Persian: fight and revenge - never, ever, give up your passions

In the last episode, I told you about Hungarian and online communities. It allowed me to get to know people on the Internet for the first time.

However, just like it happened with my other “language loves”, something else arrived at some point and made my life take another unexpected turn.

November 2011

I started reading about geopolitics and that was a quite hot moment for a particular area of the world: Iran. 

The more I read about it, the more I get curious because I realize how ignorant I was about it.

It soon became something irresistible. 

As usual, I headed to Omniglot.com to get some information about the language. Of course, I was so ignorant that I probably thought it was Arabic or something similar like that, and then… I heard an audio file of probably one of the most beautiful languages I had ever heard.

I immediately fell in love with it and at the first opportunity I had, I went to Milan to buy some books. I got one that proved to be one of the best language books I’ve ever seen. It dates back to 1974 and I don’t know your opinion, but I feel that the older a book is, the higher its quality.

Along with that, I also bought a guidebook about the country and I carried it everywhere with me for about a year.

The Iranian colony of Lecco

Somehow, quite by chance, I understood that several Iranians lived in my hometown.

Thanks to a series of coincidences, I managed to contact them and finally, I ended up in an Iranian party in February 2012. That was another pillar of my life: I love it so much that you can’t imagine.

I’ve always been quite selective regarding my circle of friends: I hate getting bored and I’d rather stay alone. Iranians, at that moment, were the most interesting people I had ever met. 

They allowed me to have a social life I enjoyed.

Another leitmotiv of those years was that I was so crazy about Persian that I used to talk to anybody in the street on the bus, on the train… I would wait for the right moment and then say: “Bebakhshid shoma Farsi harf mizanid?” - excuse me, do you speak Persian? Just to start chatting.

I don’t know if other nationalities would have been so nice and welcoming towards my efforts, but they were always so kind that you would just feel like wanting to learn more and more.

All of this has to be a bit contextualized because after spending 5 years in Brussels I think I was so enthusiastic also because I hated a lot of the atmosphere of my town. I couldn’t stand it anymore. It was a moment of huge frustration for me and Persian gave me a lot of satisfaction. 

After meeting the people of Brussels, especially the Belgians, I feel that I would be still amazed by Iranians, but maybe not in such an extreme way as I did at that time because they are really lovely too.

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Regarding my Internet life, I replicated with them what I had done with Hungarians, but the scale was way different.

At first somehow I got into some Facebook groups for Iranians wanting to study in Italy (I had no clue about this either). I was just contributing with some explanations on posts here and there and at the same time this was a way for me to practice Persian. 

After a while, some friends encouraged me to open my group which soon reached 4 thousand members.

I will be forever grateful for their idea. It was a super empowering experience and posting something there was the best moment of my days. Especially even more after realizing that I hated what I had chosen as a university course: Law.

My mood at that time...

I will make a quick digression on this: I don’t have so many great memories about university. However, in order not to sink too much into the regrets and the resentment, I just think that everything happened at the right time. 

I hated most of my high school years too because I had the feeling that I was wasting my time. 

I was expecting the university to be a sort of liberation, but indeed it turned out to be just another hassle, a necessary evil, a compulsory waste of time I would have gladly avoided.

I knew that working with languages was what I liked, but I didn’t enjoy translating that much. I didn’t like the idea of being an interpreter either because I wanted to use languages for my own needs but if I checked courses to become a teacher of Italian for foreigners I hated the idea of spending more time on literary texts.

It was like opting for a prolongation of high school whereas I already knew that the purely linguistic side of language learning is what I loved: the language families, the etymology, the grammar, and so on… so I ended up listening to my other passion of that time (that faded away): international politics and relations.

I wanted to study political sciences, but what I really wanted the most was to get a job and become financially independent asap. This desire of mine clashed heavily with the stories I would hear about political science graduates: no jobs, unpaid internships, and so on. I will go on more about it in another episode.

Fight... why?

Going back to Iran and how it impacted my life, I also have to say that I had to fight so much for this passion that you can barely imagine, but as the saying goes “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, isn’t it?

I understand the idea of being worried about a “particular” country at a special moment in its history, but I had hardly ever found something that made me feel so alive and gave me so much satisfaction in such a short time.

When people would tell me I was wasting my time or, worse, would ask me when I was going to shut down my Facebook group it was really like killing me. Simply horrible.

I would compare the pain I could feel to the one of a love story like being told that you cannot be with the person you love. Or imagine that you’re starving to death, you’ve finally found something to eat, you’ve just started enjoying the smallest bits… and someone comes to take it away from you. It was physical because I hated my life at that time.

Everything was boring.

TW: Rant

One of the things I’m most sensible about, and that’s a feature of my character that dates back exactly to that moment of my life, is feeling that I’m wasting my time. Stay tuned because this is something that will come back again more times in the next episodes.

I hated my life because I didn’t like almost any of my high school classmates. I had just ended a high school where I spent 3 years out of 5 simply offended by stupid professors who were proud of living in another era. I studied a lot of useless stuff and saw marks based on personal preferences rather than the actual work quality.

I’m sure that several of my teachers were psychopaths. I deeply believe it and sometimes I still feel resentment for the time I’ve been stolen, for the useless nights I spent desperately crying over the anxiety I had, just counting the days until the start of university.

These people and their idiot way of assessing the students’ work could have prevented me from entering certain universities. I was not brilliant because I had understood that in the long term it was better to dedicate my time to something more relevant that the mental breakdowns of some poet.

Now after years, I realize what was my problem: that I was too immature and insecure to just ignore all of this pressure. I will be much more vigilant if the same happens to my children one day. Maybe they will be able to be more optimistic than me, but I was not, and I could have maybe enjoyed myself a bit more by just saying “fuck everything, fuck everybody, this is my life”. Also, I overvalued the impact and utility of university.

I think that by the time my children will be grown up this will have changed dramatically. I realized all of this only after coming to Brussels and understanding the toxicity of the Italian mindset at that time - hope it’s changing. End of the rant.

...and revenge: why?

Persian shed some much-needed light on my days.

It was thanks to Persian that I had my first two little job experiences in two trade fairs working for Iranian companies.

Can you imagine my happiness at seeing that those two lines on my cv were only thanks to something I did all alone and not thanks to mummy or daddy finding you a little job through their network?! That they were not thanks to the career service of your university? It was an incredible feeling and honestly, I think that it was one of the things that allowed me to be selected as an intern at the Italian Embassy in Moscow some years later.

Since learning Persian was such a waste of time (according to the environment around me), I guess I should thank I don’t know what for being a teacher working a lot with Iranians, who clearly tell you that they want to work with you also because you can speak their language right?

There does be indeed some sort of divine justice.

Trust your feelings

If a direction is right and you’ve been able to test it and understand that it’s not a hallucination but it can work, although you are the only one who is realizing it, believe in yourself and go on: at some point, you’ll be able to collect the fruits of your efforts.

Don’t give up at any cost.