Unmedicated

We were happy people once. Not naïve, just animated, social, alive. We gathered constantly. We danced at weddings, at birthdays, at no occasion at all. Even grief had witnesses. Sadness visited but never unpacked its bags; it simply had some tea and then was off on its way.

Then it happened. The Islamic Republic arrived and taught us to colour inside the lines.

First the music at weddings grew quieter. My aunt stopped wearing her red dress, too bright, too dangerous. Someone whispered that the neighbours were listening. I remember the last time we danced without fear: my cousin’s wedding. Arms linked, breathless with joy, the room spinning around us. Then someone hissed: IRGC outside. The music kept playing, but our bodies froze.

That is how happiness died in Iran, warned slowly into silence.

My family had its own silence too. No one said my mother was depressed. No one used the word bipolar. My grandmother forbade it, as if naming it could summon it more fully. Pills were shameful symbols of defeat. Denial was a lullaby. We survived by not naming things, by staying carefully, obediently, within the lines we had been given.

When we left Iran, we discovered another kind of line. Staying meant one kind of death. Leaving meant another. Exile is its own quiet funeral.

When we reached America, my mother finally began treatment. Her storms quieted, but so did she. Her eyes dulled. Her laughter vanished. She became a still body that once was my mother. Relief turned her into absence.

I understood then why I cannot bring myself to take medication, why even now, when panic claws at my chest, I refuse. I am afraid that relief means erasure.

Staying unmedicated is my act of colouring outside the lines. Not heroism. Not strength. Just refusal to let chemical peace bury the truths that live in my body.

I tried therapy. One therapist asked why I cared so much about my aunt who stayed in Iran. She made her choice, he said. Another smiled gently: You’re not Jesus. You’re off the hook.

Am I? Are any of us, those who live safely while the streets where we once danced run red?

I have stood at marches beside feminists who roar for their freedom yet fall quiet when I mention mine. Women imprisoned in Iran for removing hijabs. Girls in Afghanistan erased from public life.

The answers arrive softly: we must not be culturally imperialist. It is complicated.

Is it more complicated than a fourteen-year-old girl who will never read another book?

Then came the strikes. The United States and Israel attacked Iran and killed the Supreme Leader, Khamenei. I had spent my life dreaming that regime gone.

Yet when bombs fall, grief arrives first.

I am against war. Every missile terrifies me for the people beneath it. But another question sits beside that fear: without intervention, can people ever be free?

Could the Nazis have been defeated if the world had simply watched?

The moment you ask, the room divides. Republican or Democrat. Love Trump or hate him. Support Palestine and you must defend Tehran. Support Israel and you must cheer war.

Someone has already drawn the borders of the colouring book.

I refuse that page.

Both things are true. The Iranian regime is brutal. War is brutal too. Liberation may require force. Force always leaves graves.

The world demands one colour only.

But real life bleeds.

I carry grief. I carry the memory of when we were happy. I carry it unmedicated.

Not because I am stronger, but because some truths live in the body.

And I refuse to be handed someone else’s colouring book.

The world does not need more people screaming from opposite edges of the page. It needs people willing to sit in the uneasy middle, where colours mix and arguments breathe.

Where grief can speak without slogans and loyalty tests.

Maybe that quiet table is the bravest way to colour outside the lines we inherited. Maybe freedom begins there, in the courage to think without permission.

To ask hard questions about war and mercy. About justice and survival. About what it truly takes to end tyranny without becoming it.

I do not know the answer. I only know silence never freed us.

And neither did neat colouring inside the lines.

So I keep sitting in the middle of the page unmedicated, holding grief and doubt together, refusing easy colours, waiting for truth to appear slowly there.

Layla Sabourian is an award-winning author, educator, and innovator. Creator of the patented content development culinary app, she has published multilingual children’s books, academic research, and holds a US patent advancing children’s global competence through collaborative cooking.