Chapter 1

5/18/1997

Four gray walls

Enclose around me

I sit there waiting

They said that I

Cried for myself

They said stop being

Dramatic.

But did they understand

The lump that sat

In my throat or

The heavy boulder

That sat on my

Head or the pain

That ate my insides

No. I was always alone

Not physically but

Mentally.

Forever I would lay

In my bed waiting for

An understanding person

To help me. To comfort

And believe me. To listen

And UNDERSTAND ME

No one ever came.

The pain

Continued and it

Will never stop.

1/15/18

Writing poetry became an outlet for my feelings in middle school. The sentences did not have to have the correct structure or formatting to convey the feelings that only the linking of words with patient pauses would communicate. As amateur as my writing was, I read that poem now and feel the pain of the little girl who was so lost and stuck in her reality. I wanted someone to free me from my life, but no one understood why I felt trapped and I don’t know if I really knew why either. It was just this feeling in my chest of “this isn’t okay," “this isn’t right," but I was twelve years old. I was fully aware of being a child trapped by her age, without power, coping became my mind and soul taking refuge in books of tales of freedom and sovereignty.

6/2/1997

Today I escaped the school yard. I walked the perimeter of the field and then returned to the steps. I hate the school so much, I will curse them at the end of the year. As the days go by my hatred increases. I wish I could make them see or feel or understand the pain that exists in my heart. I will not be defeated by such animals. I will fight them to my death. Wish me luck!

-Siedeh

P.S. Never have I more understood the meaning of the Hanson song “Weird."

1/15/18

The badass feeling, I had that afternoon, when I snuck past the angry lunch aides and freed myself from the monitored school yard. Of course, I was far too afraid of getting in trouble to really take advantage of my freedom, but a walk around the block was enough to feed my sense of self, and I was able to return victorious and full of determination to not allow the constraints of my environment define my sense of self and my hope of the quality of life to come when I grew up.

I found new ways to play with the reality for my own amusement. In class, I would allow my mind to wander off to other locations where I could multitask listening to the material necessary for judged regurgitation while still finding a happy place that entertained my brain cells far more than the tired speeches of unenthused teachers, as if we were the punishment of their life choices. I also developed a game of lying. I would develop elaborate stories to convince the other students of and then find such pleasure in watching their faces as they ate my bullshit with belief. Of course, my conscious would always kick in and I would then tell them it wasn’t true because I felt bad I had deceived them. I convinced the nasty girls I was “friends” with that my youngest brother was a refugee orphan from Russia that my parents had adopted while they were spies. Beyond the entertainment of fucking with their heads, I think perhaps it was really a test of my reality.

7/23/1997

People of the world

Today

Only know and live one

Way

Unconscious of their human

Kinds

Fearing opinions of others’

Minds

Knowing what is right

And wrong

Knowing how to only sing one

Song

Is it wrong?

Is it right?

Do I remain a shadow in the night?

Alone with a secret no

One knows

That there is more

To life then what is shown

1/15/18

An understanding of the mainstream conditioned mind was apparent within me from a very young age. How far back I’m not sure, but the words of this poem were not new to me, it was only at that age could I finally form the understanding into words. I always wonder if perhaps visiting Iran when I was five years old might have been the trigger that showed me the reality of my American life was a limited truth. Or perhaps it was felt by my mind much earlier in life as I watched how people interacted without understanding of my father and mother, how they appeared. Maybe it was the rhetoric of my father’s disgust for American culture and his fear that it would corrupt his children. Whatever the original source, America was my home and it’s culture my enemy. A culture that intellectualized the diversity of the world but was not willing to be open to the variations in life on its own turf, and as a young woman, if I wasn’t reading Seventeen, emulating MTV, and learning how to be a desirable American woman, I was doomed to suffer in this reality. Fully aware of my future struggles within this reality, I dove deeper into creating my own reality to escape to when the expectations of the assigned situation were not suitable to my survival within.

9/27/1997

I am thankful that I have recovered from our loss last summer of Hannah. This summer started off by helping Suzanne teach a drama class at the Cambridge Adult Center for Education and then I helped teach another camp in Lexington. This was the highlight of my summer. Never have I had so much fun. 50 children attended the camp. By the second day, I knew every child’s name and what group they were in. I just realized that my life has never been that bad, and I am pretty lucky to have such a wonderful life.

At this camp, I met a group of Pagans. It scared me at first, but everyone has their own strange ways, and these people were pretty nice. My handwriting is atrocious. I will be scorned for this next year. It’s just I have so much to write, I have no time for the way it looks. I am going back to the camp after I come back from California.

Oh, I forgot to tell you, I am going to California for 15 days. I don’t know how to explain the way this summer has treated me. I have simply been blessed by good fortune.

-Siedeh

1/15/18

My first job. The first time an outside force beyond my family and school, who saw my capability for taking on responsibility approached me with an opportunity to grow. It was a leadership role, that allowing a pent-up energy within me to have a voice, even though I still was unsure how to embody what I was feeling. The dogma of my position as a child always felt in contradiction to the feeling of powerful ability within me, and my desire to have a voice in larger conversations. I would learn over the years how to use my indoor voice and become muted so as to fit in and behave, but she always slipped out, followed by punishment for not knowing my place as a child, as a girl, as less than. The mistaken assumption that the unfiltered mind of a child understands early in life, but adults never seem to be able to admit honestly, adults don’t know everything.

For that summer, I tasted being the older human, with younger beings looking up at me. Unlike with my siblings, these were beings I had no connection to beyond those eight hours a day. I had a job. I assumed that was a qualifying factor in being able to have a voice that would be heard by those older than myself. If I emulated their behaviors, met their positions defined expectations, and proved I was smart enough and capable enough would I be heard?

The experience of being the younger human invited by the older Pagan teenager humans to have lunch in the graveyard was magical as well. I was being accepted into a group who were defined by the hierarchy of childhood as having greater freedom and greater knowledge. Five years younger than them, I felt as foreign and naive to their conversation and interactions as I was mystified and excited to be accepted onto their level of existence.

Hannah was the fulfillment of a childhood dream. Our first apartment was in 1990’s Somerville, where the Whitey Bulger gangs still ruled the landscape. In an apartment building between two main streets, our playground was a plot of concrete hidden between the bricks of buildings rising high above. I don’t remember it as sad. It was what was, and our imaginations turned that slab of concrete into hours of playing in the summer heat. My first lessons in the alchemy of poverty. My mother was good at seeing the potential in everything and she played with in our imaginary worlds, creating settings of potential. The power of the imagination to turn nothing into something has been my greatest tool of survival in this life and continues to be my source of seeing the potential within everything.

We moved to Cambridge, into a house in a neighborhood with a yard and a family across the street, and down the street. We had others to play with and imagine with. Hours of summer daylight spent riding bikes up and down the street, wandering the neighborhood as if it was our kingdom. It lasted once summer. Hannah was our best friend that summer. My siblings and I played dress-up and imagination games, the neighborhood our kingdom. I was capable at twelve of understanding the impermanence of everything, perhaps the other lesson of growing up on the economic edge. Hannah and her family moved to California and soon we would be evicted from the house as the increasing house market of the neighborhood reduced a two-family home to a one family with new owners.

I understood within change comes the betterment of life’s conditions. I have never feared change, perhaps I have been over indulgent over the years with a flight response to uncomfortable situations and the immediate reincarnation into another job, place, passion, life. The eviction led to my family being able to purchase a home in Cambridge through an affordable housing program, which provided a level of stability. It gave my being a temporary permanence.

School Assignment Writings from 1998

In that Place….

As I open the screen door onto the front porch the smell of clean laundry and roast beef fills the small square porch. The large redwood door leads into the house, into a small hallway, where a familiar face comes running down the stairs. I walk through the wall to wall carpeted hallway into the kitchen. The kitchen lined with a linoleum floor and wooden cabinets gives the room a musty feeling. There I greet the forever known cooks and notice the bubbles in the sink start to float out the small window in front of the sink, into the backyard.

The backyard where miniature pools were set up every summer. The backyard where we spent warm summer days amidst a cool breeze and the shady tall beech trees. The backyard where we spent summer nights listening to the neighbors talk about the old days while slapping annoying mosquitos.

A familiar sound comes from the living room. It is the sound of the television and there in front lies three bodies sprawled out on their bellies staring at the constant glow. I pass by them and make my way towards the stairs to the second floor, where I will put my things in the back bedroom. The back bedroom is where I spent many hot nights fast asleep. As I walk towards the bedroom, I pass the bathroom that never stinks but always smells of a perfume called “Beautiful." Opposite the bathroom is a small room that is always cluttered with junk and which will someday be a red wine color. In the small room is a splintered old stairway that leads up to the attic where I spent days searching for treasure and secrets about my deceased family members’ lives. The room opposite the back bedroom is my grandmother’s bedroom. Here in this sea blue room, is where she was awakened early in the morning by boisterous grandchildren running about the house.

As memories continue to fill my mind, I walk into the back bedroom where I throw my duffel bag onto the single bed that creaks when sat on. And as I absorb the essence of the room, a voice calls my name and mentions something about dinner. As I leave the room, the second floor, I look back at so much that I had never noticed.

1/23/2018

Eighth grade, we were learning how to write descriptions of places. I chose Grammy’s house, which at that point was still my happiest place in the United States. My mother’s mother lived in Weymouth, Massachusetts, where my mother grew up. I grew up going down and playing with my cousins, my aunt making us laugh so hard we would pee in our pants. Drinking Tetley tea with milk after a family dinner, staying up late listening to the adults talk. It was the place we would run away to when my parents fought. It was the place I prayed I would not end up living in, if my parents got a divorce. Riding back into Boston, I would always look at the city skyline as we drove closer, being so thankful that I lived in the city and not in Weymouth.

Weymouth at that times was still primarily a white suburb of Boston. I approve of gentrification when it diversifies suburban neighborhoods. As Boston has grown more expensive and congested, Weymouth has become one of the many suburbs on the south shore that has been diversified by gentrification, but when I was a kid and we would go grocery shopping at the Stop and Shop, everyone would stare at the woman with the thing on her head and the three little darker children with her. We were aliens to them. We were exotic animals they were afraid to get to close to but could not stop looking at wondering what created us.

My cousins lived in the typical American suburb of the late 90s. It was hard for us to sometimes find common ground with them because our life in the city being of two different worlds in culture as well, was more than they had experienced. Experience is the key to understanding another person, which is why ignorance is what creates most hatred. My aunt’s husband’s family would harass my father at family events, trying to get him to drink or kissing my mother on the cheek to piss him off. Even as a child, I could feel the intent when my uncle’s father, reeking of what I now know was shitty beer, would kiss my mom and look directly at my father. But my father always tried with them, despite the temper that existed within him, he never pulled it out on them. Maybe he should have, it would have been the better release than to then be mad at us later because he was really mad at the douche racist.

While my grandmother was sick in the hospital, just before she died, my aunt and her husband and my cousins pillaged her house of anything worth anything. My cousin moved in with her boyfriend, with claims from my aunt that the house insurance required someone to be occupying the house. They destroyed the place. The last time I walked through that house was once when I went down to help my mom clean it out before they sold it. To see what my cousin had done to our grandmother’s house, to our childhood memories, broke my heart. I lost respect for that side of the family at that point. It took many years later to really realize how shitty they had behaved for years out of ignorance and assumptions about who we were. Whereas I knew every time we took a tour through Harvard Square on our way home to Somerville, that if I was to grow up in Weymouth, I would be sucked into the programming that would lead to their lives, their beliefs, their limited understanding of the world. I knew that I would either drown in the ignorance or be miserable in the fight and preservation of myself.