There is a record that I must set straight for the readers of my work to understand why I did what I did, why I think like this, what group do I belong to, who is this me that they are reading about. And this is important.

I am writing this in the midst of the second joint war of Israel and United States against Iran. This is the 29th day of war, our neighborhood has seen multiple bombings, and two days ago a U.S. drone was shot by Iranian defenses over our square, exploded, and shook our building with a massive sound. Why this war happened? Simply because we have immense reserves of natural resources, are the most important geopolitical intersection of the planet, Israel wants us divided and destroyed for their evil Greater Israel pursuit, and the U.S. needs us conquered or at least destroyed for them to win over Russia and China. And they are framing it as “sending democracy”. There is this quote with ambiguous origin that puts it completely: “Isn’t it fortunate that whenever the U.S. goes in to liberate a people, they seem to find oil?”. And this is the sad reality of my world.

Now you would imagine what happens when war breaks out in a place. The world probably goes to support the innocent and turn against the evil. No that is not the case, unless of course you are white and beautiful like Ukraine. When the Israel and U.S. attacked us, without even an explanation, not even a fake one, merely because Trump had a “feeling” Iran is up to something, killed so many innocent people, and destroyed our infrastructure. Not only the world didn’t recognize the war as a crime, not only the United Nations did not even bother to say this is illegal and that we oppose it, the sanctioned Iran some more for defending itself. Just imagine that… Not the U.S. and certainly not Israel, but the country that is being attacked for no apparent reason. Then this morning United Arabian Emirates gave all Iranians a month to leave their soil, even those who had their residency. The world is of course not only silent, but perhaps cheerful. We Iranians have no place on the Earth for other races, we are like cockroaches, all other races want us gone and dead and removed from this planet. The world is like this hollywood high school movie where the United States and Israel are the bully cool kids, the rest of the school do whatever they want and go completely silent when they bully the shit out of other countries. Arab countries and those with Oil are the underdog that nobody cares about when they are hit or destroyed. As long as the people are not French, it does not matter what happens to them. And the Iran is like that drug addict asshole that has a bad reputation and all others put the blames on them and regardless of them being responsible or not hit them and hurt them.

Few days ago I had my work fed into an LLM and as it had prepared this article on it, it reached the Paulo Freire part of my work, where it had ideas on the oriental oppression imposed upon us by the British, French, and the U.S, and it said: “Again, we are exploring this purely through the psychological lens Pouya provides in his archives. We aren’t taking sides, but we are trying to convey his perspectives.” This made me so sad, because I understood even to LLMs I stand in a place they wish to sanction.

And so you would grow up in Iran and imagine the rest of the world loathe you so openly and clearly. You have no place in this world, but what about your own isolated country? No not at all. Your country has been taken hostage by some really really scary religious fanatics who kill people because they do not agree with them. Given their fragile Egos and rooted hatred of the west, everything is a direct threat to them. Even playing chess and eight ball used to be banned here. Can you imagine a government so afraid that it finds playing eight ball a device of cultural warfare? And then imagine in this country, you are not believing in any god, hate everything about Islam, and so on. Every place of this country feels unsafe to me. I still panic when I see police as they used be extorting money as soon as they found me walking with a girl in the streets, I remember how when our home was rubbed they came and told us that “On the phone you said your house is robbed, but this is an apartment” and off they went only to find the thieves when my uncle bribed them… This is a regime that every year or two kills thousands of protesters, rapes and harasses the ones they imprison, keep them for decades so they rot and perish, and execute so many young innocent people to plant fear. A country that kept its civilians dying because the pride of its leader did not allow for importing American vaccines.

There is this cafe franchise that I love so very much. They offer affordable cafe, create their own nespresso capsules, have lovely lovey things you can eat and drink. Its a place we go together with Zea a lot. And they have closed it yesterday for not honoring the death of the leader. It is like the Islamic regime in Iran is the biggest enemy of happiness. They really actually are. They have these bastards who are called “no-he-khan”. (dirge reader), and these people make so much money of monodies that they are actively lobbying the regime to recognize more and more days as national mourning days. It took years of active protests, thousands of deaths, and a sheer unspeakable amount of courage and fighting just for our women not to wear hijab. This place is hell, and these idiots are the soldiers of sadness and mourn.

So you may think that if the whole world hates your race, and your race is taken hostage by lunatics you must have a good community in school maybe? No as you know, me being me, made others make fun of me constantly, or even if they did not oppose my ways of being and living, they could not understand them as well. I was alone and sad at school for all the twelve years that I went there. I could not take it. It smelled horrible, looked horrible, I hated everything about being a man there. I would sit and think why without the presence of girl, boys become so creepy? Boys enjoyed beating each other, talking horrible words, practical jokes and I hated all of them. I hate football (soccer), I hated sports, I hated guns, I hated drugs, cars, video games, almost everything that united my schoolmates and couldn’t connect that much. I only had a few nerd friends like me, but their company was also limited. After all, I was more radical than anyone else and it came with a price.

If you have a world that hates you, a regime that hates you, and a school that hates you, what remains for you? Well, friends and family. The political things that happened in 2010 made our friends migrate to other countries. My friend Kourosh went to the Canada, my friend Nika went to Cyprus, they all went with their families who used to be my parents’ friends as well, we became lonely. Also my other friends Souren and Arian went to England. I had just changed my school and for the second time became a stranger in a place that did not want me. This happened the year after we lost my grandpa, Baba Ali. And two years after we lost my grand grand mother Maman Bozorg. Maman Bozorg used to be the center of the family in my Mom’s side, with her gone that family fell apart, with my Mom’s father gone, our family fell apart, new years were no longer new years, there was nothing interesting, all the sparkle and life we had went off like a spring’s breeze. And as I was struggling to cope with this, our family friends migrated, and I lost my friends. This events marked the massive depression years of my life. Around 2007 to 2010 was when Baba Ali got sick, those years were bad, but I was surviving. Post 2010 however my whole world had fallen apart and I had become so lonely, so sad, and so was my parents. I remember nothing but absolute loneliness and sadness from these years. Nothing good, not a pleasant memory.

And so if the whole world hates your race, if your country is taken hostage by bad people, if the culture of your country is hostile to you, if your friends and second/third family are gone, what remains? Your family remains. But then, it is not a household that our average reader can bear one second to live inside. I lived in a house that had war/action movies playing out laud from the morning to the end of the night (something like 9AM to 1AM) and my Dad believed strongly in that people study better with loud jazz playing because he was like that. It always shocked me to learn that others had quiet homes so they could study, and other hearing my situation. It was also that my Dad believes strongly in that the house must be his workshop making things, henceforth hearing the sound of metal and wood being sliced and drilled with heavy machinery from the morning to the very end of the night, simultaneously as he would force us to endure the awful sound of his action movies and jazz. I had a collection of earmuffs and headphones from the early age to put it simply. And if you ignore the noise pollution of astronomical proportions, then you have understand the visual; once I had this multi-media studies course in the university and our professor was talking about the meanings of colors, she reached the color red and said: “Red feels danger, it reminds us of blood and stress, so it has to be used very carefully, when you are designing your interior you should avoid red as much as you can, it will give you stress. I once had this friend whose house had so much red in it, she had so much stress, these people are lunatics, crazy, mad, mental.” and I was remembering that everything in our home is red. All of your furniture, all the elements, all the kitchenware… Back then I hated my professor and acted bad in the class, but she was right. Once I had a place that I could decorate and control, together with Zea, I learned just how different people can be if they live in a calm place, without noise, without these colors. Having to live with my parents for the past month is breaking almost all the good that I had built in me. And then there was the acting of these people, not only you must have understood how stressed and anxious my family is, but then there was much red flags all around the place (as I told you, our house is all red.) My Dad is a huge bully who only knows and talks to himself. His narcissism has grown so strong that these days he doesn’t remember a thing about his family, if you talk to him about his favorite things he will remember, but he refuses to even remember where we had dinner last night together. He was always yelling at me, saying that I was clumsy and useless and couldn’t do anything right. He was a dictator, he was always off to himself and didn’t want to spend time with us. It was always the rest of the family going to trips while he stayed at home and did his sculptures (one bad thing that I think I have inherited from him), and so he was extremely neglectful. His work was everything to him, and we were in his way. To my Dad I was not a “person”, but “his extension”. Like a furniture. And that was something my Mom was no different. They both always dressed me up in the ways they wanted, my Dad would only buy me toys he found interesting, and made fun of me if I wanted something else. my Mom would buy me things that I didn’t want and things to wear in the way she wanted. They had this picture of me in their head that they wished to make and they would always push to decor me like their furniture. If me or Tanya ever wanted something or had something interesting to tell, they wouldn’t even bother to listen, or if they did, their attention was always somewhere else. My mom has this habit of lying about “things that I told her” to others. She always talks to a friend and then fabricate lies about what I told this person or did or told her, things that not only I would never say, I hate to say. I used to fight with her, now I have realized there is a fictional Pouya in her head that is the Pouya she wants and that Pouya, according to the plans and narrative that she wants, says this things. If I begin to open up the problems of having to different types of narcissistic parents that deny you of even being you for starters, it’ll be my years long conversations with therapists that I prefer not to lay before you here, just know that my household was as well the same story.

And so back in my childhood I only had myself, aware that the rest of the world don’t want me. I belonged to nowhere but to the world of Pouya and Pouya himself. Sure there was Tanya but she was a child for the majority of our time together, Baba Ali was my sanctuary but he passed away, and I had some friends but they never made up for the ones I lost.

Once I realized I am by myself, I decided that my world has to be right. Since all had rejected me, I never had the fear of being rejected for the first time, I had the problem of being rejected daily by everyone. And so I could only follow the work of people who I had researched to a point of being sure they don’t personally hate me (for example, I only started to read Maestro Darwin’s works when I made sure he had a letter to someone that compared a use of language to persian poetry and by that I understood he wasn’t racist regarding us, so he was safe). And I always tried to reject all the sexist, homophobic, … people. I had the luxury of being so rejected, I could choose who to let in to my mental universe. And so I thought I should create a universe that contains only and absolutely just the best of humanity. If I belong to nowhere, and if the people in the all the world hate me, then most people are not good people, so I have to find a place that is better than all of their places. I wanted to surround myself with people who valued equality and democracy amount all people, loved animals, were progressive in their views and weren’t mean to females or LGBTQ+ or whatever minority that faces the same horrible fate as them. And that is why seeing that still with all that, LLMs find me in the “wrong side of things, and have to mention they don’t side with me” very very sad.

Things didn’t remain the same of course. In my university I found this friend, who joined me to the scientific association of computer engineering where I found so many incredible friends, and I met people with the same wounds, thoughts, and people who were at least very loving, and they made me realize I am not alone. I may be different, but I wasn’t alone. And then I found @amin who became such an incredible friend and showed me what being cared after of means, and then I met Zea who is the best thing that has ever happened to me and I don’t know if I really deserve her love. Also Tanya in her teenage years began to become my best friend and we passed through so much together. But what I wished to show you was something else in between the 2007 to 2014 of my life. To show the origin and the scale of loneliness and not belonging that I experienced. If anything, please do remember that I do not belong to any political or religious groups. I only belong to the schools of life that I have explicitly mentioned as my intellectual heritage and roots, and only those that I call by the honorary prefix of maestro.