weight. It doesn’t happen.

All it does is keep us distracted, fighting each other while governments continue to imprison, torture, and kill innocent people without consequence.

For those of us with family in Iran, this is not an abstract debate. It is not a question of competing narratives. It is a question of whether the people we love will be safe and whether their experiences will be acknowledged or erased in the very act of being discussed.

We are often told the internet has made the world smaller, more connected, more informed. Maybe it has. But it has also made it easier to mistake proximity to information for understanding, and confidence for knowledge.

In moments like this, that distinction matters. Because what this really comes down to is whose voices are centered—and whose are not.

In many public conversations, there is an effort to center those most directly affected— foregrounding Palestinian experiences in discussions of Gaza, highlighting vulnerable communities in immigration debates, and emphasizing Black voices in conversations about racial justice.

But when it comes to Iran, the conversation almost always shifts away from Iranians themselves. It becomes about the U.S., about Israel, about ideology and geopolitics—anything but the decades of lived suffering of the Iranian people.

When the U.S. or Israel act, people post instantly. There is no pause to verify, no demand for perfect sourcing—outrage is immediate, and often validated by preexisting beliefs.

But when the IRGC kills its own people, the response changes. Suddenly there is hesitation. Demands for proof. Endless fact-checking. Accusations. We are called liars, agents, propagandists. Our grief is interrogated. Our dead are debated.

And just like that, the conversation stops being about the people again. Yes, war is bad—we all agree on that. But stating the obvious isn’t the same as paying attention. Can we actually talk about what’s happening to Iranians?

Because for decades, we’ve been asking people to listen. And now, the same people who stayed silent show up in our comment sections, comfortably removed yet eager to be heard, debating what they think is best for Iran. They question Iranians inside the country, saying they’re not sure what’s true. They dismiss Iranians outside the country as too removed, even though it’s often the diaspora that has kept these conversations alive in the first place. And of course we’re loud—we have to be. This is so deeply personal for us.

We are only acknowledged when the U.S. or Israel enter the frame. And there is this fear amongst Iranians that the ending of a war means the spotlight on Iran— the spotlight that so many paid for with their lives— goes away and the brutality continues. The bombs may stop, but the killings won’t. Because for us, violence has never only come from the sky, it has always come from within. It lives in prisons, in interrogation rooms, in quiet disappearances that never make headlines—but it doesn’t end there. It lingers in homes, in classrooms, in the silence people learn to carry just to survive. A ceasefire does not dismantle that. It does not protect the people living under it. A ceasefire may quiet the world’s attention—but it does not quiet the regime.

The killings in January were documented entirely by Iranians. We were the ones posting. The ones grieving. The ones trying to make the world pay attention. And when we marched in solidarity with others, we believed that solidarity would be mutual.

But when our people were slaughtered—in one of the worst massacres in modern history—we turned around and saw no one behind us. No one supporting us. No one standing with us. No one even willing to believe us. Only people questioning whether our pain was real.

“People have been against us since the hostage crisis,” my mom tells me when I ask her about it. To them, that shift—the hatred, the dismissal—began in 1979, not today. They’re not shocked by any of this. They’ve lived inside it for too long.

More than anything, they’re shocked that I’m shocked. As if I should know better than to believe anyone would stand up for Iranians. We’ve been left to bleed for so many years, why would that change now? To them, my surprise is almost laughable.

And yet, even with all of that—through the racism, the exclusion, the quiet and not-so-quiet hostility—there is a pride in them that has never broken.

The pain and the hope live side by side. That is what grounds me, what teaches me what it means to be Iranian.

And yet, alongside that grounding, there is a sadness I didn’t expect to carry, one that has quietly reshaped how I see my friendships.

I thought when we were all marching for Palestine, we were united by something real. A shared belief in human rights. In protecting innocent lives. That was what I was marching for.

But when Iranians are at the center of suffering, that same community disappears.

There are no posts. No urgency. No collective outrage. No insistence that this, too, is unacceptable.

And that hurts. More than I expected it to.

Because it begins to feel like, as Iranians, the only people we truly have are each other.

We are the only ones who understand this specific kind of pain—the pain of being tortured, imprisoned, and killed by our own government for nearly half a century.

But also the quieter, more isolating pain of never being fully heard.
Of speaking—and realizing the world is not really listening.

And maybe that sadness is what led me back to something I hadn’t fully recognized before. Because in the absence of that broader support, I found myself turning inward—toward the people who didn’t need an explanation, who didn’t question whether any of this was real, who didn’t ask me to prove my pain.

My Iranian friends.

The ones I don’t always speak to every day. The ones I don’t always show up for in the ways I wish I did. And yet, somehow, in moments like this, we find each other without even trying.

There’s a kind of understanding between us that feels almost instinctual. A shared language built on history, on loss, on resilience. We don’t have to over-explain or justify or convince. We just know. And in a world that so often meets us with doubt or dismissal, that kind of knowing feels like relief.

I think I used to believe that community had to be constant to be real—that it had to show up loudly, visibly, all the time. But what I’m learning is that ours moves differently. It’s quieter, more fragmented, sometimes even distant. But when everything else falls away, it is there. Steady. Immediate. Unquestioning.

And maybe that’s the quiet beauty in all of this—that even after years of being overlooked, talked over, or left behind, we still find our way back to each other. Not perfectly, not always in the ways we wish we would, but in the moments that matter most.

And for me, that has become its own kind of belonging—something fragile, but unbreakable, born from the very brokenness we carry. Not because we were embraced, but because we refused to disappear.

They were trying to understand what it means to have your son trapped in a city being bombed.

When the call finally ended, my mom collapsed into my arms and sobbed. The weight of everything that had just been said, everything that could happen, was too much to carry anymore.

He went from sleeping in his car in a parking garage to sleeping in the pantry, hoping the walls will give him some kind of shelter. My aunt sits by her phone waiting for him to buy a calling card and call her on the landline every few days. She doesn’t know when the next call will come, or what time it will be. So she waits. She prays. She hopes that her baby isn’t caught in the crossfire of a war unfolding around him.

And when he does call, what he tells her about Tehran is that it has become a war zone. Everything is more expensive. Food shops are still open. Life continues in fragments.

And somehow, the people are still cheerful through all of it.

In Iran, they’re cheering for the bombs. Imagine that. Imagine being so desperate, so suffocated, that you cheer for bombs.

They are begging for foreign intervention because they’ve tried everything else. They feel they have exhausted every possible way to bring change from within. So yes, many of them believe there is no other way to overthrow this regime.

I keep seeing people say that America shouldn’t help Iran because they’re only interested in the oil. To that we say: take it. Take the oil. Take whatever you want. Because the oil has already been taken.

The IRGC has been taking it for years, using it to enrich themselves while the people get nothing. No crumbs. Nothing.

The children of the IRGC are in Dubai living luxury lifestyles. Showing their hair, dressing however they want, behaving in ways that would get you arrested and killed in Iran.

So take the oil. Take whatever you want. Just give us our freedom.

I’ve also seen people say that the people of Iran should change their government themselves.

For years they’ve tried. For years they’ve gone into the streets demanding change. They were met with bullets and headlines you had the luxury to ignore.

They can’t afford to buy rice, and you want them to overthrow their own government.

They’re being shot at in every direction and you’re asking them to try harder.

So yes, I understand why they’re cheering for bombs.

I want to be clear about something that feels absurd to even have to say: I am anti-war. I hate that this conversation keeps forcing people like me to clarify that. No one with family in Tehran wants bombs falling near the people they love.

I also want to make something else abundantly clear, since I keep getting messages about this. I know that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are not interested in liberating the people of Iran. I am not supporting them. I support the people of Iran and only the people of Iran.

Because at this point, people would rather risk dying in the fight than continue living in this reality.

And somewhere far away, people will still find a way to reduce all of this to a theory.

Everyone is quick to frame this moment as a consequence of Western imperialism, but that narrative conveniently ignores another imperial force: the IRGC. A religious one that exports power across the region while violently suppressing its own people at home.

I also want to say something about the way the Islamic Republic constantly invokes Palestine. The IRGC has never cared about Palestinians. If the way they treat their own people hasn’t already shown you that they have no regard for human life, I’m not sure what will. A regime that imprisons, tortures, and kills its own citizens does not suddenly become humanitarian when it crosses a border.

Some people see Western imperialism as the main structure shaping the region. But for Iranians, the people actually living in it, the reality is that the force shaping daily lives is the Islamic Republic.

When every conversation is framed primarily through Western imperialism, Iranian repression starts to feel like a side note rather than the central issue. Iranian suffering becomes secondary to arguments about Israel or the United States.

And frankly, many of us are exhausted by people who are not directly affected framing the entire conversation through that lens.

From the comfort of the West, it is easy to speak in theories. It is easy to critique Western power while sitting in an American apartment, sipping a latte, driving to a job you chose, kissing someone you love in public, dancing with your friends, and speaking openly about politics without fear.

In Iran, those same freedoms will get you arrested and killed.

The everyday freedoms that Americans barely notice anymore are exactly what millions of Iranians have been risking their lives to have.

Another part of the discourse that has been particularly painful is hearing people speak so definitively about Iran being “turned into a parking lot like Gaza.”

Right now many of us are desperately trying to stay hopeful while worrying about our families and trying to reach loved ones. Hearing people who are not Iranian speak so casually and definitively about our country, and our families, being destroyed is incredibly difficult and painful to sit with.

It feels less like empathy and more like a conclusion drawn from an ideological framework rather than from the reality of the people who will actually live with the consequences.

A lot of Iranians are feeling hurt right now because people who are not Iranian are speaking over us or using our country as an example to support broader ideological arguments. Our lived experiences often get sidelined while others debate Western imperialism or regional strategy.

It is already hard enough for Iranians to speak out without being arbitrarily labeled Zionists or accused of serving some foreign agenda.

So it is especially painful when people who claim to care about the region contribute to that narrative.

For many families, including my own, the violence and repression of the Islamic Republic is not theoretical or rhetorical. It is deeply personal.

And while people far away debate theories about imperialism and geopolitics, mothers are just praying that their children survive the night.

So while you get to discuss war with your friends over a beer, while you get to make TikToks and content about the headlines on your screen, while you get to remain comfortably removed from all of this, please remember that these are real people and real families among you whose lives are being permanently changed.

Your Instagram post might not mean much to you beyond a couple of likes and reshares. But to the people actually living through this, it means watching our pain turned into content. Watching strangers confidently declare that our families, our history, and our culture are about to be wiped off the face of the earth because they read a few articles.

So keep your ideologies and your geopolitical theories to yourself, and amplify the voices of actual Iranians who have been trying to communicate this reality to you for decades.

Because finally, it is our turn to tell our story.

So instead of forcing your frameworks onto us, sit down and listen.

Somewhere in Tehran tonight, my cousin is deciding whether the pantry or the parking garage feels safer to sleep in.

And somewhere else, my aunt is still sitting by the phone, waiting.

Today marks a historic day for Iranians around the world. After nearly fifty years under a regime built on repression, the man who stood at the center of that system is gone. For many of us, the feeling was not shallow celebration. It was release. It was the unfamiliar sensation of air returning to lungs that have been compressed for decades.

And yet the moment Iranians allowed themselves to exhale was the moment the world decided to correct us.

The same world that was silent during mass executions. Silent when political prisoners were killed by the thousands. Silent as women were beaten in the streets. Silent as families buried their children. That silence has now transformed into moral instruction.

Suddenly everyone is fluent in Iranian politics. One article. One thread. One post. And now they can explain what this means, what will happen next, how we should feel.

I have always been affected by what happens in the Middle East, not only because I am Middle Eastern, but because it has always felt like the world villainizes us when convenient and ignores us when we are drowning. The region is flattened into one continuous crisis. One headline. One interchangeable conflict. But internally, it is layered and specific. Iran is not an idea. It is eighty million people living under a regime that has ruled through surveillance, imprisonment, torture, and execution.

When I heard the news, I cried. Not delicately. Not politically. It felt ancestral. As if generations of Iranians were crying at once. For the students shot in the streets. For the women arrested for showing their hair. For the prisoners tortured behind walls the world pretended not to see.

I am not naïve about what comes next. I understand instability. I understand power vacuums. I understand that authoritarian systems do not disappear cleanly. I understand war. I understand foreign intervention. I understand that uncertainty is not romantic.

But for a moment, it felt like the man who presided over decades of death, imprisonment, rape, torture, and systematic oppression was finally gone.

And then I opened Instagram.

All at once, everyone is anti-war from the comfort of American apartments. A country filled with people who do not know what it is like to have bombs dropped on them. Who have never had their internet cut during protests so the world cannot see what is happening. Who have never lived under a regime where dissent can get you killed. Where dancing can get you arrested. Where showing your hair can get you beaten. Where tomorrow is never guaranteed.

And now those same voices are telling Iranians how to feel.

The ignorance of this will always amaze me. I even had a non-Iranian man tell me, “Lili darling, I’m a little more read up on this than you.” The tone said everything. As if lived experience can be replaced by articles. As if proximity to pain is something you can skim and then explain back to the people carrying it in their blood.

Yes, I am anti-war with Iran. I did not think that needed clarification. The only people who truly benefit from war are the billionaires who profit from it. But being anti-war does not require mourning a dictator.

The Iranian people have been desperate for years. A kind of desperation that no American can fully understand. The authoritarian control enforced by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not just a human rights violation. It is a human rights catastrophe. A sustained system of repression designed to silence, imprison, torture, and kill its own population.

I am not claiming bombs equal liberation.

But it is also not accurate to pretend that we are currently free and stable. We are already subjugated. Subjugated by our own regime. When conversations fixate on hypothetical future chaos while refusing to acknowledge present oppression, they erase what is already happening to us.

It is possible to criticize Israeli policy and still condemn the Iranian regime. Those positions are not mutually exclusive. But when anti-Israel sentiment turns into defending or minimizing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the conversation detaches from lived reality. The IRGC is not a symbol of resistance for us. It is the force that jails us, tortures us, executes us, and disappears us.

Iran is not Iraq. It is not Afghanistan. It is not an interchangeable cautionary tale. It is a far larger and more complex regional power with deep political consciousness and enormous strategic weight. It sits along the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most critical oil transit chokepoints in the world, through which roughly a fifth of global oil consumption passes. It holds vast energy reserves. It occupies a geopolitical position that makes it central, not peripheral.

None of that makes war desirable. None of it guarantees safety. But it demands that Iranian suffering not be reduced to a footnote in someone else’s ideological argument.

And yes, the fact that a school was bombed today, that fifty children were killed, that little girls are once again at the forefront of suffering and injustice, breaks my heart. Children dying is not political to me. It is devastating.

But watching those deaths immediately weaponized to invalidate Iranian grief and Iranian relief is something else entirely. Watching people who were silent when tens of thousands of Iranians were brutally killed suddenly find their voices now, and use those voices not to mourn universally, but to undermine Iranian pain, exposes a selective morality that is difficult to ignore.

Where was this urgency when thousands were executed? Where was this outrage when protesters were shot in the streets? When families were burying their children month after month? When we couldn’t communicate with our families due to internet blackouts?

Grief should not be conditional. Outrage should not be strategic.

This is not abstract to me.

My family has lived it.

This isn’t political theory. It is prison cells. It is torture. It is rape. It is execution.

Members of my own family have been imprisoned. They were beaten. Tortured. I have family whose fingernails were ripped off one by one during interrogations. Women assaulted in custody. Confessions forced through pain and broadcast as propaganda.

They do not just intimidate. They kill. They shoot protesters in the streets. They drag teenagers into vans and make them disappear. They jail journalists. They silence lawyers. They kill doctors. They execute dissent.

This is not religion. It is brutality disguised as faith.

So when Iranians feel relief at the death of a man who presided over decades of this violence, that relief is not ignorance. It is not blindness. It is not a geopolitical miscalculation.

It is human.

It is what happens when a people survive something they were told to endure quietly.

It is what happens when generations who were imprisoned, beaten, silenced, and buried are finally allowed one unguarded exhale.

Relief does not mean we are naïve about what comes next.
Relief does not mean we are asking for bombs.
Relief does not mean we have forgotten the cost of instability.

It means we have lived under instability for decades already.

Some people studied the region.
Some people debated strategy.
Some people waited for the “right time” to care.

We buried family.

We buried them while the world theorized.
We buried them while silence felt easier.

And now there are prescriptions for our future.
Now there are lectures about what is best for us.

But you cannot map salvation onto a country you have only ever encountered as a headline.
You cannot dictate survival to people who have been surviving all along.

You speak about us.
You analyze us.
You reduce us.

But you do not know us.

There was once a time where I loved being online, back when the internet felt good. Remember the time when we were amazed that photos from the party we went to were posted online so we were able to re-live the party we were at? Nowadays every single person is trying to go viral and have their moment to prove to themselves and their community that they are worth it. The medical community has influencers. Our lawyers are on tiktok. Imagine that, our doctors and lawyers are posting to gain traction because traction equals money and in this capitalist world, baby money is everything. The internet is open to everybody and everyone wants their moment to shine. The arts used to be for the freaks, the geeks, and the outcasts. At some point the jocks joined and now the whole system has changed. Turns out even if you were popular and cool in high school, you still want validation and recognition as an adult.

My beginning in stand up was offline, it was for the people, for the artists. Honing your skill for years before putting it on the internet for mass consumption. It was real, raw, hardworking, and the craft was respected by the people executing it. It’s not what it is today.

I am the age of the people who changed the landscape of entertainment. I am a part of that culture as well. I used to be obsessed with twitter and I currently post stand up clips. In no way do I think I am above people who are online, I am too. I have to be. And that’s the problem. In order to be successful at this, you have to do the online part as often and as aggressively as you can. The landscape changed, then the content changed, and now everything has been reduced to one minute.

You get my attention for one minute,

You tell a joke, for exactly one minute,

You want to tell a story? You better hurry to the end because all you have is one minute.

Our attention spans have reduced so drastically that an elevator pitch feels too long. We used to sit and watch hours of tv, movies, stand up, musicals, uninterrupted. Now we itch for our phones like it’s a cigarette we haven’t tasted in days. And the problem is that it's working. It’s working for a lot of people. For the scammers and the amateurs one minute is all they have and all they aspire to do.

I know people who’ve been doing comedy for less than two years who are selling out around the country, raking in thousands of dollars for a craft they have not mastered. While masters of the craft are broke and unable to move tickets.

Have we lost the point? Have we become such a self-centered individualistic society that we only constantly think about ourselves? Has community been reduced to the few friends you keep around to fill your loneliness? When did we start living like this and was I complicit? How am I allowed to be mad at a society that I am a part of?

I don’t really have the answers to the questions I ask but I also know that the answers are painfully obvious. Yes, the world sucks now. Yes, everyone is obsessed with themselves and their phones. Yes, we have lost our souls on the path to money. Yes, followers matter more than real friends in your life. Yes, this all sucks and we all feel it but we all keep doing it so it will never stop.

I wish I had a more positive note to end this on. I wish I could be like “and sharks that’s why everyone should get my brand of lobotomy” but even that pitch would be reduced to one minute.