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What do you do when the life your parents built for you doesn't fit the life you want?
Filmmaker Desiree Akhavan has spent a long time sitting with that question.
When does your life get to be your own? and not your parents or your communities.
As the daughter of Iranian immigrants, I was raised to believe the answer is never.
In her 2023 talk, she traces her journey from the kind of daughter she thought she had to be to who she actually is.
She makes the case for why disappointing the people you love most might be the most honest and important thing you can do for yourself and your community.
I let go of my idea of good and trying to fit into it other people's notion of good, and I ended up finding my own.
My parents are the heart of me.
They built me. but they don't get to determine the rules of my life.
That's coming up right after a short break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.
I was five years old when The Little Mermaid came out, and I was convinced it was a work of genius.
My mother did not agree.
To be fair, she had a point.
In the film, the mermaid disobeys her father to chase some guy and put her entire species at risk.
And to my mom, she was the ungrateful, spoiled product of the very worst in American culture.
Mom wanted me to be like Belle from Beauty and the Beast.
And in case you forgot, Belle volunteers to replace her father as a prisoner to a bloodthirsty beast for the rest of her life which, to this day, remains the base level of sacrifice expected of you as a child of immigrants.
When does your life get to be your own and not your parents' or your community's?
As the daughter of Iranian immigrants, I was raised to believe the answer is never.
But I would like to argue that the immigrant parents of the world might have it wrong.
In fact, I think you should disappoint your parents.
I think that maybe disappointing your parents could be the best thing that ever happened to you.
My parents were good, obedient Iranian children.
Their marriage wasn't arranged, it was introduced, and they were married three months after meeting.
He was 26 and she was 19.
When I was 19, I found myself seated at a table with my parents and their friends when one of them said honestly, I would rather my children to have cancer than to be gay.
They say to me, Maman, you are being the homophobia, but what can I say?
It is the truth.
And everyone laughed because, yeah, it was the truth.
And because none of them would ever have to worry about one of their kids being gay.
They had all raised good, obedient Iranian kids who would marry other good, obedient Iranian kids.
I told my parents I was in love with a woman six years after that conversation.
I did it with my eyes closed, like I was jumping off a skyscraper.
When my mom's upset, she wants all the information, like she is a bad news detective and she's trying to sniff out the even worse betrayal that you're hiding behind your back.
My dad is the complete opposite.
You can tell it's real bad when he goes completely silent.
It's kind of like you flip his off switch.
Why can't you keep your private life private, is what my brother wanted to know.
He was born in Iran and left before he turned one, but those early days managed to infuse him with a sense of propriety that's always eluded me.
Because I was born in New York, which is why I am an entitled millennial cliché.
I'm incapable of lying, and it is a character flaw.
It's gauche to be so straightforward.
There's no elegance to it.
Iranians communicate their meaning in the spaces between their words, the implications.
You have to learn a second, silent language.
There's even a word for it, tarof, the art of disingenuous generosity.
We're raised to keep offering things we don't actually want to offer and say things that we don't actually mean but must out of mandatory aggressive politeness.
To this day, when you go to pay for a cab in Iran, they'll say no no no no, no.
For you it's free.
You are like a sister, a daughter, a mother to me.
I could never charge you.
And then it's your job to convince them to charge you.
And then, once you've convinced them to charge you, you need to haggle them down so they don't rip you off.
Being the child of immigrants is like being born a widow.
The loss is baked into you.
You grow up intrinsically homesick for a place that you've never known and that no longer exists the way your family remembers it.
Our home was a testament to an Iran locked in time.
Rajar paintings of unibrowed women playing the sitar and a samovar that took 80 percent of the kitchen island.
The music we listened to was Persian, dated and featured way too much electric keyboard.
Even the Farsi I was taught to speak is antiquated.
I say, may your hands not hurt, when all I want to say is thanks.
We didn't go tailgating, we went to mehmunis, parties, where there were no fewer than 50 guests.
Dinner was never served before 11, and you danced so hard, you left with pit stains.
Being Iranian in the diaspora means gossip as your love language.
We dig into the messiest details of everyone's lives, not because we're assholes, but because we care.
It's bringing the drama, like when I overheard my father planning a party, screaming, This is war, and I do not intend to lose.
It's being obsessed with status, it's suffocating your ugliest memories and it's built into my bones.
How could I have the audacity to break free from the one rule we all silently agreed to follow blindly?
The rule that you don't get to make the rules, your parents do.
There was no precedent to being gay and Iranian.
So claiming it for myself felt ridiculous, like I was coming out as a leprechaun.
In fact, the president of Iran at that time Ahmadinejad, had publicly announced in my country we don't have homosexuals.
He just failed to mention that that might have something to do with the fact that homosexuality is punishable by death.
But the moment that I brought the worst shame imaginable onto my family, something incredible happened.
Do you know what is scary after destroying the hopes and dreams of the people that you love the most, the people that created you?
Literally nothing.
In the wake of losing my family, I lost my fear.
I had no idea that fear had been driving my life up until that point.
Fear of being strange, wrong, ugly, bad.
I was always so afraid I was embarrassing myself.
But from the moment I came out, none of that really mattered anymore.
There was no way to out-shame myself.
So as we stopped talking, I started writing.
I'd wanted to be a filmmaker since I was nine years old and wrote my first script.
It was a sketch comedy show that featured a fake advert for a product called Vomlet, the omelet made of vomit.
I'd been desperate to find my voice ever since, but I was always writing at arm's length for myself.
After I came out, there was no reason to hold back, so I didn't.
I co-created a web series with my girlfriend at the time.
It was about a pair of superficial homophobic lesbians.
And for the first time in my life, my work started speaking to other people.
I let go of my idea of good and trying to fit into other people's notion of good, and I ended up finding my own.
After that, I wrote, directed and starred in my first film, which explored themes of being a self-indulgent, closeted Iranian millennial cliché.
That film premiered at Sundance.
My next film won Sundance.
Eventually, my parents realized that being gay wasn't a death sentence, and we found each other.
But on new terms.
They are the heart of me.
They built me.
But they don't get to determine the rules of my life.
Nobody does.
I challenge you to disappoint your parents and to take the rules that they pass down from their own parents and ask if those are rules that you would choose for yourself.
I challenge you to be a little more honest and a little less obedient, not just with your parents, but with the world.
My mother's high school yearbook quote says one should live life like a duck calm and serene on the surface, but paddling like hell underneath.
I beg to differ.
Calm and serene is for other people's benefit.
The paddling, it turns out, is the good bit.
The paddling is what it is to be alive.
I once overheard my father tell someone, I knew I had two choices.
Get over it or lose my daughter.
I faced a similar choice.
Live life according to my own standards and risk losing my family or live according to their rules and never get the opportunity to meet myself.
I took a calculated risk.
And against all odds, I won.
Thank you.
That was Desiree Akhavan at the TED Diaspora Iranian event in 2023.
This talk was originally published in April 2024.
If you're curious about TED's curation, visit TED.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED.
This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner and Tanzika Sangmarnivong.
Additional support from Daniela Balarezo, Christopher Faisy-Bogan, Valentina Bohannini, Banban Chang, Brian Green and Lainey Lott.
Learn more at podcasts.ted.com.
I am Elise Hu.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
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