About

Is there anything more daunting and yet at the same time liberating as writing about oneself? Aren’t lives of many decades spent away in escaping that very moment in front of the mirror? And how many enviable destinations were tethered to this same confrontation by a rocky path of ups and downs? The thought of opening your soul's closet of curiosities and stomaching what's inside makes you grow weak about the knees. But if you soldier on and make it to the other end, looking back you will grow wings. Wings that would let you make up for the ground you had lost to confusion as you groped through the dark closet.

Below, you will find a rendition of my journey of the past ten years that could only have been viewed in its present form from the far end of the closet, in retrospect. 

Commentary for further information of those so inclined:

I was a child with unmissable creative and artistic gifts. I drew all the time and always from imagination. One day I'd be crafting characters to the tunes I played with my mouth, the next I was busy designing cars, imitating the growling of the engine every once in a while, to remind myself of the nature of the car I had in mind. Designing watches would consume me the following day and the day after I was a smith, churning out weapons by their dozens. (This description retained its accuracy without the slightest fault up until the age of 21.)

I set foot in quite a few schools in my time, and if I received praise from the writing teachers in each, goading me on to keep it up, those compliments I received with little effort. Effort here means consciously surveying books and writing-guides, to study -so to speak- to improve my writing. As with the watches and the cars and the characters I pulled out of the forge of my imagination, writing too was done out of nothing but joy. The blazing sun in your guts that Bukowski spoke of, the one that just roars into an inferno at some point, consuming you and compelling you to express your thoughts in an explosion, this life saving fire I had in me like most kids invariably have. 

But fires need to be fanned and so I did against the blizzard of hostility I received from schools that forced young humans into either of two of molds, their cronies dragging them on, ears deaf to the remonstrations of the child as he nailed his feet to the ground, eyes blind to his gaping mouth screaming in protest as they pulled his hand, and their hearts closed to the tears flowing from eyes that were soon to be stripped of their spark. Thus, as if out of a production line there came engineers who saw every cog but not the harmony, and such were born in their thousands, doctors who would save many from death but would they ever be able to return the spark to eyes once illuminated by them? 

After school, I went on to study architectural engineering only to find it to be the engineering of architecture. They had drained it of its soul preserving its stuffed carcass only for show. Gullible as the young are, we too thought that here our creativity would be welcomed and our skills honed. For a while it felt that way but then the shiny white drape slipped down and revealed an oily machine reminiscent of that which I thought I had escaped. In my country, architectural engineering has acquired a reputation for producing alumni that leave this field for good, as if all it does is making them ask themselves the question of who they are, sending them looking for the answer. Some went on to study film, others became photographers, a few became travelers, one is singing in an opera in Vienna, another makes sketches of his fellow commuters on his way back from the Tisch on the subway in New York and so the list goes on. I left before I graduated. Two years was enough for me to realize that my ambitions lay elsewhere and so, against common convention, in contrast to protests from the same cold voices that had been blowing at my flame I decided to leave what was the country's best school of architecture and go to film-school. 

This turned out to be nothing like I had imagined. I am a sociable person and there were few people in our class back when I studied architecture with whom I did not have rapport. With a handful I had a friendship and a mutual understanding that has endured to this day, resisting the erosion of thousands of miles and many years. For a fish like this to be plunged into an uncharted sea crawling with creatures which it had been raised to avoid, could have been and almost was fatal. 

Everything about my new university inadvertently encouraged isolation. Even to my very last day there, I didn’t know exactly who my classmates were. Four years of going to that place didn’t turn a single stranger into a friend. The few whose acquaintance I made, I bonded with over a shared appreciation for "The Witcher: wild hunt". Now that years have gone by, I do realize that if my school years had not burdened me with strong premonitions about people who didn’t have the exact beliefs as I did, I could have fared better at communicating with folks back at film-school. This fault appears to be entirely unrelated to one’s particular beliefs, for they seemed to have the same premonitions about me. No words were uttered to this effect, but words are not needed when actions speak. How sad that we were all wrong. How many beautiful conversations, elating moments of epiphany, uplifting banters and inspiring ideas were lost to the scythe of distorted judgements? 

It was so that my flame flickered, its halo reduced, its warmth now economical. Doubt crept in, conservatism usurped the seat that belonged to courage, courage in its fury bloated into rashness, rashness crashed in where it was place for patience and it was such that the scales lost their balance and the flame went into its last dance to stay alive.  But here lies one of the lessons I treasure the most.  One "that makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with an equal eye”. This lesson lies at the heart of all the stories I wish to tell through video-games and will be at the heart of those to come. It lies there unconsciously, effortlessly, naturally, for it isn’t something I have learned through study but rather something I have felt through life. 

When I finished my Bachelors, I couldn’t see the full half of the glass like I do now. Back then, 4 years of being caught in a corner and bullied by a corrosive form of doubt had frozen me to the point that I could no longer shield my flame from the cold wind. Like a warrior surrounded by a horde of enemies, who after slaying a dozen finally gets caught in the shin by a poisonous arrow and falls to his knees, I buckled and then the walls of enemies closed in on me. In my mid-twenties at the time, I thought maybe they were right. Maybe I should pursue a more conventional career. But then, should I? Maybe I should, I am not sure. Thus, a doubt that until that point was pushing in from the outside was now complemented by a doubt flowing from within. Like a city overwhelmed by a sieging force breaching the walls with the help of a few traitors, I was overwhelmed with doubt. 

Having graduated in July, with the reaper’s shadow of the mandatory military service hanging over me (in Iran, all able-bodied men over the age of 18 are forced to do two years of military service unless they are studying at a university), I had little time to decide my future. My experience of working in a tech startup and my original idea for a gamified app that would revolutionize tourism (don’t all aspirants describe their ambitions with such overflowing optimism?) could not have sealed my decision alone. To seal it they needed the help of my shortage of time and more importantly my contemplation of the idea that “maybe they’re right, maybe one should opt for a more conventional career”. It was so that I went on to study international tourism management for my masters to be followed by the quest to find investors and start developing my app “Crossroads” (it was first conceived as SilkRoads before I realized that in addition to the ancient interlacing intercontinental routes initially paved by Darius the great, it carried another, more recent and infamous connotation; namely that of a dark-web platform for dealing drugs). 

To be brutally honest with myself, I think I was depressed back then before I went on to study my MSc. I think it’s a phase many of us go through in life and hopefully emerge from alive if changed, hopefully for the better. Yet for some, depression ends with a splash as they descend quickly from a bridge, for others with a flash as they give their index finger a seemingly innocent instruction it had received countless many times before. For a chosen few it ends peering into an oven. For me? I went on and got an MSc. 

Now I wasn’t careless with my life, that’s not what I’m saying. In fact, I did my research and singled out University of Surrey for its reputation for having the best school of tourism and hospitality in the UK and one of the best in the world, for its focus on research, its multidisciplinary approach and also for the fact that it was my father’s alma mater where I had formed many of my fond childhood memories. It wasn’t like I said, “Well I don’t care, let’s just go and get a degree and avoid the military service”. No. In fact, I thought I was making the best decision. “I am still using my creativity and my art” I convinced myself, “after all, I’m going to make the tourism app, after all it was going to be gamified. I felt “finally I have found the path that sparks my creativity, nourishes my curiosity and incorporates my artistic abilities while being conventional and safe at the same time, after all it’s a management degree. I have always been good at rallying people around a cause. What a find!”. And there lies the profound beauty of it all that with hindsight, I look back at and smile. Being an aircraft afficionado, an aviation analogy is inescapable. I was basically like a pilot with faulty instruments who banks and climbs and pulls at the throttle as perfectly as ever, oblivious to the fact that he’s heading in the wrong direction. He trusts his data but the data is wrong. There is an icicle lodged in a Pitot tube somewhere causing a miscalculation of the airspeed, or a rudder has shifted slightly out of alignment producing the wrong yaw. Just like him I had faulty instruments and unlike with a plane where faults are carefully diagnosed preflight, with man, the only way to calibrate your instruments is to fly. It is through experience that one zeroes his instruments so he could fly true thereafter. 

It was in this way and many others that the one year I spent doing my MSc in Guildford turned out to be and still is the best year of my life. To really understand how big a complement this is, I will only say that this compliment has held through even though it was in that very same year, about three weeks after I had arrived that I lost my leg. This time, not as a metaphor. I sustained the worst injury a football player possibly could this side of a ruptured Achilles which happens as rarely as its epic name suggests. I ruptured my ACL and tore my meniscus. If you think of a leg as an airplane, it’s like losing hydraulics. The details can become exhaustive. They can consume this whole thing if I allow myself to be lured by them. So, I will keep my distance and view those same details from a vantage point that reveals their collective form, the big picture. 

Through having no option but to be strong, I learned how strong I could be. Through living what I had feared, I found that I had greatly overestimated fear, through reading what I didn’t have the solitude to read, I found that I was not alone in thinking the way I did, through conversations around a table that sat people from worlds far apart, I saw how closer we were together than we thought. It was a year of transformation both mentally and physically. It was between the Septembers of 2018 and 2019 that some of the most important changes that had long been brewing inside of me, finally galvanized. Thus began a process of learning to harness the power of doubt and transform it from a force of destruction to a momentum for production.

My return to Iran after finishing my studies was initially treated as a short stop before going back to pursue a PhD in the field of organizational behavior. The process of discovering myself anew had just begun and so my idea of a future career had not yet undergone a major change by this pending discovery. I was still looking for common ground, for a compromise between what I wanted and what was demanded by circumstance. Here I received perhaps the single most significant stroke of luck to that date by getting rejected by every single one of the 11 PhD programs I applied to. Almost immediately, this title was claimed by an even more important if somber stroke of luck in the form of a global pandemic. Neither were desirable outcomes on the surface but time proved them to have been blessings in disguise. I was lucky I got rejected because even if I wanted to be in charge of some company’s HR policy in the future, nobody else would have wanted that position occupied by a philosopher-type character with an artistic flourish and a way with words who in the event of a collision between the interests of the stakeholder and the rights of the employees would most certainly side with the latter. I am not M.S. Talebpour PhD. You can call me Saeed. And I’d like to keep it that way. 

The pandemic’s effect on me was of a more complex nature. First off, it washed away all hint of regret for my not having found a job in the tourism sector back in the UK. I can imagine sanitizers that last longer in liquid form after contact with air than I -an Iranian and probably an intern- would have possibly lasted in a tourism industry coming in contact with a global pandemic. Secondly, it made a very difficult decision an inevitable one. I had convinced myself long ago that I would never have to do the military service. My plan was to apply for a PhD outside of Iran and study all the way to post-doc if I had to until I had settled down abroad. The way it works is that you are exempt from the service as long as you are studying. The catch though is that you cannot study more than once in any level. For instance, you can’t complete an MSc and then get an exemption for studying a second one. Also, no more than a year can elapse between the completion of one degree and the start of the next. Realizing that the pandemic’s end was nowhere in sight, I thought I might as well swallow the frog and save time by drafting myself into the mandatory service before the one-year period was over. A pivotal factor in making this decision with confidence and positivity instead of dread and bitterness was a word of wisdom imparted upon me by my sister. It was her who convinced me that a single year, even two isn’t much over the span of a lifetime so it is more than wise to spend that much time thinking before making a move that if made in haste, might result in a checkmate at a time when a rematch would no longer be possible. Now for a while at least, I didn’t have to worry about what to do next, for the next thing to do was always the same waking up at 5:30 in the morning and heading for the barracks. So here I was with more than a year’s time to sit down in peace, look back and think. Here was that period of respite after a long voyage through choppy seas and rampant storms that would allow me to digest the fruits of my journey, to redraw the map after chartering new seas and at last, calibrate my compass to the true north. 

If you pick up Catch 22, persevere up to chapter 4 before jotting down the words “So far a very underwhelming book” and put it down for good and then, go through an experience that would have you pick that book up again and amend your previous statement with the words “A very premature comment”, it is safe to say that that intervening experience of yours, was a profound one. Such was my experience as a conscript, expressed concisely. This period served not only as an opportunity for my process of self-discovery to mature and yield a generous harvest, but it was also a voyage of its own leaving me with an endowment of stories, sensations, characters, moments, scenes, absurdities, complexities and questions that I can draw from to nourish my stories as long as I draw breath to write them. 

We have come a distance. Here at last I approach the part of the map where I presently stand. Like a fighter retrieving his old gloves from the forgotten depths of the cellar, I have retrieved my joy and wiped off the dust. It is with the enduring warmth of this joy that I can once again light the furnace of my imagination in which I will forge my games, the candle under whose glow I shall compose symphonies of words and the torch that will show me the way, so that I may not walk in circles. 

Nietzsche said “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how” and I can’t help but hear the same rhythm ringing in my own words as I tell myself: if you know what to say and why, you will surely figure out how to say it. The edifice of words erected above, serves to describe as concisely as I can, the journey that made me figure out what to say and why to say it. It gave me back my voice and the courage to use it. While these questions of what and why will endure and flow on in my life forever, it is now time for me to focus on the last question and learn the how. I am aware of the challenges that lay ahead and cannot wait to look them in the eye. For I know that I embark on this voyage with the experience of another on my back. Where I feared rocky seas, I now embrace them and where the turbulence made me stumble, I shall now dance and if by chance I fall on deck, I will rise again for it wouldn’t be my first time and if I am thrown overboard, the ocean will no longer drown the infinite of my soul, for we have both been there, done that.