I am racing against a clock that doesn’t exist.
The war started, and within days my instinct was to invent deadlines to move faster and work harder. As if hurrying could make the painful situation end sooner. I called it resilience. I called it coping. But it is a childish form of escape, dressed up in productivity. My body still wants to sprint. My mind knows there is nowhere to run. Just a situation unfolding on its own time, with or without my panic.
As an Iranian, this war cannot be a background noise for me. It is not just gas and oil prices, it is not just another conflict in the middle east, it is not just a moral standing such as Gaza, it is in my chest, it is in the center of my world. It is in every message I’m afraid to open too slowly. It is in the way I check the news before I check the time. It is about my home. My family. My friends. It is about Iran.
I know I am not alone. I bet every Iranian is currently experiencing the same loop: spending hours daily consuming news and analyses that confirm their specific brand of belief and grief, reading history, geopolitical analyses, and stories of pain from the inside, all of it sandwiched between funny videos, cat videos and food recipes. It is a surreal kind of radicalization and a very strange way of mourning and coping. Even the most grounded and educated people I know are starting to fracture, we are angry, desperate, helpless, and confused. We have become the inevitable products of what has happened to us, what could happen, and what we fear will happen next.
What I feel now isn’t just anger. It’s something heavier. A spiritual fatigue. And it makes sense. Being tired suits this situation very well. We are all trying to make sense of a world we didn’t choose to experience this way and honestly, I don’t think we ever will. That’s not a conclusion. It’s just the truth of where we are.
And somehow, that’s enough to say.