These Walls

"his blog looks depressing" was what a friend of mine told my other friend about my blog, which reminded me of a reality that I've been trying to overlook for the last two years: no matter what you do and where you are, you'll always be seen as an East Asian (yes, I'm becoming more and more exhausted of the term "middle east"). Truth is, I never tried to bypass that, but the more I interact with my friends from Europe, the more I understand how different our lifestyles, our ideals, our struggles, and our privileges are. Generally, that's not a huge case as we are all born with unavoidable disparities to each other, and I never saw it as a rationale to befriend someone or not, but it gets back at me from time to time when I notice how we see each other's backgrounds. While it's painful that for most of my life I had to deal with news on war, censorship, prison, and awful inflation, though I'm not even coming from a poor family, I still found ways to "live" and "survive" amid all the…