Chapter 1
Today I turned to one year old of my 40s life. I'm new to this world. As a one year old baby, I'm uncertain. Am I crying because I'm hungry, because I am sleepy, cold, warm, or someone hurt my feelings? How did I end up here—a grown-up man already lost his parents while he needed them the most? Parents, who are going to hold me in their arms while I close my eyes and let myself go. Some kind of embrace that is not clocked according to how much I pay, how good I behave, or how pretty I am—only and only because I'm their one-year-old baby. I let them carry me to the best they know, until I know better myself.
Well today, I woke up with these thoughts. However, I got things to take care of; for example, the job that I hate, of course after I wash and feed myself. Leaving 40 years of life behind me was only enough to take care of my basic needs and responsibilities. What about the things that I really want? Here comes my wife with the hardest question, as always:
'What do you really want, Amir?'
For a moment, I got excited, thinking she might finally have the answer I’ve been searching for all these years. But then she added,
“Maybe I can get it for your birthday.”
It’s sad, but also kind of cute. Sad because what I really want is much deeper than something my wife could buy with our joint account. Cute because, maybe, life really is about a simple birthday gift, and I didn’t know that yet. After all, I’m still new to this world—the world of being in my 40s.
So I answer: “How about an early morning swim for my birthday?” Considering my birthday is on July 26th.
A morning swim refreshes me for the entire day. I love every part of it, and I’m pretty good at it. The only thing I don’t like is not having a real friend to swim with. But I’m choosing this gift because, at least, it won’t be a lonely swim. My wife will be sitting on the beach, wrapped in a blanket against the fresh morning air, while I swim. Wouldn’t it be more fun with my grandmother, though? At least she would’ve watched me swim instead of scrolling through her Instagram.
My wife, Andrea, is a young Mexican psychologist and a well-known figure in mental health on social media. She’s dedicated to promoting a lifestyle that fosters emotional well-being within her community. She doesn’t need to jump into cold water or climb a snowy mountain to feel alive. She’s always known what she wants, ever since she can remember. And that’s our biggest difference —bigger than our age gap. Most of the time, I forget that she’s 14 years younger than me, but I never forget for a moment that she knows what she wants, and I never have.
I had the same feeling I have today, about 20 years ago, on my 22nd birthday. I was sitting on the three-step balcony of my dad’s home on a hot summer day, thinking, "So what now? What’s the next step?" Like I was just born into a whole new world of my 20s, lost like a one-year-old baby. All the certainty I’d earned in the first 20 years was gone. Where was that experienced teenager who thought he knew everything, better than anyone else? Not taking advice, ready to give it to everyone. He knew exactly where he was going. God, I miss those days. Where to get money? Ask daddy.Where to sleep? Ask mommy.What to eat? Ask mommy or daddy.What to do with life? Go to school.What’s the meaning of life? My friends.What do we do with friends? Talk about girls.
Basically, every teenager is a genius. The only person smarter than a teenager is an older teenager.
That three-step balcony at my dad’s home is in Iran. Almost everyone has heard about Iran, but even most Iranians who live there can’t fully describe what kind of place it is. Every corner is different—different languages, different cultures, different outfits. However, one thing applies to every Iranian male in every corner of Iran: two years of obligatory Military Service. Every boy knows he has to serve once he’s old enough—starting at 18. As a child, I didn’t understand what the army was, so I never worried about it. I even thought it would be fun to be a soldier. But, as a 20-year-old man, thinking about Military Service isn’t fun anymore. The less you understand, the less painful it is to know you have to join. A child doesn’t understand, but as you grow older, you begin to grasp what’s coming, and it becomes sadder. Once you turn 18, you’re no longer a free man. You have to explain why you’re not in military training. You need to prove that you qualify for one of the few reasons to delay service. Basically, if you’re not mentally or physically disabled, your only option is to say, “I haven’t finished school yet.” As universities and colleges expanded during my time, the typical age for Military Service shifted from the late teens to the early 20s.
Here I am, fresh in 20s. It’s real. I have to decide now: do I choose what everyone else does, or do I avoid Military Service? Time to dive into one of two holes—one that’s predictable, where I can see how everyone else jumps in and suffers, or the dark one, where almost no one jumps, and I can’t see through the darkness to know what’s there. Like shouting into a dark hole, “Heeeey, is it worse than Military Service down there? Is someone there who can answer me?” But nothing comes back, except the echo of my own voice. There’s no way back, no in-between—either join the army or live as a fugitive. It wasn’t a hard decision for me to make. Right there on that step of the balcony, I made my decision for the second cycle of my life, from 20 to 40 years old, which I’ve now completed. The longest 20 years of my life so far, and I can’t wait to recap and start a brand new, better 20 years.
How did I end up in the farthest place from home, sitting here and writing for the first time in my life? I’m writing because I don’t want to make the wrong decision again, not at this critical moment. This one is harder than the decision I made on that balcony, which took me about two hours. This time, I’ve been thinking for more than a year. There’s no obligatory Military Service now. There’s no obligation for anything to help narrow it down this time. It’s all up to me to decide how to live my third cycle of 20 years and where I’ll end up at 60.
Maybe having a couple of kids around me and Andrea in my 60s would be fun. Kids who are already about 20 years old and choose to be around me, not because they need me, but because they want to be with me. Well, that sounds like a long shot. First, Andrea and I would have to decide to have children, and then we’d have to try. After that, the child would have to grow up in North America (where I am now, Canada, BC, Vancouver ), hopefully without falling into addiction, prison, cancer, scams, crime, or worse, a face on an ipad, And in the end, they’d have to choose to be around me. Good luck with that. Not to mention, I also have to make it there in one piece, with all these doubts and uncertainties. Am I really a family person? Is that really what I want? Or do I want to dedicate myself to what I think is my talent and career? Or even worse, do I just want to have sex with as many women as possible all my life?
Many people say money is the simple answer to all doubts and uncertainties. Once you have a couple of million in your account, you can buy anything you want whenever you want, and you don’t have to make hard decisions. The moment you get bored with one thing, you just go get another. Assuming, of course, that money solves everything. So here’s the outline of a money-driven life: earn as much as you can, do only the things that make financial sense and that you like, and avoid everything else, whether you like it or not. Live like that until the end of your life. This approach works for many people, but money isn’t my goal. Money is just one of the important tools to help me reach my goals. First, I need to define what my goals are. I believe that once I know for sure what I really want, I’ll be able to gather the tools, aim for my goal, and achieve it. But setting a goal itself is about achieving something even more important.
If making a bad decision is better than making no decision, then that choice I made on the balcony wasn’t a total failure. I chose to apply for Military Service. As a decision, it was very easy to make, but going through it was misery beyond imagination. Let me put it this way: there’s no way through two years of Military Service—it goes through you. It turns into a depression inside you and stays there until you realize it’s not going to pass, and you have to live with it for the rest of those two years. You figure out that counting the days only makes you more hopeless by the first week. In less than a month, they change your identity into something new—just a tiny component of a giant green figure called the army. The components don’t matter. The army is what’s supposed to look good, sound good, and be regimented. In no time I had been turned into just another component of the regiment. I was bald, unshaved, sunburned, sleepless, and sick, like everyone else.
However, the real problem was none of the above. After all, we were young, and there was a medical centre with experts in there whose job, besides keeping us alive, was to punish us if we weren’t truly dying but ended up in the clinic just because we were sick. They were real experts—it was impossible to fake it. So far, three soldiers had been transferred to medical after collapsing during training. The first was punished with an extra month of service, while the other two were taken to the hospital. One of them never returned. But, as I said, none of this was the real problem.The real issue was dehumanization. Everything else was just a small part of the tools used to erase our character in the first phase of training. After all, you could have anticipated these hardships. Some people even prepared themselves before training to suffer —they stopped drinking, smoking, watching TV, having sex, sleeping, bathing, shaving, eating good food, seeing friends and family, smiling, and more, ahead of the time. But all that was just a distraction from what was really going to happen to us in the training centre. Erasing the humanity from someone who’s been human for nearly 20 years and turning them into a soldier who only follows orders, all in two months—that’s the real magic. And the magician does it best when no one is prepared.
On the first day of training, when our humanity wasn’t completely dead yet, just a few hours before the meaning of friendship would be erased from our minds, I spoke to my new friend.I had met him the day before, on an 18-hour bus ride to the training centre. I remember saying, “Habib, it’s only noon, and I feel like I’ve been here forever.” Habib replied, “I know, right? We got off the bus last night, and I already feel like I’ve been here for days.”
On the day we arrived at the training centre, after getting off the bus, they kept us behind the gate with dozens of other busloads of people who had also arrived by sunset. They left us there, behind the tall gate separating the training centre from the outside world, without telling us the plan or what was waiting for us inside. All we saw was a wall and a door. We were tired and hungry from the long trip, so we just talked and ate whatever we had in our bags. By midnight, a couple of people showed up. Their job was to humiliate us as much as possible before letting us in, to show us that we were their bitches—and it worked. We were exhausted and didn’t realize we’d be waiting for 10 hours, so we just let them insult us, hoping it would end soon. The last, and most important thing, before they replaced our identities with numbers, was leaving our pride behind the gate. We had to shout, “I don’t have balls,” before entering.
Naturally, I wanted to rest in a spot that would be mine—I was hoping to finally get a place to settle into. That’s what everyone else wanted too. Someone introduced himself as our trainer for the next two months and immediately started teaching us how to sleep the army way. It wasn’t too complicated, but it took longer than making a normal bed—and the point was to make us sleep uncomfortably. It was already 2 AM when he finally let us go to bed, but he advised us not to remove our boots or uniforms and to sleep without unmaking our beds, that we just made as practice.
The next thing I remember was a massive explosion that jolted me awake. I was shocked, and the super bright lights start hurting my eyes. That’s when I remembered—I’m in the training centre. Apparently, I had fallen into a dead sleep the night before, completely exhausted from the trip, the long wait at the door, and all the insults and humiliation. They woke us up with a gunshot inside the dorm, yelling at us to be outside in the yard in five minutes, fully dressed and with our beds perfectly made—the very beds we had barely slept in, still in our uniforms and boots. But something felt very wrong. It was harder than ever just to stay on my feet. I checked my watch—it was 4:30 AM. We had slept for barely two hours, and now they were rushing us outside, warning that anyone late would be kept awake on watch duty next night instead of getting any sleep. There was no time to think things through, and even if there had been, none of us were conscious enough to do anything but follow orders.
When I stepped outside, it was cold and dark. It was definitely still sleeping time for any normal person. By the time the sun rose, we had already been in training for hours. Everything was new—information kept coming at us, along with threats about what would happen if we didn’t pay attention. At breakfast, we were all sad and exhausted, desperate for just five minutes to ourselves. But the insults and training continued, even through breakfast. The quality of breakfast time was as good as the sleep time.
By noon, Habib and I realized that the next two years weren’t going to pass by counting the days or hours. We had to forget who we were before and become that new thing—the component they wanted us to be—and live like that, without waiting to feel human again.
Now I understand why the issue of "balls" was so important to them. I mean, the idea of not having balls. We actually graduated from training right where we left our balls before it all began. The next two months of physical training and torture were just distractions to hide the magician’s trick. Like all magics, it was based on a simple theory. For men, having balls is like a religion, and a 20-year-old man is the most devoted of believers in that regard. So when they take that away, they strip his humanity, leaving him for the military to mold into whatever it needs—a soldier.
All we wanted was to be normal citizens, and look at what was happening to us.