Eighty percent of my family is still there. Hundreds of cousins. More aunts and uncles than I can count. My grandmother. Family I have known mostly through names and photographs and the crackle of a bad phone line reaching halfway across the world. For most of my life, we were pieces of one another, held together by static and longing. The photo you see of me as a little girl - that was me in Iran visiting. I am sitting on my grandfather’s lap. I was very young when he passed away. All I have is a few photos. And then — for all the heaviness I’ve written about elsewhere — social media gave me this one pure gift: video calls, photographs, faces. We talk often now, even though I have not stood in the same room with most of them in over four decades. Four decades. Let that sit with you the way it sits with me.

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My story begins, as so many Iranian American stories do, with a leaving.

My father left Iran in the early seventies and came here to study. He went to UC Berkeley. Then he returned home in 1977 and — as I love to tease — more or less imported my mother. They met, they married quickly (which was simply how it was done back then), and he brought her across the world to a country whose language she did not speak. They settled in Chico, California, and that is where I was born. My mother didn’t know a single word of English when she arrived. She still tells me that she learned English from the television — from watching talk shows, day after day, teaching herself a new life one program at a time. They came here to build something new, especially with all that was breaking open back home in the revolution.

So I have only ever known this life, this American one. But make no mistake — it was a deeply Persian life.

I grew up with Farsi floating through the air of our home. With ghormeh sabzi and kebabs and mountains of rice on the table not to mention the Rashti food. And above all, I grew up inside music. My father played instrument after instrument — the tombak, the ney, and my very favorite, the santur, that breathtaking string instrument you strike with two little mallets until the whole room shimmers. And oh, the weekends. Every Friday and Saturday night, whichever relatives had managed to get out of Iran — and it was never many — along with the friends they’d found who had also fled, would fill our home. There was always music. Always food. Always dancing. Always someone’s voice rising in song while my father and my uncle played long into the night. All of us kids would fall asleep at three in the morning to the sound of all of it — the laughter, the strings, the singing. That was the soundtrack of my childhood, and I promise you I can still hear every note.

At one point we moved to Palmdale.

We were, as far as I could tell, the only Iranian family for miles — maybe one or two others in the whole town. And the children were not kind to me. They called me “unibrow.” They mocked the customs my parents held onto so fiercely — not being allowed to shave my legs, or tweeze my eyebrows, as a teenage girl, all these old-world traditions being planted in a very Americanized place. Some of them called me an “Iranian terrorist” or told me to go back where I came from. It was a hard, lonely way to grow up. (There’s a story from those years — a boy, a school dance, a night he simply never came — but that one is tender enough that it deserves its own telling, another day.)

So I did what so many children of immigrants do. I tried, with every ounce of me, to disappear into the crowd. To be liked. To be normal. To be just one of the kids. And that meant pushing hard against my own family, against the very things that made me me. Those were not easy years, for any of us. And by the time I was eighteen, I had lost my Farsi entirely. I could no longer speak the language of the lullabies I’d fallen asleep to.

But something in me was still tethered to all of it. It had only gone quiet. It had never, ever gone away.

And then I met Behrooz. We all know him now as Bruce.

My husband was born and raised in Iran, and our story holds a detail I still can hardly believe. We discovered, only later, that both of our mothers come from the very same corner of Iran — Rasht — and, if I have it right, even attended the same school, though they never once knew each other. Two women from one small place in the world. And decades later, an ocean away, their two children meet in Laguna Beach, California, and fall in love. Behrooz has been by my side for 28 years. This September we will celebrate 21 years of marriage. We have four children now. Sometimes I think about the arithmetic of that — all the ways it could not have happened — and I have to catch my breath.

Bruce is the one who brought me home to myself.

Loving him reawakened everything — the familiarity, the food, the language, the music of my earliest years, all of it flooding back. I started to relearn Farsi, word by word. I threw myself back into Persian cooking, though I still laugh remembering the nights as a girl when I refused it outright and begged for Del Taco instead. Now? I could never turn a Persian dish away, not for anything. And the music came roaring back — the singers, the songs, the very ones I’d drifted to sleep to as a child. The cassettes of my girlhood became the CDs of my twenties, and then the playlists of my whole life. My entire soundtrack was rewritten, in the most beautiful way I can imagine.

Now, in my forties, so much of what I do is in devotion to the Iranian community and the diaspora — emceeing events, showing up for cultural moments, flying all over this country to be part of it. My favorite time of the entire year is Nowruz, the first day of spring; I love it so much that I go a little overboard celebrating it, traveling everywhere to lift it up for one organization after another. Then comes Yalda, the winter solstice, and Mehregan, at the turn of fall. I officiate Persian weddings in English now, too, to help keep those exquisite traditions alive — and one day I’ll tell you that whole story, and everything that moves through my heart when I’m standing there, marrying two people and having a front row seat to love.

I have spent these years handpicking the most beautiful pieces of my culture and holding them up to the light — the music I dance to on Fox 5 San Diego, the food, the poetry, the art, the rich and ancient history, and above all the deep, deep kindness of the Iranian people. Even now, in the middle of everything heavy our people are carrying, I keep using my platform to lift all of it into the light where the world can see it.

People tell me I made it cool to be Iranian — that I was never ashamed, never embarrassed, only proud. That is the message I hear again and again. And the ones that make my heart smile the most come from the young. Teenagers will write to me: Shally, I never really identified with being Iranian — but you reminded me. Now I dance. Now I love the food. Now I’m proud. Because they see someone born and raised right here in America who wraps her arms around her culture with her whole heart, and they realize they’re allowed to do the same.

And nothing — nothing — makes it more real than watching it unfold under my own roof.

Each of my four children plays an Iranian instrument. My daughter takes Persian dance. When I ask them what they want for dinner and they reply Ghomeh Sabzi and Doogh I get little butterflies. On International Day at their schools, we represent Iran proudly, arms full of our food, standing tall for everyone to see. It is surreal for me — genuinely surreal — to watch my children carry their heritage with that kind of ease and pride, when I remember, so painfully clearly, how hard it once was for me to do the very same thing in a schoolyard that made me feel ashamed of it. And if I got to play even a small part in that shift — for my kids, for those teenagers, for anyone — then it has been one of the great honors of my life.

Let me leave you with the meaning of my name, because it holds my whole heart in it.

When people ask me where I am from I tell them I am a little Kurdish, a little Turkish ( both from my Dad’s side) and a whole lot Rashti and all that comes from my Mom. My name, Shally, means a grain of rice — from the fields of Shalizar. Shomal is the northern region my family comes from, and my mother is from Rasht. I’ve been told the fields there are famous. That is the name my parents chose to give me. A grain of rice, from a place I have never lived in, planted in a girl who grew up an ocean away.

And so here is my dream — the one I hold close and carry everywhere I go.

One day, I will return to the towns my mother and father came from. To Rasht, especially. I will walk out into the fields of Shalizar, and I will dance. I want to feel, just once, what it is to put my bare feet down in the soil of a place I might have called home, if not for the revolution. I want to stand where my name was born.

I long for that day. I dream of it. And somehow, deep in my bones, I know it is coming very soon.

You may ask why I have not gone back? Well I can. But I also know there are people waiting for me and they are not my family. And I will not be welcomed with open arms. I have and will continue to speak out against the current regime in Iran and the atrocities they have committed for almost 50 years. The murders, the rapes, the violence, the pain they have caused. Families torn apart, lives changed forever.

My heart and soul aches for Iran and even more so for the beautiful people of Iran. The millions who have been fighting for years to return to the country and place we all know and love. Not the one that has been taken hostage by the Islamic Republic In Iran. Not a day goes by I don’t think about the mothers who are sitting at their children’s graves, the tens of thousands of them who are heroes and gave their lives so that the next generation can live a better life than they have ever known.

I am in awe of their bravery. My soul aches for all the pain they endured. And I have never been more hopeful that freedom is near and we can all see our beautiful Iran again soon.

With love and light,

Shally

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For the last seven months, I’ve been different. Quiet.

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you know that quiet isn’t my nature. I’m the woman dancing in her kitchen before the sun is up. I’m the one who shows up in your morning with a good morning, my joon joonies and far too much energy for the hour. So my silence — this long, uncharacteristic hush — probably left you wondering. This is my answer. The honest one. The whole one.

Let me start at the very beginning, because the beginning is where you’ll understand me.

I came to social media almost by accident. I still remember the morning my co-anchor walked into the studio and asked whether I’d posted on Twitter yet, or shared anything on Instagram. And I remember thinking, my goodness — what in the world is Twitter? What is Instagram? This was right around the time my first son was born. I was a morning news anchor waking to a three a.m. alarm, and I was becoming a mother — live, in front of a camera, in front of a whole city watching. Somewhere in those early, bleary, beautiful days, I cracked the door open and let people in. Into the real life of a working mom. The unglamorous, exhausting, holy ordinariness of it.

I never had a strategy. I only ever had one goal, and I want you to hear it plainly, because everything that came after grew out of it: I wanted to make people happy. To bring a little joy. A little energy. A reason to smile before the day got heavy.

And one of the ways that happened caught even me by surprise.

During commercial breaks — on an American news channel, mind you — I started dancing to Persian music. It began as nothing more than a way to lift the mood in that groggy first hour of the morning. But it caught fire. Soon it wasn’t just me; it was all of us, me and my wonderful non-Iranian coworkers, dancing together to Persian songs every single week, the whole studio moving, the whole room lighter for it. Sure, there were a few grumpies. There always are. But mostly? It was pure, unfiltered joy.

I know that, because of the messages that came back to me.

Shally, I’m lying in a hospital bed fighting cancer, and you have no idea what your energy does for me. I’m a mom of one, drowning in depression, and watching you reminded me to get up today. You reminded me to give my husband my attention again. And then the one I heard over, and over, and over: Where do you get so much energy? How do you manage it all? Where does your zest for life come from?

I always answered the same way, and I’ll answer it here for you too.

We are each running our own race. My pace isn’t yours, and it was never meant to be. But every single day, I try to lead my life from a place of overwhelming gratitude — for work I love, for four beautiful babies, for the man I’ve walked beside for twenty-eight years, and, before all of it, for my health.

And if I’m honest, I think my zest is born from the very work that has broken my heart a thousand times. As a news anchor, I have a front-row seat to lives changing — and most often, they change for the worse in a single unguarded second. A family loses a child. A diagnosis lands. An accident. A tragedy no one saw coming. A war. When you witness, again and again, how fragile and how fleeting this whole thing is, something in you makes a decision. Mine was this: every second I am still here, I am going to dance through it. I am going to lead with love and light.

So I leaned all the way in. I gave you everything — the cooking, the tears, the exhaustion, the mess, the sweetness. I brought you all the way into our world.

And our world is a deeply Iranian one. I was born and raised right here in California; I’ve never lived in Iran a day of my life. But something has always tethered me to the homeland my family comes from — a rope I can’t see and have never once been able to cut. My husband is Iranian too. The United States is our home; we love it, we’re raising our babies in it, and we wouldn’t trade it for anywhere on earth. But we work hard to keep our culture and our traditions breathing in our house. And as my little platform grew, so did my Iranian audience — the community I recognize so much of my own heart inside of.

And this is where the story turns.

The bigger it grew, the louder the voices became — and not all of them came bearing love. I began drawing in people who were cruel simply for the sport of it. You’re only doing this for money. You’re a show-off. You’re a narcissist. You’re too old — what are you even doing? You name it, and someone typed it at me. And slowly, quietly, it began to wear a groove into my mental health, because I was not raised in that world. I didn’t have the armor for it. Social media had thrown open a million doors — I made real friendships, real connections, people all over this world I still hold dear — but it asked a price I hadn’t known I was agreeing to pay.

It took me years to understand where all that cruelty was coming from. And then one day, a stranger handed me the answer.

A message arrived from an account with no photo and no followers — clearly one someone had built for the sole purpose of reaching me, because I’d blocked them somewhere else. (Yes, I block. When my peace is disturbed, I protect it. People are entitled to their opinions; I am entitled to guard my own well-being.) But this message was not like the others. This woman wrote to tell me that she had hated me — for years. And then she wrote something braver than most of us ever manage: she told me that one morning she woke up and asked herself why. Why did she hate this woman she’d never met?

And what she found underneath was a rocky relationship with her sister. Money trouble in her family. A painful distance from her father. And beneath all of it, one small, devastating truth she was brave enough to say out loud: she hated me because she wanted to be happy like me. She wanted the freedom to smile, and to dance, the way I did. She wrote to say she was sorry — for the years of cruelty, for the hate — when all she had ever really wanted was to stand inside that kind of light.

I thanked her. But something moved in me that day and it never moved back.

Because I finally understood: the hate coming toward me was never about me. It was about what I was stirring up in people who find it unbearable to watch someone else be happy. If I don’t have it, why should she? People will love you, and people will hate you — and so little of it has anything to do with you, and so much of it has to do with the lenses they’ve been handed. If you are looking through love, you see love. If you are looking through kindness, you see kindness.

Somewhere along the way, so many of these people were never taught the simplest grace: that when you don’t like something, you can just step away, quietly, and go on with your life. Instead there’s this idea — and it runs so deep in so many of us — that if I am unhappy, you had better be unhappy too. If I am grieving, you must grieve with me. If I am sad, how dare you smile. There is so little room left for a person to simply be who they are — which, when you really sit with it, is the truest freedom there is. (That is its own conversation, one I’ll come back to another day, especially where my own culture is concerned.)

And nowhere — nowhere — did I feel that pressure more than around Iran.

This year, the weight became more than I knew how to hold.

Since January, my homeland has been living through something historic and devastating — an uprising, a staggering loss of life, and now a war that reaches into the country I was born in and the country my blood comes from. I won’t lay out the history here; if you don’t know it, I gently, lovingly ask you to go and learn it for yourself, because it deserves that from all of us. But I need you to understand what those months did to me, because it is the very center of why I disappeared.

Here is a part of my story I have never told you.

I am a journalist. And I hold myself to a completely different standard than the world has come to expect from “influencers” — a word I have never once claimed. People forget what our job actually is. A journalist exists to tell the truth and to report verified facts. But we are living in an age where anyone can pick up a phone, call themselves a journalist, and pour unconfirmed information and opinions into the world without ever once checking whether it happened. For those of us who were trained the real way, that is the violation of everything we were taught to be.

So I was caught in an impossible place. I wanted to report every single thing happening in Iran — the deaths, the violence, the events unfolding hour by hour. My whole body ached to. But I was not on the ground. I could not see it with my own eyes. And finding sources I could actually trust was its own heartbreak, because even the people I trusted were getting it wrong. My hands were tied. For months I could not verify what I believed in my bones to be true — and even now, today, the facts remain almost impossible to confirm, because journalists are not permitted inside Iran to witness any of it.

Can you imagine it? Being told, all day long on social media, what I must share and what I must not, what was right and what was wrong — and then walking onto a television set and sitting up straight with a serious, steady face, reporting only what could be confirmed, while knowing in my heart there was so much more, so much worse, that I could not yet say out loud? Feeding one machine that screamed at me to speak, while my profession — rightly — held me to silence until the truth could be proven?

It was overwhelming in a way I don’t have clean words for. Especially at the beginning.

And there were the videos. The ones that came across my screen that no human being should ever have to see. Dead bodies. Mothers screaming for their children. I will never unsee them. They are stitched into me now, permanently, whether I gave permission or not.

All of it — the impossible weight of reporting a homeland I couldn’t reach, the images I can’t erase, the shaming from one direction and the trolls from the other, the noise, the endless criticism — all of it, stacked one on top of the other, simply became more than I could carry. There were days I could not get out of bed. And I still had four babies to raise. A home to run. A life to keep moving — the ordinary weight of life and kids school and activities and exhaustion and don’t forget the brain fog — all of it underneath the weight of a nation on my shoulders.

At the same time, I watched the ground shift beneath social media itself. The place where I had lived for fifteen years — where I once shared little clips of our days and simple, tender thoughts — was turning into something I no longer recognized. An influencer machine. And I was never an influencer; I was just the lady from the morning news, hoping to hand you a smile before your day began. But now every scroll had become a lecture: how to live, how to feel about yourself, how to treat your friends, what to think. The same recycled posts, copied and pasted a thousand times over. And every time I dared to share something myself — no matter how gently I meant it — there was a small pack waiting to snatch it, twist it, and reshare it to launch an attack, because attacks earn attention and attention earns followers. It had become vicious.

So I stepped back. I parked all of it. And I chose — for the first time in a long time — me. My well-being. My children. My family. I put it down so that I could survive.

Because that is the honest word for it. Survive.

But here is what I also know to be true about myself: I will always, always believe in showing up for others. And I know I carry a responsibility — to the good ones, to the millions of you who come to this space not to tear down, but for connection, for love, for a little light in a heavy morning. For months I’ve teetered back and forth, asking myself not only whether to come back, but how.

Which is exactly what brought me here, to this page.

This feels like a safer place to land. So much of what I will share with you here, I would never say on video or in a feed, knowing there’s a pack waiting to tear it to pieces. But here, I have a feeling that most of that noise won’t have the patience to sit with three pages, or seven, and truly listen to what a person is trying to say. So here — here — you are going to get the real me. The deeper thoughts. The private ones. The things I have never shared anywhere else in my life.

My leaving and my returning are such an enormous part of the heaviness I’ve carried this year, and I couldn’t step back into your lives without letting you understand it fully.

And I have good news to leave you with: I am coming back this fall. I’ll be going live again on my Facebook and YouTube pages, because there are so many conversations I am aching to have with you. I just have to find my way through the noise — and protect the softest parts of myself while I do.

That’s my story, my joon joons. In a nutshell.

Thank you for being one of the good ones. I have so much to share with you. And I have a feeling you will be shocked with what has been behind that smile you see everyday.

With love and light, Shally