An Experience of Exile from Iran

I am a refugee from Iran.
I fighted for my beliefs, values and rights as a human. Equality, women rights, free religion, freedom, and democratic values that must be for everybody. These are important for me.
But unfortunately our dictator doesn’t respect these rights and easily killed and put you in prison. I am one of the millions of Iranians that was forced to leave their country to save their life. It was not my choice, but I was forced to do it. If I was in another country they give me an award and I would be a hero because of my activities and fighting for rights. But in a dictatorship you are a person that can be killed easily. You are a bad man, because you ask for women rights, equality and freedom.
Here I want to share some of my unwanted journey that forced me to leave my life and country.
Leaving your country is like a suicide. It is the hardest decision in your life.
You are forced to cut all your loves and roots brutally, your mother, father, brothers, sisters, friends, relatives and all your loves that grow up during your life. All the social capital that you make during your life. All your experience and valuable things you must leave.
If you are lucky you can take just a backpack.
You have to choose which memory you want to take with you. The things that are memories of your loves, and you want for the times that you are alone and where the smell of them may calm you when you are too alone.
Unfortunately, during your difficult journey you may lose your backpack or the police in some country may throw it away, and you feel more and more alone in this dangerous and unsafe journey. It may be your family photos or your mobile with the email gift from your love.
The journey that you don’t know where you want to go and when it will be finished, everything is strange. Nobody in the border welcoming you. The only thing that is with you is uncertainty. Nobody is waiting for you and you don’t have enough money to eat during your journey.
Exile, and moving to another country, is like dying.
You go to another world that is strange for you. It is like a new birth but different now that you are 40 years old. You must learn a new language, a new culture, and fall down to make your life again, with the difference that this time there is no mother or father to take your hand and help you stand up. You have to start again to find your friends, job, home and all ways of your life.
You throw yourself in another life that is strange for you.
A strange new life where a music, perfume, food or song may suddenly transport you to your own country and remember all joys and loves.
You enter a new world where you are always worried that they will look at you as an uninvited guest. Where your country is not, you are always insecure. You are always a stranger to people.
Exile means cutting off all attachments. You have to leave all your loved ones and go. You know that you will no longer see many of your loved ones who are old and elderly. You have to deceive yourself and convince yourself that one day I will return to my homeland and embrace my loved ones again. But you know very well that this may be an illusion.
Every morning when you wake up, the first thing you check with fear and stress is WhatApp, so that you don’t hear about the death of your father or mother or your grandparents.