Living Without Fear

Why writing has been so hard for me, and what I'm doing about it

In September 2021, I was 22 and at my best. For the first time in my life, I felt free.

I had just escaped my trafficker. I’d finished college and secured a position at the University of Texas. I was about to move to the US, my ideal country.

I had the freedom of a slave set free. No more dreading sunsets, when my trafficker could come home any moment and assault me. No more crying in the bathroom as I bleed after being locked in his room. I was free to go out on my own will, make plans for my future, dance, and sleep alone in safety.

My mind could focus as I read the words on a book. I woke up with energy, ate, exercised. My body started to feel mine again. My mind was full of ideas. I was making educational YouTube videos and some earning enough money to survive from it. I was also working on writing a novel inspired by my friends in Iran. I was the happiest I had ever been.

It all ended when the officer at the American embassy put my visa on hold. They said they must run background check because my passport was from Iran. Having never ever supported terrorism in my life, I was optimistic.

I waited and waited but did not hear back. Two weeks, three, six, ten. My European visa expired. I wasn’t going back to my trafficker, to ask him to extend my visa, no matter what. So I was plunged into the dark world of being an undocumented. My life turned upside down. I barely slept for more than two hours. I lived every day with the horror of hearing deportation police knocking on my door.

Being undocumented is like being labeled a murderer on the run. You’re afraid of showing your face outside, afraid of closing your eyelids, afraid of sharp footsteps, always looking for nooks to hide in. It reminded me of the fear I lived with in Iran, but it was even worse. Being undocumented in the West is scarier that being gay in Iran.

That lack of basic security, that constant fear for my life—literally made me dumb. It suffocated the sparkle in my mind. I could not focus on anything for more than one minute. My emotions became incoherent. I lost interest in all activities. I was decimated by fear.

That is how I’ve been feeling in America today.

America has been in a dark place for everyone recently. But for immigrants like me especially, America is at its darkest:

[POLITICO:] Two senior intelligence officials said that people who work in the National Counterterrorism Center are actively pushing the White House on a hardline plan to deport some 2 million people from mostly Muslim countries who entered the U.S. under Biden — and force them to reapply from abroad if they want to return.

The first intelligence official declined to explain how the NCTC arrived at the figure of 2 million.

The sober reality is: Because I’m a gay Iranian-born immigrant, I could be disappeared at any moment. Not even my green card can protect me.

To be honest with you, I am afraid for my life. The fear has taken a toll on me and made me feel too scattered to write.

The fear rushes in with sadness—sadness at seeing America having lost its way, reduced to something resembling the dictatorship I fled.

Thankfully, I've been in similar situations before. I've learned how to deal with them. What I did last time is what I'll do today: decide to stop living in fear. Live my best life right now, as if there were no threat.

Because at the end of day, life is not about fear. The best way to get out of fear and injustice is to live your life to the fullest. Live with purpose, make friends, and advocate for yourself; let everyone see that you are a good person who is unjustly victimized. You cannot control whether you will die tomorrow; what you can do is to live in such a way that if you die, you die happy.

In the conclusion of one of my favorite novels, the protagonist is escaping Soviet dictatorship on foot. She falls to the ground after being shot at the border. She keeps walking until the last moment, dying happy because she never gave up pursuing what she knew was good.

I will do everything to make sure I am not deported. But if I do get unjustly deported, if I am sent to my death like that, I don’t want to die having lived the last months of my life in fear. I want to die like Nathan Hale, his face solemn, his posture proud, facing the tyrant’s gunpoint saying, ‘I have no regrets.’

That is what my personal heroes did. That is what I did at my best.

I am again standing at a dangerous precipice, facing another great injustice. Either I will stay small, live with grievances, and curse the world, or I will live and speak up with no fear.

If ICE wants to send me back to Iran, so be it. I firmly stand with what I’ve accomplished in my life. It was good that I escaped Iran, and it is good that I came to live here in America. I won’t let the senseless ugliness of some government bureaucrat stop me from living my dear life. They can kill me, if they wish, but they cannot make me live in crippling fear so long as I’m alive.

A picture Joey took from the Statue of Nathan Hale, depicting his fearless state moments before he is executed by the British soldiers. National Gallery of Arts, Washington, D.C.