Everybody has their own definition of happiness. I realize I’m happy when I feel surrounded by so many small but beautiful things. When I laugh, I know I’m happy. There’s nothing better than being able to laugh and enjoy just about everything there is to enjoy…it makes life so much easier when you can look at it this way, when you can detach yourself from the parts you don’t like about who you are…when you can look at the time and know you’ve spent it well and you’ve had your fun…when you can think of tomorrow as a day to go back to what you absolutely love to do…when you can smile even if it rained and nothing happened…when I’m happy, I love everything about me, myself, and I…

I don’t know who I am anymore. I have lost my place once again. I can’t quite figure out why or where I went wrong. The road is ahead of me and I am way behind, blocks away and every time I try to catch up I fall behind once again…There are so many things I could have done by now but I didn’t and I don’t know what stopped me…It’s not good enough to have dreams I’ve learned. It’s not good enough to me…I want more for myself… I want to break free from all the people I depend on. I depend on too many people. I am always waiting for someone to tell me what to do or where to go, I am always waiting for someone to call me back or leave a message on my phone… I want to do things my own way, I want to draw my own map of life, not someone else’s…I need to get out of here and start living for myself because I can’t live like this, it’s causing too much pain for me…
What was once satisfying for me is no longer satisfying, not even close…There are feelings inside of me that I am tired of trying to explain…
I didn’t have a single happy day this week…I tried to find a way out…but just couldn’t…

Iran was always a great country in my childhood eyes. I left Iran at the age of 11. It was not until I went back to Iran at 15 that I saw with my own eyes what Iran didn’t have. There was no democracy. Walking on the streets of Tehran brought back so many memories, but I couldn’t imagine myself walking those streets for the rest of my life. It was nothing compared to walking outside on a street in Virginia or anywhere else in the U.S. I felt guilty as I watched people because I knew I was free and they were not.
Another election has arrived for Iran and I am thinking…are they really going to get what they deserve? Are they really going to get their freedom, their democracy? What can I do for them? The only thing I can do, as I am sitting here, on my comfortable bed, reading a magazine on Hollywood gossip, while Iranian women are protesting for equal rights, is to vote. As an Iranian I feel obliged to vote because I am Iranian too. I could have been living there, among them, seeing what they see, going through their problems. But now that I am here, it is my duty to vote so that hopefully they too could have what anyone, in any country or in any nation embraces…freedom.

It tore me to pieces when I realized that I have a Farsi (my mother tongue) vocabulary of a 5th grader. It crushed my ego; I lost all hope of ever being able to write in Farsi as an adult would. I am so frustrated; I feel trapped between two incomplete languages. Sometimes I think it would have been easier if I only knew Farsi and lived in Iran and minded my own business. Except things didn’t turn out that way, that would have been too easy. I mistakenly thought I would be an expert at both. I had laid bags of hope in my heart, all which are now torn open, slowly being washed away…piece by piece…There is a price to pay for being a bilingual. It is not impossible to strengthen both languages, it just requires time and patience. But I can’t explain how heavy the weight of not knowing everything feels, it’s like you want to have everything, see everything and learn, but you just can’t keep up. Even in my own house I am sometimes an outsider because there are things I don’t understand, not just in the language, but cultural and political facts about Iran. It tears me into pieces but there’s not much I can do…I just have to accept the fact or look at it another way…

Maybe you think the heart of D.C. is the monument in Washington Mall or you might think it is the Congress or the White House. But I think the heart of D.C. is not just one place, I think it covers all the busy streets that spell out life. It is the crowd of people who walk through Wisconsin Avenue and shop endlessly beneath the warm summer sun. It is the busy streets that are blocked by traffic and are filled with important people, people who live their lives right by the capital. The heart of D.C. beats by those who live around it and walk by it everyday. The people of D.C. are what make the heart beat, whether they’re the homeless, who perform and make music, or the interns who attend jobs while studying at GWU, or the bus drivers who drive through the city everyday, life beats because of everyday people who live there.
I’ve walked through D.C. on many occasions. I love walking over Key Bridge and looking down below at the Potomac River, watching boats pass by and the water below my feet; icy when it’s winter and fresh and warm when summer arrives. Although I may be a foreigner, I also grew up in a city. I did not live in a city where freedom rings; I lived in Tehran where people constantly demonstrate for freedom. But no matter what culture or what nation you come from, if you’re a city lover like me, you probably know where the heart beats…

The wind goes through my hair, it makes me feel beautiful and carefree, each blow of the wind goes through me, inside my veins, I feel the blood running; the wind is inside me, I feel powerful, young, fresh, free from the polluted air and all the nonessential elements…It is a purity beyond no other…A safety, a guard against reckless days and malicious thoughts, thoughts that keep you up all night and make you become someone you never dared of becoming…it’s a safety against danger and fear…the wind carries so much, yet when it passes through you, you feel as if it were weightless…

I’m on a journey, a journey to self-discovery, no, that would be a lie. I’m on a journey to find a purpose in my life, to make one dream come true at least. Sometimes that purpose gets lost in my mind. When you’re a kid, you think you can just take a scratch sheet of paper, write down the goals you want to reach by the age of your desire, and then you’ll be set. It doesn’t work that way. Some days will have no purpose at all. You could just be going through pages of a memory book for one whole afternoon.
Maybe it’s okay not to have a purpose…just go through life blindly, see what direction the wind will take you.

I am standing on a road, a road that doesn’t really divide in two, meaning that it makes it even harder for me to choose paths…
life is going by pretty fast, the faster it goes, the scarier it becomes, the options, the choices, the decisions…all exciting though, don’t get me wrong.
i am realizing now that i’m just happy…and that’s what matters to me right now, not what’s going to happen tomorrow, or whether i’ll have to go to New York city…just this moment…i’m happy to be where i am
although i still fantasize and dream about things i want to do and see, life is just good sometimes even when it’s really simple
it’s important to enjoy simple things too…i don’t remember where i heard this, probably in a movie or something, but anyway…