Hamid Ekbia

"I’ve been writing a memoir, and it’s a project that has been ongoing for a couple of years, I felt like it’s related to the current moment. I had published another piece with the L.A. Review of Books, and I thought I would share my experience. I sent it to them, and it didn’t even take them an hour to say yes.”"

"Yes, life as a political prisoner is a much more gruesome experience, but what makes the current moment so dramatic is the scale of it,There seems to be no end in sight, and the uncertainty of it is a big part. In my situation, I didn’t know when I was going to be released. I had a very different political view from the government. I wasn’t involved in violent activity or anything like that. I was imprisoned for my thoughts, and there wasn’t a sentence. They never told me until the very last moment when I would be released, and that created a lot of pain and angst."

"When you lose contact with the world, whether it is social contact or being in our homes, we kind of start floating mentally, psychologically, and otherwise, I use the notion of anchoring because in the same way ships and boats anchor themselves in the sea, we need to anchor ourselves into the reality of the world. There is life going on, a world that we need to connect to. Anchoring covers all of these different aspects relating to the world outside."

"What I was trying to say in the article was that you can look ahead of the curve and say, ‘I know this isn’t going to go on forever. This will end.’ It’s all about being hopeful, but it’s also about remembering that you were somebody with a life and connections, and you will live that life again in time."