I was taking a walk and listening to K-pop and thinking about how nice it must feel to be Korean right now & having the world love your music & cinema & lit. I actually broke down on the street because I thought no matter what we do or achieve or say, people will hate Iran.

There is a really horrifying loneliness to being Iranian that’s been there for ages. Iran, Turkey, & Israel are the only non-Arab countries in the Middle East. We are also Shia. No one around us likes us much. We don’t love ourselves right.

(Some Iranian is going to be mad at me tweeting this of course. So many Iranians find me embarrassing, I get it. It’s ok, I am not speaking for them. Plenty of Iranians are blessed & rich & beautiful & happy—I am so glad for them, though I can never achieve any of that)

It is just frustrating. I think always of Neusha Farrahi and how I watched him set himself on fire in front of LA’s Federal Building in 1987 & how it’s so hard for people to understand why that happened, but some of the rest of us get it. He was 31, a young activist.

I am just tired. The weirdest things bother me lately. Watching Britney Spears’s Instagram even & seeing these FreeBritney people obsessed with blaming her Iranian boyfriend when we all know her father is to blame...it’s just so upsetting. He can never be enough, none of us can.

The damage the West had done to hurt us will never go away. Everyone will always find us suspicious. We have to work so hard to earn any love. I used to never see this but I guess it took me becoming disabled and old to really experience the full brunt of feeling unwanted here.

I just think if I live in America too much longer, it will kill me. Ironically if I go back to Iran I could be put in prison & that would kill me (my chronic illnesses would not allow me to survive that). I don’t know where to go. I like being alive but I don’t know where to go.

If I could know I could live in Iran safely I would just go back. I think it’s the only place I might have the slightest chance in somehow. I wish there was a way for me to get there & hide in the countryside. Lol if you have any ideas let me know.

America has some good things about it but the psychological stress of bigotry & its devotion to so many forms of hate is a lot when you have experienced it for thirtysomething years.

I am tired of seeing things like this constantly https://twitter.com/negarmortazavi/status/1317548431997587456?s=21

I am supposed to look at this stuff, the same stuff I saw when I was a small child in the Eighties and somehow not be scared of white Americans. i don’t know how. I guess I am not strong enough.

Sorry to go on. Thanks for listening.

Also as a PS I don’t want to pretend Americans have always been great to Koreans & other East Asians either (re 1st tweet)! It was just a moment I felt so proud of such excellence from our East Asian brothers & sisters, and I realized I forgot how it feels to feel real pride