It wasn’t as if I simply stopped going to work one morning. About forty days after I was hired, I was already thinking about quitting several times a week. Toward the end, I thought about it every second, until one day I finally reached my breaking point and made one of the most exhilarating decisions of my life.

Even now, whenever I remember it, the thought leaves a sweet taste in my mouth and an invisible smile on my lips. Then I wonder whether it really was the right thing to do. I decided to become a world traveler.

I had made that decision almost out of nowhere, like a madwoman who had escaped her cage. I was never the kind of girl whose mind could easily be changed by someone else. I was self-directed. I made my own decisions for myself, and everyone knew it.

I resigned and walked away from my secure job. I did it with such certainty and energy that hardly anyone dared question whether my decision was right or wrong. I remember the stunned expressions of the people I told. There was something contradictory in their faces: admiration and doubt at the same time. Admiration for my courage and independence; doubt because of what might await me if I failed.

When I told my friend Reyhaneh, she said, “Are you crazy? Where are you going to get the money to live?”

I said, “I’ll paint and sell my paintings along the way.”

Of course, at that point I had never even painted a picture.

She stared at me. “But you’re not a painter!”

“It doesn’t matter. If someone has artistic taste, whatever they paint will eventually look beautiful to somebody—and somebody will be willing to pay for it and make it theirs.”

She said, “What are you going to do about the risks? You’re a girl! You can’t handle—”

That was the one thing I wasn’t worried about at all.

I had been living alone for several years. I had fought hard for the right to live on my own. My parents had opposed my leaving the family home, but I had convinced them. I had been like this since childhood, and they knew that, one way or another, I would do it. I had proved it to them several times.

Like when, at twelve, after three years of piano practice, I suddenly decided to learn guitar and stop wasting any more time on the piano. In their eyes, a proper girl played piano, not guitar. But I had made up my mind.

I learned to play guitar, too, in a style they understood absolutely nothing about. Every now and then I had to push a cloth between the strings so the sound wouldn’t drive my mother crazy. And after years of studying flamenco, even at the height of my skill, when I had one or two students of my own, my father would still say, “So when are you going to play me a song?”

What he meant was: When are you going to play something I can sing along to? Toward the end, I would play a few songs just for him, and he would sing along.

Another one of those sudden, self-directed decisions came the year I was supposed to take the university entrance exam. I was in the mathematics-and-physics track, but four or five months before the exam, I decided to take the art entrance exam instead. Naturally, I was accepted into nothing that year. Nor the next year.