As much as I’ve always hated being the anxiety black sheep in my family, it actually makes me more panicky to see my parents on edge. Prepandemic, if our house was an airplane, then I was the nervous air traveler, and they were the flight attendants who don’t even bat an eye when there’s a sudden drop in air pressure.

I’m not exaggerating. A few years ago, we were sitting around the dining room table playing a cutthroat game of Persian rummy when an earthquake hit. It lasted only a few seconds, but the jolt was enough to get me to crawl under the table. My mom and dad kept dropping cards onto the table and complaining about their workdays through the whole ordeal. Even Neda thought they were freakishly calm, but they shrugged and said it was nothing compared to the earthquake in 1989.

“That was a 7.1, and it lasted for seventeen seconds.”

But these days, they’re uncharacteristically jittery. They’ve survived a war, a revolution, the collapse of the Bay Bridge in that earthquake, 9/11, racists telling them to leave the country after 9/11—but they’ve never lived through a pandemic. They keep saying how nice it’s going to be to have a commute that only requires them to walk up a flight of stairs, but I know the place they really feel most at home are those giant glass office buildings on Stevens Creek Boulevard. Uncertainty, when it screws with their routine, is their least favorite state of being.

Gabriela once read an article about inherited trauma, and she’s convinced that my anxiety is a result of my parents’ escape from Tehran. I like that explanation. It means that the way my brain operates is just the unavoidable collateral damage caused by power-hungry men and religious zealots. The kind of damage you can’t measure when you’re in the thick of it. The kind that only reveals itself years and years later. I never brought this theory up with my parents because I never bring up my anxiety with them. Somehow, I think if they knew just how bad it was, they’d view it as a sign of weakness. I have had everything I’ve ever wanted—what do I have to be anxious about?