I once tried to jump out of a plane. High above the Atlantic Ocean, on a commercial airliner headed to Germany in 1999, I made my way to the back exit and attempted to open the door. A flight attendant swiftly intercepted me, grabbing my hand and asking what I was doing.
“I just need to get out,” I told her.
Continue reading: https://theamericanscholar.org/deleting-delusions
I should’ve found a new dentist years ago. The fact that Dr. Patel has stopped giving me his signature scratch-and-sniff stickers and started calling me “the Elder” might have been enough to force others out by now, but not me. We’ve been through too much together: dozens of cleanings, six fillings, two extractions after an unfortunate encounter with the bottom of a swimming pool, and one nitrous-fueled hallucination wherein the toucans on the ceiling flew down to greet me. And history aside, where else am I going to find a free Pac-Man machine in the waiting room?
Continue reading: https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-118-fall-2022/cavities-and-debris
Like countless educators across America, I have completed active shooter training. The public university where I teach requires it. Officially, I have been instructed on how to run, hide and fight in order to ensure that my students and I survive in the event that an aspiring assassin enters our classroom.
Unofficially, I am as thoroughly prepared to survive a mass shooting as I am to perform an appendectomy. That is to say, not at all, because I am a professor of creative writing and a lawyer by trade. Hence, survival combat, like general surgery, falls decidedly outside my range of expertise.
Continue reading: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2021/06/08/colleges-failure-mandate-suicide-prevention-training-ignorant-and-reckless-opinion
Letters of recommendation have aggravated me for more than 20 years. Today, as the spring admissions season draws to a close, I break my silence. Having been on every side of the LOR equation — requesting them, reading them, writing them, regarding them and disregarding them — I now call for an end to them. Not just at academic institutions, but at every institution that has historically discriminated against applicants on any basis besides merit. Shameless tributes to America’s longstanding commitment to inequity, letters of recommendation belong in the dustbin of history.
Read MoreFive years ago, in an act of creative desperation, I decided to immerse myself in the classical Persian poetry I grew up taking for granted. I aimed to learn it by heart and under the expert tutelage of my father, a physician by trade and a connoisseur of Sufi poetry by tradition. For my father, nothing is more sacred than poetry — specifically the mystical poetry of Rumi.
Read MoreBeing Iranian American is like being the child of divorced parents who refuse get along, not even for the kids. Growing up as one of these embattled children, conflict embedded in my DNA, I’ve never known a moment when my two homelands have been anything short of archenemies. Thus, what most of the world experiences as an external, geopolitical conflict, I and my fellow Iranian Americans experience as an internal, deeply personal one. These are our parents you’re talking about, and we love them both, even when we hate them.
Read MoreConsidering its habit of staging coups and its criminal response to the immigration crisis, you might think I'd have lost faith in America. Here's why I haven't.
Read MoreFrom The Mighty:
Melody Moezzi is a writer, speaker, activist, attorney, award-winning author, and an Adversity 2 Advocacy (A2A) Advocate. She is speaking and answering questions today about her experiences living with bipolar disorder and as a dedicated mental health advocate who has spent years combating the discrimination and stigma surrounding mental health conditions.
Don’t drink the water. I’ve heard it nearly a hundred times already, and I’ve only been here a week.
When I accepted a position as a visiting professor in the creative writing department at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, I wasn’t thinking about the drinking water. Mostly, I was thinking about the beach, the beach, and a little more about the beach. Also, my syllabi, my students, and my swimsuits. I didn’t think twice about the Cape Fear River two blocks from my new home. But I’m thinking a lot about it now.
Read MoreIn 2013, I was attending a conference by the Depression Bipolar Support Alliance in Miami to receive their Life Unlimited Award for my work in mental health as an advocate and author. I had been in the advocacy world for about six years, and the book I’d co-written with my mother about my struggle with bipolar and her struggle to help me had been out for a year at that point. In other words, I was feeling pretty confident in my abilities as an advocate at that point, but of course, I knew I still had much to learn. But after years of speaking, I was struggling to find female advocates that were my age and on the circuit in the same way I was. Though I was constantly speaking to large audiences, a part of me felt alone in my advocacy. And then I met Melody Moezzi.
Read MoreFor me, wellness is about being able to fulfill your purpose in life. It’s not about the absence of illness or disability-certainly not in my case, as part of my purpose is to fight the stigma and discrimination surrounding illness and disability. To be well in my book is to be doing that which you are meant to be doing-not based on the judgments of yourself or the expectations of others, but based on the unique design and demands of your own singular soul. For me, that means creating art and pursuing justice-and doing it all, as much as possible, through love. In order to live well-that is, to be able to do that which I am meant to be doing-I need to take care of my body, mind and soul. This means eating largely real food with ingredients I can pronounce and exercising (which I admit I’m not that great at, but I try). It also means taking medication, attending weekly therapy, engaging in daily prayers, and spending quality time with the people I love most. Ultimately though, I don’t think that we always need to be well in order to live well. A lot of living well-especially for those of us living with mental health conditions-is about learning how to manage when we’re not necessarily feeling our best. As I see it, to be well is to experience the full range of human emotion and experience with grace and curiosity-to wonder what each experience and emotion has to teach us instead of immediately judging ourselves and the events in our lives as necessarily good or bad. Often, the same experiences that I felt were the worst things to ever happen to me (a pancreatic tumor and bipolar disorder, for example) at the time turned out to be the best things to ever happen to me, because they helped me the most along my journey to finding and following my true purpose in life.
Melody Moezzi, an Iranian-American writer, activist, attorney and award-winning author.
To learn more about Melody’s journey to wellness, please read her memoir, Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life.
To hear Melody’s message of hope, please watch the video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJp5mxd5aoI
On Sunday, I joined more than a thousand demonstrators at Raleigh-Durham International Airport to oppose an unconstitutional executive order signed by President Donald Trump last week. The order attempts to block refugees from entering the United States for 120 days (or if they’re Syrian, indefinitely) and to prohibit U.S. entry to nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen) for 90 days.
Read MoreThere were too many painful losses to count in 2016, and the death of Carrie Fisher was among the most painful for me. I’ve never seen any of the Star Wars movies–-I never got around to it as a kid and now it’s just fun to watch people’s horrified reactions when I tell them I’ve never seen the iconic films. I read her memoir, Wishful Drinking, the year I got sober. I related to Fisher on many levels–-as a recovering alcoholic, as a person who has learned not to be ashamed of her depression, as someone who is really and truly obsessed with her dog, and as a woman who has always found humor in the blunt, the sarcastic, and the inappropriate. So inspired not just by Wishful Drinking but her entire life, here are 10 non-fiction books I think the Great Carrie Fisher, Our Misfit Queen, would appreciate.
Read MoreToday more than ever, love is in order. As an Iranian-American Muslim woman of color living with a disability, I grieve for our country given the results of the latest presidential election. I was born in the United States. I love this nation. I have studied its laws and its flaws. As an author, attorney and activist, I have fought with my words and actions to make it a better place. But only recently have I come to realize that fighting isn’t enough. Love is in order.
Read MoreIf ever there were an election cycle that has taken a nonrefundable toll on the American psyche, this is it. And as an American Muslim, it has been all the more taxing.
Read MoreI’ve been a loyal fan of comic Maria Bamford’s ever since watching her ingeniously frank and vulnerable web series The Maria Bamford Show. In it, she highlights her personal struggles with depression and anxiety while acting as herself and a panoply of other characters—including members of her quirky Midwestern family, who feature prominently in much of her comedy.
Read MoreWho doesn’t love to read about dysfunctional families that shine in moments of darkness or ordinary families thrown into extraordinary situations? When I started this list, my mind went straight to Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Karen White’s grit lit, and everything by Lisa Genova. There are many great books in this category, but here’s an eclectic mix pulled from the old, the new, and the about-to-be released … Looking for a memoir in a class of its own? Try this one, written by a Hula-hooping, feminist, Muslim, Iranian-American lawyer and activist. (Did you get all that?) With brutal honesty and dark humor, Moezzi holds nothing back in her portrayal of manic-depression and its impact on her family. Plus, Lee Smith wrote a killer blurb. I rest my case. — Barbara Claypool White
Read MoreAs the annual Hajj pilgrimage gets under way in Saudi Arabia, we hear from those preparing for the journey after last year's deadly crush. And, after a photo by a person with depression of their tidied bedroom went viral, we ask people with the illness what coping mechanisms they use
Read MoreMuslims are increasingly under attack—both from within and without, both domestically and globally. We are being slaughtered by those claiming to be Muslim but ignoring the most basic tenets of our faith, those forgetting the meaning of the words with which we begin every single prayer—calling on a most “compassionate” and “merciful” God. On the other hand, we are also being slaughtered by those duped into believing that these vicious so-called Muslims (who have dismissed and disgraced our faith by claiming it, building organizations they insist on calling “Islamic”) represent all Muslims.
Read MoreMelody Moezzi was born in Chicago but considers herself equally Iranian as American. Her parents emigrated to the United States after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. And while Moezzi was raised here and has made a life here, earning a law degree and building a career as an author and social commentator, her heart and thoughts are never far from Persia. This is evident when you read her beautiful memoir Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life. What makes her book so original and valuable is how she examines cultural thinking about mental illness in both parts of the world. As she writes about her Iranian heritage, “My people don’t do psychotherapy. It just isn’t our style.” But it’s her style now. The story of how she got there is remarkable. We spoke with Moezzi recently about her book, her life now, and how the past keeps revisiting us, in big ways and small, whether we want it to or not.
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