Technically, I was born in Germany and raised in Canada. But my hope for this letter is that I can write you my memories, my truths, my secrets, my fears—the way that I have felt them.
People ask me: Yelda why is mental health so important to you? I say, it’s not important to me—it is me. Mental health is a part of my DNA, and it’s taken over three decades to admit it. My first depression, I thought, would be my last depression. Anxiety was a word (once I found it) that accurately illustrated the way I lived life, the way my mother lived life, the way my grandmother lived life. Unhealthy to you was healthy to us, and I can imagine this is the reality of many children who come from low-income families. Having a donut for breakfast was normal, so long as it was paired with cow’s milk. What did you expect us to know about healthy eating and exercise, let alone trauma or mental illness? We were occupied with surviving and assimilating.
I didn’t learn English from my parents, I relied on school and pop culture to teach me the language—so naturally it took me longer to find words like depression and PTSD. Finding these words felt valuable, weighted, elemental—like finding gold. They were the bread crumbs that led me home. They were mirrors that I could stand naked in front of. I took refuge in these words.
Not only was I born into a family, refugees from Afghanistan, who experienced long, dark nights riddled with trauma and near-death experiences in their journey to freedom, but I was living in my mother’s womb through it all. In one scene of the movie, my mom bleeds out and is told that both she and her baby will die. She accepts a powder folded up in a newspaper from a Pakistani midwife, swallows it, and prays to Allah. She then gets on a flight to Thailand. Our human smuggling story is a dramatic letter of it’s own and I’m sure we’ll get into it one day, but for now I’ll skip to the part where the Ali family are safely landed in Frankfurt, Germany and awaiting the arrival of their third child.
It’s winter of 1986, and I’m meant to be born on January 1st. My parents are hoping they can make money off of me being the first baby born in the year. They have pre-named me Khatera—which means Memory in Farsi. During this time, I can only imagine how deeply they cling to their memories, the only home they have. I take a few weeks to arrive (a theme in my life: late to the party) and in that time—a letter arrives from my uncle Kahlil Gibran, named after Kahlil Gibran. He writes: Name her Yelda. And just like that, they named me Yelda. In our culture, we believe that when a baby is born after a traumatic experience, they’re bound to be a legend. That was the story behind my uncle’s name, and I’d like to believe that was his narrative for me.
Yelda means the Winter Solstice, the longest, darkest night of the year. It’s the rebirth of the Sun. It’s a celebration in Persian culture that includes reading poetry and sharing pomegranates. The Night of Yelda is a time for self-reflection. The Sun rising has been a visual that I hold closely in trying times of my mental health journey. Especially in my darkest moments that feel endless. I think to myself: Yelda, the Sun is renewing itself. Our energy source is regenerating. And it will rise again.
Born in War, Raised in Trauma
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