Inspiring Words from Women Facing Despair with Hope and Resilience
My reactions to and takeaways from several of the forty-two moving journal entries from three Iranian women published in the New York Times
Last night, at about 2 am, I woke and decided to read a piece that had appeared in my New York Times app feed a few days earlier (this is a gift link — i.e., unlocked/not behind their paywall).
[by now the gift link will have expired so here’s a standard link]
Once I started, I could not put it down — held captive by the words, wisdom, courage, and universal spirituality displayed in the vulnerable prose of these women that the publication had approached to create, keep, and share diary entries about their experiences since the protest movement — known as Woman, Life, Freedom — began last September after the brutal death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, at the hands of the morality police for not strictly complying with the hajib-wearing rules. The movement then transformed into broader demands for an end to the theocratic and oppressive regime of the Islamic Republic.
I felt the pull to share some of the entries with my readers and my thoughts, reactions, and takeaways therefrom.
This short entry grabbed me at the level of my soul — I paused, stared at the screen, and absorbed it for several minutes.
March 12
PARNIAN: I feel good for no reason. Ever since the start of the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution, there has been so much pain that feeling good seems bizarre. Yet I feel great today. I wonder why. The lightness is weird.
Her words reminded me of experiences and emotions we all face though the facts may vary greatly. They echo my own feelings when faced with grief and I imagine those of many others. I recall many times waking up and for a brief moment, forgetting what had transpired. My friend Anne said this to me just the other day about her continuing real-life nightmare regarding her adult daughter Marissa’s acquired brain injury.
Moreover, the entry reflects my thoughts on the pain of grief that I have conveyed many times in my essays and comments:
The pain pockets of grief have infinite depth — these chasms can cause tears at a moments notice no matter how much time as elapsed, yet as the pockets drain, their infinite depth leaves room for infinite amounts of Light to enter our lives.
Sometimes it does feel weird to feel good.
March 13
GHAZAL: My friend and I have found an exciting cafe on Enghelab Street that screens foreign films and shows. I watch this show, “The Last of Us,” which I love. This week it was part of the cafe’s program, so my friend and I made a reservation. You know, we don’t get to watch foreign films and TV shows together with friends, grab a bite and enjoy ourselves. And that cafe made it possible for us.
Most of the customers were our age, and we shared the same vibe. It felt great to watch the show and react to different scenes collectively. Nobody told us to keep it down. To be honest, it felt like freedom.
I find it ironic that she finds hope, enjoyment, and freedom in watching a post-apocalyptic show where one never knows who can be trusted — perhaps she identifies present-day Iran with such a post-apocalyptic world.
Freedom.
I sat with that one word for a few moments and recalled this Viktor Frankl quote from Man’s Search for Meaning:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way…between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
These women display the strength to choose to practice acceptance of the unacceptable on a day-to-day basis. I find that too many people that I encounter do not understand the power of acceptance. Acceptance does not require giving up.
I can often find serenity in practicing acceptance on a moment-to-moment basis but not accepting permanence. Patrick Paul Garlinger eloquently described this balancing act thusly in his essay 9 Signs That You’re Healing Spiritually:
“There’s a balance to be found between being present and accepting the present moment while still opening to a new way of being in the world. As you heal spiritually, you know the present moment is full of possibility and, in its own way, is perfect just as it is. Yet you also know that you are capable of co-creating with the Divine, and there are wonderful opportunities that can emerge in the future if you focus your attention and take divinely inspired action.”
How can I or anyone accept that everything is as it is supposed to be when the current situation is terrible? How can that be perfect?
In this manner — moment by moment everything is as it is supposed to be because there is no other way for it to be because everything that caused the present moment is in the past and there is nothing I or anyone can do to change the past so, therefore, the only possibility for the present moment is for it to be just the way it is and yet we can maintain hope for and take actions toward a better future. (For a more complete discussion of my views on acceptance, see this essay).
I felt so inspired by the choices made by these women and conveyed by their journal entries. For the most part, their words display their choices to enjoy life, despite the trials, tribulations, and oppressions they endure. These women add many levels to Jodie Helm’s message the other day, You Have a Choice, You Can Either Enjoy Life, or Not, and make what many of us complain about seem so trivial.
Jodie wrote:
My dad used to say to count our blessings, rather than our troubles, and that’s sound advice I rarely forget. There are a lot of things going on in the world that I don’t like, and I’m sure pretty much everyone feels the same way. I check out the days’ headlines but rarely continue reading, because, although I want to keep up on what’s happening in the world around us, I’m not interested in a lot of details. Why add to my frustration? We can either look for good things or look for bad things, and whichever one we choose, we’ll find, without a doubt.
Even the material issues we face here in the USA, including but not limited to income inequality, gun violence, sexual assaults, crime in general, inflation, and a deeply divided and often dysfunctional government seem to pale in comparison to what women and men face in Iran.
March 18
PARNIAN: I was checking the news on Twitter when I came across a picture of a man dressed in brown. The tweet said that the families of prisoners on death row have gathered outside the Urmia Central Prison. Mohayeddin Ebrahimi, a political prisoner, would be executed tomorrow with the morning call to prayer. “Let’s be the voice of our countrymen,” the tweet read.
Executions have become an all-consuming issue; people follow the cases closely, and when they hear that a protester will be executed at dawn, they rush to the prison and stand outside the walls all night.
I was about to retweet it so that others, too, could become the voice of Mohayeddin, when I saw the date of the tweet. It was exactly one day old. That meant they had probably hanged Mohayeddin.
I closed the Twitter app, disconnected my VPN, locked the phone screen and stared at the darkness in my room. [Emphasis added]
Through such darkness, I see the light emanating from these women and all of those involved in their movement.
The women touched upon the financial hardships in Iran that they and their friends face every day, where the economy is in shambles due to U.S. sanctions and the Iranian government’s corruption and mismanagement. While such sanctions seem appropriate, it is a shame that the general population must be the ones to suffer.
March 15
PARNIAN: The company I work for has been in financial trouble for over eight months and cannot pay the employees’ salaries. Several employees at my work resigned and left. The ones who stayed, including me, are mostly young and single. Some of my colleagues are spending their savings; others are borrowing money. I have no intention of dipping into my savings, and I’m too proud to borrow, so I have taken translation jobs on the side, working late after my regular hours.
Today I was having my third cup of coffee, struggling with a headache and insomnia, when the door opened. In came my colleague, looking upset. “Look, Parnian, my girlfriend is a modern person and doesn’t think providing money is a man’s duty, but I’m just tired,” he told me. “She has been paying for everything for several months, and her support makes me feel worse. The harder I try, the poorer I become.” After staring at the kitchen floor for a few seconds, he said, “I feel useless.”
I hugged him and whispered in his ear: “You will get through this. Don’t forget that our only weapon is our thick skin. Be a rhino!” [Emphasis added]
Her words of support and compassion for her friend caused me to think of all the thin-skinned writers on Medium who cannot stand a hint of criticism and/or complain about claps and the algorithm.
March 23
GHAZAL: I saw a beautiful graffiti message on my way to a stationery store today that said, “Move on but don’t forget,” with a Mahsa Amini hashtag underneath. In order to succeed, we have to keep our spirits up as much as possible. We must not stop living or lose hope. We shouldn’t feel guilty for being happy. The government’s sole aim is to take our joy away, and we can’t allow that.
With all of our legitimate complaints about our government and how too many officials care more about maintaining their power than serving the majority of the people who elected them, can you imagine the energy suck of living under a government that doesn’t even pretend to care about the pursuit of happiness and leaves its citizens feeling that the government’s sole purpose is to take our joy away?!?!
Thankfully, I cannot. Yet, it’s not unfathomable that it could happen to many here if we slip into autocracy. As I think about it, many may already feel this way as rights are obliterated, choices are taken away, and/or people live in poverty or without homes.
March 31
PARNIAN: We were in a taxi on the way to the airport after spending some time in Kurdistan. The driver was a warm and chatty man, so we took advantage and asked him about Kurdish dances. …He asked if we knew how to do Kurdish dances. We all shook our heads, so he pulled over, played a Kurdish song and told us to get out of the car. “Don’t be shy,” he said. “The road is empty. No one will see you.”
We stood in a line, and he showed us how to move our hands and feet to the rhythm of the music. We did our best. After we got back in the car, he said: “Men and women are the same for us. We are all one.” His tone was serious. “We stand in a line, one man and one woman, and hold each other’s hands. We are not men or women. We are brothers and sisters.” [Emphasis added]
I sometimes see writers on Medium in comments, particularly Genius Turner and Rebecca Romanelli, refer to others (including me) as brothers or sisters, and that extends to their references to those of the opposite sex. Until reading that journal entry, the deeper and obvious meaning had not popped into my conscious mind. We are all family. We are all connected.
April 4
PARNIAN: We were stopped at one of the busiest metro stations, and a lady dressed in a work uniform was leaning against the train’s wall, frowning at every passenger who got on. The carriage was packed. She was quietly checking her phone when a beautiful young girl with curly blond hair got on, covering half of the woman’s face with her hair.
The lady politely asked the young girl, “My dear, can you put your scarf on?”
The young girl blurted loudly: “It’s because of people like you that we live this way. When are you going to learn to mind your own business? Do we have no other problems? Do I tell you what to wear?”
The woman listened to her calmly, turned back to her phone and said: “As you like. You are very close to me. Your hair is in my nose.”
People started laughing.
That story reminds me of the dangers of assumptions and preconceived notions (see John Ege’s essay), and how people can become so accustomed to abusive situations that they see it even where it doesn’t exist.
I string together these next few entries in one section for connected takeaways.
April 7
KIMIA: On my way to the airport to go back to Iran, I wore a shawl around my neck so I wouldn’t have to look for it in my backpack when I arrived. Once I put the damn thing around my neck, my anxiety returned. I was still in Turkey, yet the stress crept back into my body.
May 27
PARNIAN: A few days ago, I saw a new banner with something like a mirror in the center surrounded by pictures of five martyrs of the war in Syria. … A few teenage girls with long hair hanging over their shoulders were standing in front of the banner, taking selfies in the mirror, without the hijab. It made me laugh. I rejoiced at their beauty and courage, in their simple and harmless way of exclaiming, “I exist!” The government is not afraid of women’s hair or the length of their skirts. They are afraid of our existence. [emphasis added]
This is a simple revolution: Do not mock or restrain people for their gender, orientation, nationality, religion. Don’t kill. Don’t rape. Don’t attack. Don’t threaten. We don’t want things to be perfect overnight. We simply don’t want to be invisible. We want to be ordinary people, not subjects. We want to make decisions, even mistakes. We want to exist. [Emphasis added]
Kimia’s statement about the stress creeping back into her body simply from the shawl touching her shoulder demonstrates that a hajib and similar requirements across many religions have been effective tools for manipulative power structures to control through fear. (If a woman chooses to wear it, that’s an altogether different matter).
The entry also made me think of the many articles about anxiety and trauma stored in the body.
Religious leaders that rely on instilling belief and obedience through fear and through not recognizing different people as fellow human beings but only as lesser others, will eventually lose their standing. The branches of religions that rely on hate rather than love will eventually fall by the wayside. Parnian recognizes that the shift, or The Shift as many of us have come to believe in it, will take time and united effort to take hold as the old guard will fight to hold onto their positions. See Jodie Helm’s Hard Times Are Coming, The Archangels Say We Will Prevail, in which she includes:
The kinds of changes the world needs are massive in scope. We are not speaking of certain businesses or people. We are speaking of entire systems and governments that need widespread changes made. These changes will not be quick or easy, and those in power will fight to keep things the way they are currently.
All religions when not corrupted by those that seek power are based on love and tolerance. As Leah Castellon, who explored and experienced Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity, Episcopalian, Methodist, and Lutheran churches, Judaism, Islam (including Sufism), Buddhism, and Hinduism wrote in one of the first essays I read on Medium nearly three years ago:
If there is one clear message that I feel I have learned on my path it is this: God is love and more expansive than I can wrap my brain around; His love is so much greater than I can comprehend.
With the diversity of the people on this earth, doesn’t it stand to reason that infinite love would provide a multitude of channels to access that source? I think so. For that reason, I will not adhere to any particular religion, but I will honor my personal journey and the paths of fellow earnest seekers.
This next diary entry ties that all together.
April 8
PARNIAN: A Twitter friend posted something interesting. Until four or five years ago, he wrote, he never missed a single prayer, but now every time he hears the call to prayer, he starts cursing. Many people around me are turning away from Islam. Some religious families have stopped practicing and even asked the women in their families to take off their hijabs. What will happen to those who no longer pray and are irritated by the call to prayer? Or those who even make fun of religion? How are they going to feel once their anger has subsided? What will happen when people are no longer humiliated and threatened in the name of Islam? When religion is merely a matter of the heart?
When will religion become merely a matter of the heart? When all of humanity recognizes that no religion is superior to another and we all accept everyone’s right to question teachers and leaders; when theists, deists, and atheists all display spirituality, which does not require belief in God but does at least include belief in humanity and that we act and treat one another with love, empathy, compassion, humility, honesty, courage, responsibility and accountability. That is when religion will become not merely but supremely a matter of the heart.
That is when we shall have peace on Earth.
Amen.
I hope after reading my piece you will avail yourselves of the gift link I provided and read the complete NYT piece.
In Rama I create, with soul energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
