“You can’t say that. I’m Iranian.”

An Iranian-American woman on survivor’s guilt and grief

BY ROYA SHARIAT

THE AUTHOR AND HER MOTHER AT AN IRANIAN FESTIVAL IN 1999 (COURTESY OF ROYA SHARIAT) 

This weekend, I watched the U.S. move from threats to strikes against my homeland, Iran. And I was haunted by an old memory that now feels like a warning.

In 2017, I ended up at a New Year’s party full of American diplomats in Argentina, invited by a friend of the host who warned me that I might meet some strange characters. As midnight approached, the host raised a toast and asked everyone to share their resolutions for the year ahead. The answers were predictable—more travel, good health, new adventures—until one guest wearing a bloodthirsty grin exclaimed: “Regime change in Iran!”

For a moment, I dissociated. Then I did what years of existing as an Iranian in America have trained me to do: I clapped back. “You can’t say that. I’m Iranian.” The room fell silent. Heat rushed to my face, but the only way out was through. With a shaky voice, I told him that American intervention in Iran has never led to anything good, that people’s lives aren’t pawns for someone else’s resolutions. I spent the rest of the night crying while a friend tried to console me, until I learned that the man I’d yelled at was one of America’s highest‑ranking military generals.

This was just one of many uncomfortable moments I’ve encountered as an Iranian-American, an identity that raises eyebrows and prompts questions I’m often unqualified to answer. For the past two months, I’ve witnessed the latest regime-led violence unfold from the comfort and safety of my London home, while faced with an entirely new set of questions: What’s the best way to show up for a community you can’t be physically present in? How do you process survivor’s guilt and grief simultaneously? How do you reconcile so many disparate viewpoints, both within Iran and abroad?

“Regime change” has re-entered the bloodstream of political discourse, moving from abstraction to reality in a matter of months, and especially this weekend in the wake of the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s draconian supreme leader. The phrase itself is staggering: How can toppling a foreign government be made to sound as quick and seamless as changing an outfit? In two words, the nuances of diplomacy, the violence of war, and the brutal mechanics of how regimes actually fall are erased. The phrase becomes so abstracted from its meaning that it’s palatable enough to pass as a New Year’s resolution. Forget a revenge body; how about regime change?

THE AUTHOR AND HER MOTHER, 2023 (COURTESY OF ROYA SHARIAT) 

But “regime change” doesn’t capture what’s actually needed in Iran. Removing a leader is not the same as dismantling a system, or building what comes next. Destruction is not a shortcut to freedom, and freedom doesn’t get to be declared by people insulated from the consequences.

Iranians deserve self‑governance. They deserve a free Iran, liberated from repression and fear, from a government that’s repeatedly used lethal force against its own citizens. Iranians inside the country have risked their lives to say as much: through the historic, women-led “Women, Life, Freedom” movement sparked by Mahsa Jina Amini’s 2023 death, through recent anti-government protests wherein women were front and center, through the simple act of refusing to be silent. But liberation can’t come from bombs, or from the sudden collapse of power without a path forward. Power vacuums are not freedom. They create the same kind of conditions that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power after the 1979 revolution.

This moment requires holding multiple realities at once: relief in the wake of Khamenei’s death, grief for civilians killed in the crossfire—including schoolchildren—and fear and skepticism about what comes next.

The governments invoking Iran’s freedom, like the U.S. and the U.K., have not historically delivered it in the region, or in Iran itself. The U.S. backed an undemocratic coup in Iran in the 1950s. That history makes one thing clear: Change imposed from the outside is never neutral. What happens next will not be determined by a single death, but by who holds power, and how.

Every New Year, someone raises a glass and makes a resolution about other people’s lives. What people in Iran are demanding is dignity and agency: the right to shape their own futures on their own terms, with solidarity—not agendas imposed from the outside. For Americans watching, the responsibility is not to decide Iran’s future, but to listen to those already risking everything to shape it themselves—people who are asking, simply, for life over destruction.

If you want to listen to Iranian voices, start with Nilo Tabrizy, Yara Elmjouie, Sahar Delijani, Gissou Nia, and Vali Nasr.

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