A Bag of Broken Tiles: Report from Tehran

When the war began, I was asleep. I had decided not to leave the house that morning—despite having a meeting scheduled with someone I couldn’t afford to disappoint. I told myself it was anxiety. I went back to sleep. When I woke up, my phone was flooded with messages—from inside and outside Iran. The war had already started. For a moment, my first thought was not fear but something strangely ordinary: What will he think of me if I don’t show up? 

Only later did I learn that explosions had occurred near a group of my friends. They had dropped to the floor during the blasts and then gathered outside, shaken but unharmed. 

In the hours that followed, the internet began to disappear. One VPN after another failed, as if exits were being quietly sealed. I had prepared for disconnection but not for the feeling that came with it: as if I were trapped in a room filling slowly with water, rising toward my face. In the first days, we were not yet used to the sound of explosions. With each blast, we would jump out of our places. We taped the windows, tied the cabinet doors shut, and with every explosion we took shelter behind what felt like the relatively safe walls of the house. 

I had read somewhere that we should keep our mouths slightly open during a blast so our eardrums wouldn’t rupture. My sister had read that we should hold a pillow behind our necks to protect our spines from possible shrapnel. I had imagined it many times—silently thinking about the fragment that, after the explosions, might come to end everything for us. 

Some of the blasts were so strong that the walls trembled, as if the house itself might come undone. We gathered in the center of the home—my parents, my sister, our cat—trying to stay away from the windows in case the glass shattered. And yet, our family, too, was coming apart. Disagreements kept surfacing: One insisted we should keep our phones and laptops charged; another was angry that we hadn’t bought enough bottled water, worried our food supplies might run out. One said we had to stay in Tehran; another wanted to force everyone to leave. One believed we should run to the basement during each explosion, rushing through the house at every blast. Another lay frozen in bed, as if nailed to it, doing nothing but sleeping all day.

We were suspended between being thrown and holding on, between leaving and staying still—this suspension became the most vivid experience of the war for us. 

By then, we had become like fragments after an explosion—each of us thrown into a different corner—yet still forced to endure one another under the same roof. 

In the early hours, I was glad to be off work. Deep down, I was relieved that I didn’t have to invest my scarce psychic energy in my patients. Yet the feeling didn’t last long, and my guilt over leaving them surged. 

A little later, I moved a plastic chair into the bathroom. It was the only space that felt even slightly safe—at least there was no window above me that could shatter. From there, I began seeing my patients. A different kind of analytic setting emerged—not built on neutrality or consistency but on proximity to survival. 

I kept asking myself: Was this decision right or wrong? If I told them I was available, would I be violating the frame and the setting? If I listened to the suggestion of one who wanted to help me get online, would the therapy be harmed? I had never been a war therapist. Nowhere in the textbooks or handbooks did it say how to preserve life when you yourself are dying. 

Throughout the war, my red blanket came to stand in for my own analyst’s presence. Each time I lay down and pulled it over myself, I tried to recreate the conditions of a space that could still hold me— somewhere outside the reach of explosions, failing connections, and the slow suffocation of uncertainty. The blanket became a fragile substitute for something I could no longer fully access. But something began to shift. 

Due to the internet outage, I had to call my analyst by phone from the other side of the world. Not being able to see him was driving me insane. In every session, I asked him to describe his room to me—what his home looked like, where he was sitting, and whether the rasping sound I heard over the phone was because he had pneumonia. Then, with the same level of detail, I would tell him where I was sitting and how I had tried to position myself exactly as I always did during our sessions. In one session, I told my analyst that I felt he was no longer interpreting me as he used to. That the work had become more supportive, more careful. I told him this made me feel weak—almost pitiful—as if I were no longer capable of being thought about in the same way. I asked him, quite directly, to be with me as before. 

At the same time, I noticed something else: I, too, was refusing the war. 

There were days when I read psychoanalysis for eight hours straight. Days when, despite the collapse of the internet, I wrote multiple papers using whatever materials I had at hand. I worked—almost obsessively—seeing patients, even offering sessions for free, as if maintaining the analytic function in others could shield me from recognizing what was happening around me. 

It was not resilience. It was a form of disavowal.

If I was refusing the war, my patients were doing something no less striking. In the first week, nearly all of them spoke not of explosions, fear, or death but of boundaries in their relationships. Of partners who failed to understand them. Of things left unsaid, now expected to be intuitively known. The war remained almost entirely absent from the room. It appeared only in fragments—quick references, passing remarks—never staying long enough to be examined. Instead, something else took its place: a heightened sensitivity to recognition, to being understood or misunderstood. As if the external rupture had relocated itself into the most intimate spaces. 

It was as if my patients wanted to make sure I could fully understand everything they were saying, just as I had wanted from my own therapist. Time and again, in sessions, they would ask me, “Do you remember when we talked about that topic?” And often, our sessions would begin with this very question: What had we discussed last time? It was as if they wanted to be certain I was there—with double the effort to comprehend and to construct a coherent memory of their presence. 

What I longed for, in the simplest sense, was something nearly impossible to express in the language of conflict: a life in which neither civil nor foreign war had to be understood. A life in which war remained distant, almost unthinkable—something that happened elsewhere, to others. 

Instead, I found myself suspended between irreconcilable positions, unable to fully belong to any of them. This suspension was not only political. It was psychic. At times, it felt as if the very ground of identification had given way. Each position seemed to require a simplification I could not sustain. I only knew that there were many things I didn’t understand. In a just world, not knowing shouldn’t be a bad thing—my lack of knowledge in political science, war, economics, and so on—yet now, not knowing made me feel uneasy, as if I couldn’t offer deep analyses or belong to any group. I was an ordinary person, and now being ordinary felt like something wrong. 

And yet, as an analyst, I was expected to hold the full spectrum of experience and belief. People torn by fear, loyalty, hope, or anger—those caught between survival and conviction, those celebrating change or mourning loss, those safely distant and those trapped in its immediacy. I was tasked with receiving each perspective fully, without merging them, without reducing their complexity, without letting the weight of their contradictions break me. 

There were moments when this felt less like analytic work and more like standing in the middle of incompatible realities, none of which could be resolved. 

One day, trying to find a way to speak from within this tension, I told a patient, “We often imagine ourselves as pieces of a puzzle—searching for the missing parts that would finally complete us. But what if we are not a puzzle at all? What if we are a bag of broken tiles—fragments that do not quite fit together, yet must still be arranged into something livable?” Later, I realized I was not only speaking about her. Iran is not a puzzle waiting to be completed. It is a bag of broken turquoise tiles. And to live here, in this moment, is to resist the urge to force these fragments into coherence too quickly—to remain with their disjunction, their incompatibility, their refusal to settle. 

In the mornings, I water my succulents. It is spring, and from within their hardened, almost wooden skins, small green shoots have begun to emerge. I watch them closely, as if their survival depends on my attention. The air is sometimes thick, difficult to breathe. Some days, I wake with the quiet certainty that I may not see the next one. And still, I water them. Not because I am certain that life will continue. Not because hope feels secure or even fully available. But because something in me persists in acting as if it might.