The first thing I did after a tragic life event was delete Instagram.

Not in a blaze of glory. Not with a carefully kerned Notes-app manifesto about boundaries and healing. I just pressed down on the app until it started shaking like it knew it was guilty, and I removed it from my phone.

Grief has a way of clarifying your audience. When something breaks your heart open, you become acutely aware of who is standing outside with binoculars. The no-contact family members who treat my life like a syndicated series. The high school and college girls who once borrowed my clothes and now lurk my milestones, no peep for years. The ex coworkers who never quite liked me but love a front row seat to the plot. Ex-besties, who I am sure refresh my existence online like their life depends on it (this is not speculation....I know).

I could not stomach the idea of them witnessing my pain. Not even peripherally. Not even through a sepia toned carousel with a vulnerable caption that says “be gentle with yourself” and racks up 312 views from people who have not texted me since 2016.

There is something grotesque about people who would not protect you getting to consume you unprotected.

I did share it. Just not widely. I posted to my Close Friends story.

That small, almost tender, green circle. A handful of people I do not even see that often, but who feel safe in a way that is hard to explain. Not because we are inseparable, but because they are not spectators. They are not collecting data. They are not waiting for the fall. They are just… kind.

It felt right. Intimate but not theatrical. Witnessed but not displayed.

The rest of the internet did not need to know.

So I deleted the apps. No Instagram. No TikTok. I did not announce a hiatus. I did not threaten a comeback. I simply vanished from the grid like a minor character written off mid season.

The silence was deafening at first.

My thumb kept searching for the app out of muscle memory. I would unlock my phone and stare at the empty space where it used to live. Without the feed, there was no instant mirror. No micro doses of validation. No subtle confirmation that people were still watching.

And that is when it hit me. I have been performing for an audience I would not invite to dinner.

Why should my estranged relatives have access to my grief when they do not have access to my joy? Why should old classmates get to measure my heartbreak against their own tidy narratives? Why should shitty people get even a pixel of my vulnerability?

Absolutely not.

Today I woke up and instead of scrolling, I opened a self help workbook. I answered questions in longhand like an earnest graduate student of my own psyche. No one was going to screenshot it. No one was going to comment “so proud of you.” It was just me, interrogating myself gently.

I went to the gym.

Forty five minutes on the stairstepper. Thirty on the treadmill. Twenty in the sauna. The kind of heat that feels biblical. Sweat tracing my spine. No mirror selfie. No “discipline equals results” caption. Just effort. Just breath. Just the private satisfaction of doing something hard without documenting it.

I kept a log of what I ate. Not as punishment. Not as penance. Just as awareness. I want to know myself better than the algorithm does.

Somewhere between the treadmill and the sauna, I had a realization that felt almost embarrassing in its honesty.

I do not want to be an influencer.

I want the texture of that life, sure.

The matching sets. The color coded fridge. The dinner parties with tapered candles and curated playlists and guests who look like they stepped out of a soft focus coming of age film. I want the polish. The cohesion. The aesthetic control.

But I want it in my actual life. In my house. With people who would bring soup without posting about it.

Deleting social media has forced me to ask who I am when no one is watching. When my no-contact family cannot peek in. When old coworkers cannot tally my wins and losses. When the quiet lurkers from college cannot whisper, “I always knew.”

Who am I when the performance ends?

I am someone who experienced something devastating and chose discretion over display.

I am someone who understands that privacy is not secrecy. It is self-respect.

I am someone who can climb a stairstepper for 45 minutes and not require applause, damnit!!

There is still a part of me that fears disappearing. That wonders if absence equals irrelevance. It is difficult to be an artist in a culture that equates visibility with value. But I keep returning to this simple truth:
I would still make music if no one was watching.

I would still write songs in my loft. I would still dance alone in my private dance studio. I would still dress up and do glam for no reason. I would still host the dinner with matching napkins and a perfectly sequenced playlist. I would still want my life to feel cinematic.

The difference now is that the audience is curated.

Tiny. Intentional. Green circled.

Maybe the real luxury is not being perceived by everyone.

Maybe the real power is choosing who gets to see you when you are not polished.

For the first time in a long time, my life feels less like a broadcast and more like a novel.

And I finally get to decide who is allowed to read it.

Until next time,
<3
Janet

I have learned that silence has a texture. It is not empty. It is padded, deliberate, curated for comfort. It feels like a room where everyone has agreed to whisper so no one has to acknowledge who is missing.

Being Iranian in the diaspora means you grow up fluent in that texture. You learn early how people’s faces change when you say where you’re from. The flicker of curiosity followed by confusion followed by a quiet relief when the conversation moves on. You learn which parts of yourself are acceptable to share at dinner parties and which ones make people stare at their wine glasses like they suddenly remember an email they forgot to send.

I have spent my whole life watching causes become trends. I do not say that cynically. I say it with the weariness of someone who keeps hoping the trend will mature into something sturdier. Something that can survive complexity. Something that does not evaporate the second it becomes uncomfortable or hard to explain.

There is a particular kind of person who knows exactly what to say when the moral math is simple. They have the fonts, the slogans, the language down to a science. They know when to post, what to repost, how to signal urgency without disrupting their own sense of stability. Their care is real, I think, but it is also rehearsed. It arrives already formatted.

Iran does not arrive that way. Iran shows up loud and contradictory and historically inconvenient. Iran asks you to hold multiple truths at once. That the government is brutal. That the people are not their government. That women are resisting in ways that do not translate cleanly into Western frameworks. That rage and love can coexist in the same breath. That freedom is not always photogenic.

Supporting Iranians requires curiosity instead of certainty. It requires listening longer than feels efficient. It requires admitting you might not understand everything immediately. And I think this is where a lot of people quietly exit the conversation. Not with malice, but with a shrug disguised as overwhelm.

What makes it painful is not that everyone cannot carry everything. It is that so many people claim to care about justice as an identity, until justice stops being flattering. Until it stops offering the dopamine hit of approval. Until it asks for consistency instead of performance.

I notice how quickly language disappears. How captions dry up. How people who once insisted silence was complicity suddenly develop a philosophy about private concern. I notice how grief becomes something you are supposed to experience quietly if it does not fit the dominant narrative of the moment. I notice how Iranians are expected to be endlessly patient, endlessly grateful for scraps of attention, endlessly calm while our families are terrified.

There is a specific loneliness that comes with watching people who pride themselves on awareness choose not to be aware. It feels like being told, without words, that your pain is too inconvenient to engage with properly. Too nuanced. Too much work.

I do not want anyone to be perfect. I do not want a gold star system for caring. I want honesty. I want people to admit when their activism is shaped by aesthetics and algorithms instead of actual solidarity. I want them to notice how quickly they disengage when a cause does not come with a script.

Because performative activism does not just fail the people it ignores. It teaches everyone else that justice is seasonal. That attention is transactional. That if you wait long enough, the world will move on and you can return to brunch.

Meanwhile, Iranians do not get to move on. We carry history in our bodies. We carry fear in our phone calls home. We carry the weight of explaining ourselves over and over again to people who believe they are informed because they have learned the correct vocabulary.

What I am asking for is not louder voices, but steadier ones. Not more posts, but more presence. Not certainty, but willingness. I am asking people to interrogate why they show up so passionately for some struggles and go quiet for others. To question whether their politics are rooted in values or visibility.

Solidarity should not require a branding guide. It should not dissolve the second it stops being legible. It should be able to sit with mess, with contradiction, with stories that do not resolve neatly by the end of a slideshow.

I am tired of feeling like my anger needs to be polite to be valid. I am tired of translating my grief into something palatable. I am tired of watching people confuse comfort with morality.

Iran needs acknowledgment. Attention that does not flinch. Care that does not disappear when the conversation gets hard. A willingness to stay even when there is no applause for doing so.
​
If justice is only practiced when it is easy, it is not justice. It is theater. And I think I am finally brave enough to admit that I am exhausted from sitting in the audience.

My first single of 2026 "Take It All Back" is out now everywhere!! :)

Here are all of the links altogether of the interviews I have done! :) The "Khejalat" piece is the only one I wrote specifically for the magazine.

<3

xoxo
​Janet