I've never been to Iran. Why has the crisis left me in despair?
I've spent the past two weeks glued to my phone. Not reading the news — inhaling it.
Comment sections, maps, Telegram channels, satellite images, video essays of analysis and speculation. It's compulsive and nauseating, and I can't stop. Iran is under threat of war again, and I feel like I can't breathe.
I'm half Iranian. My father left Iran in the 1960s, long before the revolution, not as a refugee, but simply as a young man who wanted to live somewhere else. The way I moved to London in my twenties, he moved to Europe in his.
Growing up, Iran was always both close and just out of reach for me. My father made a life in Germany — he met my mother and raised my sister and I there, and kept us at a careful distance from the country he came from. There were practical reasons for this: under Iranian law, children of Iranian men are automatically citizens. We can't enter on tourist visas, can't renounce our citizenship — and in times of political instability dual nationals are at risk. He didn't want us to feel tethered to a country that could make life harder, a place that came with political baggage and a passport we'd never be able to shake.
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