About Iran, from an Iranian Woman

No matter what happens to me in this life, no matter where I live or what language I speak, I will always be an Iranian woman. In every lifetime, I would choose to be Iranian.

Today marks a historic day for Iranians around the world. After nearly fifty years under a regime built on repression, the man who stood at the center of that system is gone. For many of us, the feeling was not shallow celebration. It was release. It was the unfamiliar sensation of air returning to lungs that have been compressed for decades.

And yet the moment Iranians allowed themselves to exhale was the moment the world decided to correct us.

The same world that was silent during mass executions. Silent when political prisoners were killed by the thousands. Silent as women were beaten in the streets. Silent as families buried their children. That silence has now transformed into moral instruction.

Suddenly everyone is fluent in Iranian politics. One article. One thread. One post. And now they can explain what this means, what will happen next, how we should feel.

I have always been affected by what happens in the Middle East, not only because I am Middle Eastern, but because it has always felt like the world villainizes us when convenient and ignores us when we are drowning. The region is flattened into one continuous crisis. One headline. One interchangeable conflict. But internally, it is layered and specific. Iran is not an idea. It is eighty million people living under a regime that has ruled through surveillance, imprisonment, torture, and execution.

When I heard the news, I cried. Not delicately. Not politically. It felt ancestral. As if generations of Iranians were crying at once. For the students shot in the streets. For the women arrested for showing their hair. For the prisoners tortured behind walls the world pretended not to see.

I am not naïve about what comes next. I understand instability. I understand power vacuums. I understand that authoritarian systems do not disappear cleanly. I understand war. I understand foreign intervention. I understand that uncertainty is not romantic.

But for a moment, it felt like the man who presided over decades of death, imprisonment, rape, torture, and systematic oppression was finally gone.

And then I opened Instagram.

All at once, everyone is anti-war from the comfort of American apartments. A country filled with people who do not know what it is like to have bombs dropped on them. Who have never had their internet cut during protests so the world cannot see what is happening. Who have never lived under a regime where dissent can get you killed. Where dancing can get you arrested. Where showing your hair can get you beaten. Where tomorrow is never guaranteed.

And now those same voices are telling Iranians how to feel.

The ignorance of this will always amaze me. I even had a non-Iranian man tell me, “Lili darling, I’m a little more read up on this than you.” The tone said everything. As if lived experience can be replaced by articles. As if proximity to pain is something you can skim and then explain back to the people carrying it in their blood.

Yes, I am anti-war with Iran. I did not think that needed clarification. The only people who truly benefit from war are the billionaires who profit from it. But being anti-war does not require mourning a dictator.

The Iranian people have been desperate for years. A kind of desperation that no American can fully understand. The authoritarian control enforced by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not just a human rights violation. It is a human rights catastrophe. A sustained system of repression designed to silence, imprison, torture, and kill its own population.

I am not claiming bombs equal liberation.

But it is also not accurate to pretend that we are currently free and stable. We are already subjugated. Subjugated by our own regime. When conversations fixate on hypothetical future chaos while refusing to acknowledge present oppression, they erase what is already happening to us.

It is possible to criticize Israeli policy and still condemn the Iranian regime. Those positions are not mutually exclusive. But when anti-Israel sentiment turns into defending or minimizing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the conversation detaches from lived reality. The IRGC is not a symbol of resistance for us. It is the force that jails us, tortures us, executes us, and disappears us.

Iran is not Iraq. It is not Afghanistan. It is not an interchangeable cautionary tale. It is a far larger and more complex regional power with deep political consciousness and enormous strategic weight. It sits along the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most critical oil transit chokepoints in the world, through which roughly a fifth of global oil consumption passes. It holds vast energy reserves. It occupies a geopolitical position that makes it central, not peripheral.

None of that makes war desirable. None of it guarantees safety. But it demands that Iranian suffering not be reduced to a footnote in someone else’s ideological argument.

And yes, the fact that a school was bombed today, that fifty children were killed, that little girls are once again at the forefront of suffering and injustice, breaks my heart. Children dying is not political to me. It is devastating.

But watching those deaths immediately weaponized to invalidate Iranian grief and Iranian relief is something else entirely. Watching people who were silent when tens of thousands of Iranians were brutally killed suddenly find their voices now, and use those voices not to mourn universally, but to undermine Iranian pain, exposes a selective morality that is difficult to ignore.

Where was this urgency when thousands were executed? Where was this outrage when protesters were shot in the streets? When families were burying their children month after month? When we couldn’t communicate with our families due to internet blackouts?

Grief should not be conditional. Outrage should not be strategic.

This is not abstract to me.

My family has lived it.

This isn’t political theory. It is prison cells. It is torture. It is rape. It is execution.

Members of my own family have been imprisoned. They were beaten. Tortured. I have family whose fingernails were ripped off one by one during interrogations. Women assaulted in custody. Confessions forced through pain and broadcast as propaganda.

They do not just intimidate. They kill. They shoot protesters in the streets. They drag teenagers into vans and make them disappear. They jail journalists. They silence lawyers. They kill doctors. They execute dissent.

This is not religion. It is brutality disguised as faith.

So when Iranians feel relief at the death of a man who presided over decades of this violence, that relief is not ignorance. It is not blindness. It is not a geopolitical miscalculation.

It is human.

It is what happens when a people survive something they were told to endure quietly.

It is what happens when generations who were imprisoned, beaten, silenced, and buried are finally allowed one unguarded exhale.

Relief does not mean we are naïve about what comes next.
Relief does not mean we are asking for bombs.
Relief does not mean we have forgotten the cost of instability.

It means we have lived under instability for decades already.

Some people studied the region.
Some people debated strategy.
Some people waited for the “right time” to care.

We buried family.

We buried them while the world theorized.
We buried them while silence felt easier.

And now there are prescriptions for our future.
Now there are lectures about what is best for us.

But you cannot map salvation onto a country you have only ever encountered as a headline.
You cannot dictate survival to people who have been surviving all along.

You speak about us.
You analyze us.
You reduce us.

But you do not know us.