nazanin was one of my closest friends while i lived in pittsburgh. i met her one evening at a mutual friend’s place; she sat underneath his rubber tree among a semi-circle of acquaintances, talking passionately about politics in her birth country of Iran, and at one point i got confused and asked if she was referring to canada.
“ah no, tehran - the capital city of Iran,” she said with a charming half-smile. her tight black curls framed her face as she tilted her head to one side.
i was embarrassed and apologized. i’d thought she’d said toron(to); i’d always thought tehran was pronounced teh-ran and not teh-ran. but nazanin reacted warmly instead of rebuffing me, explaining that she thought both pronunciations were probably okay.
our friendship quickly blossomed from there. nazanin would text me, often spontaneously, to see if i wanted to hang out. i loved the activities she suggested for us: museum visits, long walks in the park, bargain hunting at TJ Maxx, indie movies at the art house theater. nazanin was poor and punk and stubborn, with a sharply discerning taste for music, food and art.
she was also profoundly depressed. i did what i could to help lift her up, especially during the pittsburgh winters, when even an inch of snow made the thought of a fifteen-minute drive across icy hills to get to nazanin’s house seem unthinkable. sometimes i thought nazanin asked for too much, wanting me to be there for her in ways which tested my boundaries. i remember bristling on one snowy day after she confessed to not leaving her bed for days and begged me to bring her apple pie from mcdonald’s.
i expected to lose touch with nazanin after she moved away from pittsburgh, followed subsequently by my own move to germany a few years later. but she has reached out to me persistently over the years, usually over text, often bombarding me with bad news when her life takes disappointing turns: job losses, her mother’s chronic illnesses and falling outs with her father, missed romantic connections, her own tooth-and-nail struggles with depression. against the backdrop of her disappointments i often feel too sheepish to share highlights from my life, and so our friendship over text has started to feel one-sided and heavy, and i am often at a loss over how to respond. sometimes the cause of her depression seems clear as day: i believe it stems from an extraordinary pressure she feels to be anything other than who she is, and a sense of duty towards her parents which weighs enormously on her shoulders. but none of my thoughts seem appropriate to share with her over text, and the nine hour time difference between us has made it difficult to find a good time to talk. and so i approach in-person reunions with nazanin with cautious hope that i’ll be able to say something both helpful and kind which might finally help her out of her years-long rut.
ulrich got to meet nazanin for the first time yesterday. she has been in better spirits lately after clawing her way out of the depths of seattle winter and yet another disappointing job loss, her third in as many years. ulrich was pleasantly surprised after meeting her; he said she was very sweet, and never would have guessed she was struggling the way i’ve described over the years. when he told me this i felt instantly guilty; i realized that i had mostly only shared my worries and doubts about nazanin this whole time - including my skepticism that she would ever get better - instead of highlighting the wonderful things about her. and then, somehow, i suddenly realized what it means to be a friend to someone i love, someone like nazanin:
being nazanin’s friend means meeting her anew each time i see her and letting go of past experiences or assumptions of what our friendship is like. it means embracing her depression when it shows up, but also her joyous, vibrant, and multifaceted selves when those emerge instead of the depression i’ve come to expect. and it means allowing myself to be surprised by her resilience - a quality of hers that i am seeing more and more of during this trip.
Damn this is poignant and powerful. I love the eyes through which Ulrich viewed her. And maybe the eyes you see her with are the same eyes you see yourself with, (that's how it goes with me at least) so maybe you'll also see yourself more kindly. . . it's an issue i struggle with too. . .figuring out how to dragonfly my one way of seeing others and myself.