Iranian American entrepreneur and AI executive Kiana Ehsani shared a deeply personal account on X about how the ongoing conflict involving Iran has disrupted her life, separated families, and intensified fears among Iranians living abroad.
Her post detailed the heartbreak of cancelling her wedding, losing contact with loved ones in Iran, and facing uncertainty over immigration policies in the United States.
Ehsani, who currently works at Anthropic and previously co-founded Vercept, said she was meant to travel to Türkiye for her wedding celebration, where both her family from Iran and her partner’s family were expected to finally meet each other in person.
In the emotional post, she described how carefully the wedding had been planned before the conflict upended everything.
“Today I was supposed to be on my way to Türkiye for my wedding, to meet up with my family and have them finally meet my partner and husband. We had everything planned. We chose Turkiye since it’s close to Iran and my partner and I could both go there and have our families meet each other. We were supposed to get married with our close family and a small group of friends on a boat on the Mediterranean Sea at sunset. Because of the war, all flights to and from Iran are cancelled and my family can’t leave Iran, so we had to call off the wedding.”
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The post painted a picture of how geopolitical tensions and travel restrictions continue to affect ordinary Iranian families across the world. Ehsani explained that instead of preparing for her wedding trip, she spent the day coping with the emotional weight of being unable to communicate with her family back home.
She shared that one of the hardest parts has been losing regular contact with her grandmother because communication channels into Iran have effectively been shut down.
“Instead, this is how my day looked like.
I woke up to a reminder to call my grandma (I used to call her every Friday morning). I snoozed the reminder until next Friday, just like I have done for the past many years. I can’t call her like our tradition these days because there is no way to call home. All international calls to Iran are blocked, and the internet is fully shut down by the regime.”
Ehsani also reflected on her immigration journey in the United States. She revealed that after more than a decade of living in America and spending five years as a green card holder, she recently became eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship. However, she said recent executive actions targeting Iranians have left her uncertain about her future.
“I got to work and right as I opened my computer I received an email I had scheduled to send to myself 5 years ago: ‘Apply for citizenship.’ This summer marks 11 years of being in the US and 5 years of being a green card holder. I am now eligible to file for citizenship, but it doesn’t matter because an executive order was signed a few months ago that banned all Iranians from applying for any visa or citizenship.”
Her comments also touched on growing anxiety among temporary visa holders in the United States after recent discussions around changes to green card processing rules. Ehsani said many Iranians fear that leaving the U.S. during the application process could mean being unable to return for months or even years because of visa backlogs and travel restrictions.
“At lunch I opened Twitter just to see what’s up in the world and saw the news that those who don’t have a green card now need to leave the US before they can get one. This means every one of my Iranian friends who are here on a visa now has to go back home (on which flight?) to get a green card??? As if it’s that easy? We all know getting back to the US for Iranians is a huge challenge (months and months of waiting for a visa, with a chance of never being able to come back).”
As the post continued, Ehsani moved beyond policy discussions and described the emotional exhaustion many Iranians in the diaspora are quietly carrying while trying to maintain normal lives abroad. She said work has become one of the few distractions helping her cope with the constant fear and uncertainty surrounding her loved ones.
“And this is just a normal Friday for an Iranian. These days, when people ask how I’m doing and how I’m handling everything, I just say:
‘It’s okay, it’s okay. It will be okay some day.’ But the reality is: nothing is okay. I’m in constant pain. I haven’t seen my family and loved ones in years, I barely hear about their wellbeing, and I’m constantly worried about them. I’m just burying myself in work because that’s the only distraction that can save me from losing my mind.”
She concluded the post with a raw admission about the emotional state of many Iranians currently living through the crisis from afar.
“I’m not okay. None of us are okay. We are just barely holding it together…”