You’ve reached Cosmic Kudos, a weekly newsletter about astrology, spiritual expansion, magic, and the making of our own personal mythologies. Plus, specially curated recommendations, various writings, and thoughtful cultural criticisms delivered straight to your inbox 💌
If this was forwarded along to you, pls subscribe below. If you’re already a subscriber, welcome back! I’d be over the moon if you shared this with a friend or someone you think would like it.
This newsletter is free, but you can support my work by buying me a coffee if you feel so inclined.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Hi friends,
I’ve been in an ongoing crisis of midterms anxiety for the past few weeks, like anyone in America who gives one iota of a fuck about the state of democracy right now. (I finished writing this on Wednesday evening, but wanted to update it before I send it out as, like many are now saying, including President Biden, Tuesday was actually “a good day for democracy.”)
This newsletter is late, mostly because of a. allll of the above and b. I decided I want to send it out on Mondays going forward. But then this essay wasn’t ready on Monday, and I just couldn’t rush it.
A (not so) little disclaimer:
Please note that this piece is written from my own personal experience. I can’t write for the entirety of Iranian culture (modern and otherwise), or even represent the incredible breadth of the first-gen Iranian-American experience; certain rituals, practices, and experiences I mention may be slightly different depending on where in Iran they originate from and the people that practice them. (Someone who hails from the North of Iran, like my maternal grandmother, spoke an entirely different dialect of Farsi than a Kurdish woman would, for instance.)
As in most creative nonfiction, the perspective is subjective. Of course people will always remember things differently. This is how I remember things.
Snaps to my sister Kiana, who read a first draft of this, then kept it really real (as a Leo sibling does), and was basically like, listen, I know you think you have to put it all in this one part right here but make it easier on yourself. This is a lot of content, lol.
But before we get into it… The energy emanating from Monday’s Taurus blood moon lunar eclipse has been intense—I mean, am I right? It feels like I’ve been relinquishing SO much toxicity that built up in October, and throughout the past few months, really.
Writing the essay I’m sharing with you today, dear reader, has been a kind of release on its own.
I’ve been feeling so much in my body as well: the desperate need for more rest. Waking up in the middle of the night, then finding myself unable to get back to sleep afterward. Hot girl tummy troubles (you know how it goes!). If you’ve been having a similar experience, I’ll just go ahead and share the reminder I think we all need to hear: It’s okay—no in fact it’s fucking necessary, à la the queen warrior poet Audre Lorde—to be gentle with ourselves right now.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.”
—Audre Lorde
part I: Other
I have always believed in some form of magic. As a child, play was easy, but books and stories were better.
And though I preferred the company of books, for the most part, I never had difficulty making friends. I had that special certainty so many children have—a kind of presence that radiates out, the knowledge that comes from the sureness of desire and belonging. I’ll point out the privilege in that last one, of course—in my formative years, I was never made to feel I didn’t belong.1
Part of the reason for the certainty was the strong female influences in my young life. I’ve written about the stories I dined on growing up, spoon-fed to me along with mug after steaming mug of warm milk and honey—my great-aunt’s specialty.
My parents always sought to instill in my sister, brother, and I a strong sense of culture; we grew up knowing who we were and where we came from. I knew what my name meant—alchemy, in the ancient sense of the term, or the philosopher’s stone2, both of which beget the metaphysical transfiguration of lesser metals into gold.
See also: from Persian poetry, rare or unique.
See also: daughter to the ancient Sufi mystic and poet Rumi, who died of tuberculosis when she was very young.
When you’re able to assert yourself, be who you are without fear or doubt at a young age, you find that you can make friends easily. This sureness of character helped guide me through my formative years. Read: I busied myself with scampering all the way up and down the monkey bars and bossing around the other little girls on the playground. I could also tell a mean ghost story around the campfire, back before any kind of anxiety, least of all the social kind, was ever on my radar.
I don’t recall exactly how the conversation with this little girl in my first-grade class began, though I have no doubt it was innocuous enough. I do remember her name, the long glossy black braid she wore that swung low across her back, her glasses, everything else down to the accusatory glint in her eyes.
We weren’t close, but we lived in the same neighborhood, her childhood home just a few houses down from my own. That day we passed by one another after school, and as Joyce3 was teetering on the threshold of her front door and I was about to sweep by to finish the walk to my own house, the dance unfolded.
At first, it was like any part of the regular old dance that passes between children: “I can’t after school, I have soccer practice.” “My mom says you can sleep over this weekend if you want!”
And, this time: “I can’t on Sunday morning, I have to go to church. Don’t you?”
Somehow, the spool unraveled itself after that. No, I did not have to go to church on Sunday. I did not, in fact, ever have to go to church on Sundays. What was that like?
It wasn’t long until Joyce arrived at her summary conclusion. “But aren’t you Christian?” she asked.
“No,” I admitted. Was I supposed to be?
Well then we Definitely couldn’t hang out, she told me then, an unremitting zeal entering her voice. The glint in her eyes sharpened as she relayed this final damning4 fact. Not only could we not be friends, but because my family was Muslim and not Christian, I was definitely going to H-E-double-hockey-sticks.
Something came over me then. I would say that I can’t explain it, because of my age, but I can.
I wanted to be good. Better than good—holy. I wanted to be pure, a perfect pale rose. And I was also curious. Mostly because of my previous lack of exposure—to Sunday mornings at church and the Bible, and because I thought if I could understand their stories, I could understand the community, the sphere of their influence.
Joyce and I started going to the same Christian summer camp. My mom dropped my sister and I off there in the mornings, and we children were carted off to theme parks by the bus load, or else spent the days coloring and doing your regular summer camp activities, engaging in group singalongs about the sweet unreserved goodness of Jesus, watching cutesy cartoons themed around biblical proverbs and tales.
But at the center of everything persisted an underlying understanding, one that dogged each activity: We want you to be this way, because we are this way, and because things are better this way. Isn’t life simpler? Isn’t this fun?
I told one of my counselors that I wanted a copy of the Bible to take home with me. To read as much of it as I could. She was overjoyed, and sent me off with the massive, leather-bound tome when my mom came to pick us up at the end of the day. My family will—lovingly, teasingly—never let me live down what happened next: I made it about a quarter of the way through, highlighting and annotating as I went, the way I did with all my other books at home. As if it was a study guide, and I would be tested the next day at camp.
Finding me hugging my specially annotated edition later, my mom admonished me: “You can’t write in this book, Kimi!” she said. “This book is special to them. It’s holy.”
Once she discovered that the ideologies they sought to impart at camp blurred the borders of conversion and brainwashing, she summarily removed my sister and I. But I was left with a newfound awareness: Some stories were bigger than others, I realized. There was no room for me to write my own into this one.
I would have to find another way.
It was a Tuesday morning that reigned soft and serene—just another weekday breaking open in September, insofar as it can be “just another Tuesday” when you’re in the fifth grade.
My sister and I were in the midst of getting ready for school. Leaving the room she and I shared at the time, this is what I remember: my parents were watching the news in the dark, but the images on the television tilted one after the other with sickening speed.
Plane. Tower. Hit.
Plane. Tower. Scores of people jumping in a spray of flames.
Plane. Tower. Hi—
Looking back, I remain utterly baffled that media outlets chose to replay these horrifying scenes over and over again. There were no trigger warnings in the early 2000s, no mentions of graphic violence and trauma depicted ahead. Instead they played the events of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, on a loop on channel after channel.
Eventually my sister and I were herded to school, mostly because no one knew what else to do. I headed to my elementary school class, where there was pandemonium as our teachers, having no idea what to say to their scared, confused, and angry students, struggled to wrest back control of the classrooms.
The truth is that every instance of prejudice and intolerance comes as a surprise, to this day. But back then, it was a wound that gaped ugly and garish, its open maw yet ravenous. The environment was one of hostility, alarm. What stemmed from my teacher attempting to calm the class down quickly devolved to kids ranting about the terrorists, spewing vitriol their parents had undoubtedly voiced earlier.
Send them all back to where they came from.
They don’t belong here anyway.
There were nasty looks and comments thrown in my direction, but more than that, there was a palpable shift in energy. One I couldn’t hope to understand. Were they angry at me? My family?5
Never mind the fact that there were no Iranians on the planes that day.
After that, I knew what it was to experience my own identity mutate—both for myself and in the gaze of others. I wasn’t able to wholly articulate it at that age (I was in fifth grade, after all), but it was an integral one.
Later, in high school, the questioning of my identity—and its trajectory—set about in earnest. At school, it began with the veracity of the standardized testing bubbles. My mother had always shared with my siblings and I that Iranians are Caucasian, but where did the Middle Eastern fit into the equation? What was I supposed to circle in, and would it ever satisfy?
At fifteen, I didn’t know. What I could say, technically, was that my family is Muslim, or at least that it was passed down to us. I’m not practicing, nor are my parents, although my mother has always thought we should all have something to believe in. Maybe it’s because, having left her homeland to move to New York with her family during her own high school years, she knew that people could be unkind if you were different. And she’d discerned, as every immigrant does, just how quickly your world could morph into something new, something entirely unfamiliar to you.
Why not, then, look to something more expansive, something holy, for answers? Why not keep a series of superstitions and practices as ammunition against any and all forces that would seek to render harm—whether it’s other people or cheshm, what Iranians refer to as the evil eye.
Even today, my mother does not allow anyone to leave her house for a trip without bringing out her massive old Koran. You kiss one side of it, she taps it to your forehead, and once you’ve stepped out of the front door you turn back so that the process is repeated, after which she murmurs her own soft whispered prayer in Farsi under her breath.
When I moved back to San Francisco in 2015, my parents tossed bowls of water into the street after the car, the liquid splattering on the asphalt. When my sister moved to LA, we all did the same. Every year on the Tuesday evening before Persian New Year (which takes place on the vernal equinox), we jump over fires, a festival called Chahar Shanbeh Soori, one that’s meant to burn out illness and usher in good health for the year ahead.
These are rituals passed down by my grandmother and by our overarching Persian culture, which is a sprawling behemoth of a thing, speckled with all kinds of spiritual traditions—many of which, like Chahar Shanbeh Soori, are based on ancient Zoroastrian practices. Zoroastrianism, a religion of ancient Persia predating Islam, is arguably one of the oldest religions in the world, originating as long as 4,000 years ago.
No one in my close family has ever questioned these age-old customs. In fact, I found myself clinging to them as a way to divest myself from the twisted path of modern Islamicism, and of institutionalized religion. That, I could not relate to, nor did I want any association with. (I also made an overt choice to step away from speaking Farsi as a teenager, which was my first language, in efforts to whitewash myself—something I’ve regretted ever since.)
Of course, everyone should have the right to worship as they see fit—or decide not to. The point is and has always been a matter of choice, and so, too, should it be regarding the mandatory hijab which has become irrevocably tied to the practices—the many unforgiving mandates—that comprise the reality of Islam for women. That choice is what so many brave Iranian women are fighting for today—even as Iranian lawmakers call for the protesters, whom they referred to as “rioters,” already dying while fighting for their rights to be met with “severe punishment.”
I can laugh at the above-mentioned childhood anecdote now for its sheer and obvious absurdity—the way she so vehemently insisted, “H-E-double-hockey-sticks!” will forever be emblazoned into my memory—but for a long time I took it personally.
The problem was not the fact that it wasn’t true. The problem was that she so fiercely believed it to be true. The problem is that religious fundamentalist groups of all kinds imbue and enforce this type of gatekeeping, of extreme and yet untenable zealotry; that they embroil children in it from young ages; and that their fervor has only multiplied and spread at calamitous rates in recent years.
And it has unfolded with a rapidity most of us could never have expected. It has contorted itself into a mania, forming a cesspool from which prejudice, hatred (of women, LGBTQIA+ folx, minority groups, other religions, and really anyone who differs from yt cis-het norms), evangelicalism, QAnon and conspiracy theory culture, and more are born and can then go on to thrive.
Just look at how antisemitism has risen in recent years, even in recent weeks after Kanye West’s disgusting outburst(s) and continued misbehavior and what seems like Elon Musk’s ploy to turn Twitter over to the alt-right in the guise of protecting “free speech.” Or the sheer amount of hate crimes directed at AAPI groups. Or the myriad cascading ways in which systemic racism and discrimination continue to negatively impact brown and Black people.
And just look—well, I don’t have to tell you to look—at the way in which the news cycle is dominated by headline after headline decrying the ongoing demise of democracy as we know it—and indeed, the end of the division between church and state.
I have always believed in some form of magic. As a child, books and stories were best—and as I grew into an adolescent.6 But where did my nascent desire fall, my insistence on drawing this magic from the world—through words, first, and then through all manner of things I was just waiting to learn? To let fly through my veins, like love or the pleasant sleepy pitching buzz of wine, like not wanting to fall asleep at night because I was so hungry not to miss something?
Where did the holiness of the body and its inner workings lie on the tightrope pulled taut between myself and others? Between people and that thing in the sky they looked up to, whether it really was a fearsome male God or not?
Where would my choices fall on this spectrum of belief? I wasn’t sure then, but the experiences I shared with you above had created a tipping point for me.
And as the years came on, as I stared them down, I promised myself I would find out.
To be continued . . .
Some stray housekeeping items before I go
I’ve deactivated my Instagram account for the time being. Who knows how long that will last—what I do know is that I’d been considering it for awhile, and finally caught myself doomscrolling for the nth time and realized in the moment that it was actively making me unhappy.
I’m loathe to do the same to my Twitter just yet, even though we are very much on the precipice of the shitshow that billionaire garbage human I mean, Elon Musk has just begun to unleash. So, we’ll have to see what happens.
I think most of us can feel we in are a moment of cultural reckoning across all social media platforms—and for the internet in general. I don’t find myself interested in chasing clout on any of the usual suspects any longer. I haven’t been in it for that kind of engagement for a long time, having experienced a mental shift over the past 6 months that made me realize: I am really only looking to prioritize building community around (my) writing.
I’m genuinely happy with the direction Substack has taken me in since this little baby ‘stack got its start over the summer. So, you know where to find me. Right here!
A little cross-promotion
Are you kinda sorta obsessed with email newsletters? (Same.) Looking to find and amplify the voices of independent writers you may not have otherwise come across? (Also same!)
The Sample is designed to help you do just that: Select a few topics you’re interested in, then receive “sample” articles sent to your inbox. If you want more from the author, subscribe to their newsletter with a single click. Try it out here.
After this essay is complete, I’d like to know—what do you want to see more of in Cosmic Kudos? More recommendations, poems, another essay series? Pls feel free to respond directly to this email, or drop a comment below with your suggestions 👇🏼 I’d love to hear from you!
See you next week,
xx
Kimia
Like any precocious little girl should be, I was told I was smart, special, and pretty, and I realize how lucky that makes me.
Also known as the “elixir of life”, or the legendary magical potion said to grant the drinker immortality.
Name has been changed, naturally.
sorry I had to
In an earlier version of this essay, I misremembered comments like these as being said to me on 9/11. Though I also heard them during that time period, these were specifically relayed to someone else who is close to me on that day.
and I still feel that way as an adult tbh, but part II of this essay delves into experiences I had as a teenager, so bear with me here :)