What I Got Wrong About Strength in My Earliest Years
I came to the United States in 1985 with very little and a great deal of pressure on my own shoulders. I was a young woman from Tehran navigating a new country, a new language at a deeper level of fluency than I yet had, and the weight of everything I had left behind. In those early years at Santa Monica College and then at California State University, Northridge, I believed something that I now understand was both true and dangerously incomplete: that strength meant handling everything alone.
That belief made a certain kind of sense given where I came from. I had grown up inside real political upheaval. I had lost my younger brother. I had watched my family absorb hardship after hardship, and what I took from all of that was a conviction that self-sufficiency was the highest form of resilience. If I needed help, I thought, it was a sign that I hadn't worked hard enough or prepared well enough. So I worked harder. I prepared more. I carried more.
For years, that approach actually produced results. I finished my studies. I built a life in Los Angeles. I became the person others leaned on during their difficult moments, whether emotionally, financially, or practically. People close to me described me as someone who knows how to get things done, and I wore that description like a medal. But here's what I couldn't see from inside it: I had confused endurance with wisdom. I thought absorbing difficulty quietly was the same thing as growing through it.
The shift came slowly, not in one dramatic moment. It came through caring for my elderly mother as her health declined, through managing the real demands of dementia and dialysis schedules alongside everything else I was responsible for. And it came through building a business alongside my daughter, which required a kind of collaborative honesty I had never fully allowed myself before. Working beside someone I loved and trusted showed me that asking for support, sharing the weight, accepting input, none of that diminished what I was capable of. It clarified it.
What I think now is almost the opposite of what I believed in 1985. Strength is not the absence of need. It is the honesty to recognize what you need and the courage to build relationships solid enough to hold it. The values I carry into my work today, communication, ethics, integrity, compassion, they aren't abstract ideals. They are the specific corrections to the mistakes I made when I thought silence and self-reliance were the same thing as character.
I also think about what that old belief cost the people around me. When you are committed to appearing capable at all costs, you can become difficult to reach. You model a version of strength that looks more like a wall than a foundation. My daughter's resilience, her ability to keep moving through hard circumstances while staying open and connected, taught me that. She didn't learn it from the version of me that carried everything alone. She built it in spite of that, and watching her do it changed how I understood my own history.
There is something I want to be clear about, though. I don't regret the perseverance. Coming to a new country at a young age, studying biology and biotechnology while supporting myself, building stability out of very little, those experiences gave me something real. But the lesson I carried forward for too long was the wrong one. The grit was right. The isolation was not. Roshanak Khadem the person I am now knows the difference, even if the younger version of me couldn't yet see it.
If you're curious about the values and commitments that shape how I approach my work and the people in my life today, I'd invite you to read more on the about page or reach out directly. The shift in thinking I've described here still shapes every decision I make, and I expect it always will.