Between Worlds: Rebuilding Myself Through Language, Art, and Psychedelics

A story of exile and the alchemy of becoming whole

I didn’t begin writing this in the wreckage. By the time I arrived here, I’d already crossed something—multiple medicine journeys, deep into analysis, convinced language might still be a way out. This piece comes from the middle of that process, not the beginning: after the illusions had cracked, before I knew which ones would survive. I’m publishing it now because it still tells the truth, even if the truth keeps changing.

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I was born in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, when the air itself felt charged with fear and change. My family fled to the United States and landed in the Pacific Northwest — gray skies, moss, endless rain. That landscape became my first teacher in how to live between worlds.

My first real writing wasn’t about art. It was about survival.

As a kid, I translated Farsi into English for my parents — bank letters, school forms, whatever needed decoding. Somewhere in that process, I realized language could do more than explain things; it could transform them. It could make something foreign feel like home.

That realization shaped everything that followed.

I studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Washington, then earned my MFA at the University of San Francisco. But the real work started after that — writing about the fractures in my family, the tension between Iranian heritage and American self-invention, and the strange beauty of rebuilding an identity that never fully belonged anywhere.

My memoir, Your Dad Is a Dog, grew out of that search.

It’s darkly funny and painfully honest — part exile story, part personal exorcism. The manuscript was a finalist for the 2024 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest. Chapters have appeared in The Meadow and Blue Mesa Review. The Iowa Review selected the opening chapter, too, though it couldn’t appear there because it had already been published — a small irony for a book about displacement and repetition.

In recent years, my attention has turned inward, revisiting my lifelong passion for Jungian psychology and dreamwork and, of late, incorporating the study of psychedelic integration. These are the places where I meet the unconscious as a collaborator, where art stops being a product and becomes a practice.

I’ve always loved artists whose lives are their art — David Bowie, Kate Bush, John Cassavetes, Cindy Sherman, Björk, Aldous Huxley, David Lynch, Andy Warhol. They didn’t just make things; they became them. That’s what I’m trying to do: live as the art, let the transformation itself be the work.

If I had to sum myself up, I’d say I’m an Iranian-American writer, memoir aficionado, dream chronicler, shadow integrator, and candidate for intelligent life on Earth. My work — and my life — are experiments in consciousness.

I’m trying to turn private metamorphosis into something that might move someone else, or at least remind them that we’re all translating ourselves into being, one page at a time.

If Between Worlds is the map of how I became, then the forthcoming excerpts from Your Dad Is a Dog are the terrain itself — the raw landscape I crossed, the long echoes behind the voice you’ve just met, and the moments that shaped the life and story now fully realized.