I think all of us have gone through periods in life that felt unbearably hard.
Days when breathing itself seemed difficult.
Days when we felt we could no longer endure what was happening,
or maybe thought about giving up entirely.
And then somehow,
a new version of us returned to life.
Like a cocoon becoming a butterfly.
And that butterfly no longer resembles the cocoon it once was.
If someone asked me how I experienced becoming a butterfly,
the first image that comes to my mind
would be a 24-year-old girl
who thought the world had ended.
I was 24 when I went to the hospital with numbness in my face,
hearing loss,
and numbness in my hands and legs.
They explained to me that these symptoms could be signs of multiple sclerosis.
It was 2010.
I had just been accepted into graduate school,
and I felt as if my entire world had collapsed.
Every night I went to sleep terrified that I might wake up the next morning unable to walk.
And over and over again,
I kept asking myself:
“Why me?”
Those days passed.
It probably took nearly a year before I could say the words “multiple sclerosis”
without my voice breaking.
Before I could speak about it with other people.
Later,
I decided not to see MS as only a disease.
I turned it into a reason to do volunteer work and raise awareness in Iran.
Little by little,
I learned how to live with it.
I learned that instead of fighting it every moment,
I had to accept it as part of myself.
And maybe this sounds strange,
but that same MS later became the reason I stood as an Olympic torchbearer for Iran during the 2017 Winter Olympics in South Korea.
Someone asked me there:
“Did you ever lose hope during this journey?”
And the answer that came from somewhere deep inside me was this:
“I lost hope
so I could return to life hopeful again.”
If someone asked me today how I experienced becoming a butterfly,
the first image that would still come to my mind
would be that 24-year-old girl
who believed her world was over.
