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“I felt like everyone met my representative and no one knew me.” Mandana Dayani
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There’s a kind of loneliness that comes from being “liked” but never really known. Mandana Dayani opens up about growing up as an immigrant - learning how to adapt, how to fit in, how to become the version of herself that felt safest. “I felt like everyone met my representative and no one knew me.” If you’ve ever felt that distance between who you are and who the world sees, this conversation is for you. 📽️Full episode: unitetoheal.com/courage-to-care Amudim exists for the people who have been carrying stories like this quietly - and for the moment they don’t have to anymore.
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Transcript
Auto-generated transcript. Not time-synced to the video.
I think the advocacy work taught me the
most about who I am and what actually
makes me happy because I think so much
of my life and being an immigrant was
just figuring out how to be perfect.
I've always sort of reflected back to
people what they wanted me to be and I
knew how to be every different type of I
could walk into a room and within 10
seconds read the room and be like, "Oh,
I have to be like really [music] funny
or I have to be the cool girl heel or I
have to be like what whatever it was."
and I could do that and succeed, but I
was like I always felt fraudulent in a
way. Like I felt like everyone met my
representative and no one knew me. And I
didn't even know what I was because I
was trying to be what American was.
[music] I was trying so hard to
assimilate to like America as a child
that I didn't know like am I done? Like
can I [music] like did I do it?
[laughter] There was no like end to
whatever that exercise was.
>> [music]
>> Um, and I I think
>> I just want to interrupt really quickly
so that people know, you fled Iran with
your family and came to America when
[music] you were around five, right? We
left Iran. Yes. So when I was like five,
we went to Italy, then New York, and
then LA. Okay.