In honor of Earth Day 2020, we're rolling out stories on how climate change impacts mental health all month. In this op-ed, Saya Ameli Hajebi writes about health, home, and how she's working to protect it.

I remember going to sleep every night to the same dream as I was growing up in Iran. I dreamed that I lived in the woods, that I could play tag through the pomegranate trees with my brother Sarmad in Shomal, the north of Iran. We would be showered with morning dew as we crashed through the leaves. I dreamed that I could drink from the river that flowed like glass, the river my mom lifted me over so I wouldn’t be swept away by the currents when I reached down to catch the little silver fish. In those dreams, I breathed in the scent of bahar narenj under clear blue skies every time the wind weaved a soft hand through my hair, but my dream was interrupted by a pressure rising up inside my throat: A cough. I couldn’t control it. The gap between each cough shortened coming too quick for me to breathe in between.

My eyes snapped open. I wasn’t the one coughing. It was my brother was coughing—again.

Sarmad’s heavy coughs penetrated the thin walls of my room. I didn’t need to read the air pollution report to know it was bad; my brother’s lungs always told the whole story much faster than the morning newspaper did. I could already hear my mom ripping her bedsheets away and running into his room to get him his inhaler, but all I could feel was red heat bubbling up inside me.

My mom was telling him to calm down while she assembled the special device they’d made my brother to administer the drug more effectively, but my body felt numb. I could hear short puffs of air, my mom telling him to breathe. It felt like my hands were tied. I wanted to walk into his room to help, but as a 7 year old with no medical training, I knew I would just get in the way. I was powerless in the face of the smog that hung over our apartment, intentionally located as far outside the city as we could afford.

To me, climate anxiety was never a term used to describe fear of a future environmental catastrophe. Climate anxiety was living and breathing right next to me, like a black wolf ready to pounce at the people I loved, my brother, my family. It meant uncertainty about whether or not school would be canceled from the pollution in Tehran. It meant having a blue plastic drum filled to the brim with clean water in case our water supply was shut off again. It meant fear for what could happen to my brother if air pollution reached new extremes. It meant I could dream of blue skies, but wake up to a grey nightmare. Climate anxiety was just another piece of my reality and I didn’t think that I had the power to change it.

* * *

In 2011, my family moved to the U.S. My mother’s first words as we stepped off the plane in Boston were, “Look up! I’ve never seen the sky so blue.” As I tilted my head up, my whole world turned upside down. This aerial ocean covered a city not too different from Tehran, and yet my brother’s chest rose and fell with ease. For a moment, all my anxiety about the climate crisis fell away. I wanted this blue sky to be endless. I wanted this blue sky to surround my family forever.