The Girl Who Refused to Be Decided For

17 hours ago
3 min read

By Nahid Abyari

I was born into a country that had already made most of my decisions before I could speak.

What to wear. How to move through public space. Which doors I could walk through alone and which required a man beside me to make my presence acceptable. The rules weren't suggestions. They were walls — and the most suffocating thing about them was how normal everyone around me had learned to make them feel.

I refused to feel normal about them.

But I was sharp. Sharp enough to fight through a system where your entire future is compressed into a single university entrance rank. Sharp enough to win a government scholarship when most students were just trying to get through the door.

I thought that was the victory. I had been told it was.

Then I graduated, built a company, and it worked. Revenue. Clients. Real growth.

And I still felt the walls.

Because success in Iran, for a woman, comes with conditions. Global platforms blocked. International partnerships strangled by a passport the world had prejudged. Waking up every day in a country where the law had opinions about your body, where your ambition was tolerated up to a point — and past that point became something others felt entitled to manage.

And then there was the internet. Something the rest of the world takes for granted so completely they've forgotten it's a privilege. In Iran, entire pieces of the world simply didn't exist for me. YouTube — gone. Countless platforms — blocked, either by my government deciding I didn't need access, or by companies that had written off my entire country before I ever knocked on their door. I would sit there knowing the knowledge existed, the tools existed, the connections existed — and being told by an error page that they weren't for me.

Then, in early 2026, the government cut the internet almost entirely. For nearly three months. Not slowed it. Not filtered. Cut it — as a weapon, wielded against its own people, during the most important uprising of my generation.

I want to decide everything. What I wear. Where I grow. What I build. What I say and who hears it. I want my choices to belong to me — fully, without asking permission, without filtering myself through someone else's comfort.

That's not a radical demand. But in the life I was living, it felt like one.

Freedom was not going to come to me. I had to leave to find it.

Oman gave me back my own life.

I remember the first time I opened a website I had never been able to access before and it simply — loaded. No errors. No block. No government standing between me and a piece of the world I had always deserved to reach. It sounds small. It was everything.

I arrived carrying two things most people spend decades acquiring separately: the mind of someone who had built and run a real company — who knew from the inside what quietly destroys businesses — and the obsession of someone who had fallen completely in love with AI.

I had lived the exhaustion I wanted to solve. I knew the founder running on their own nervous system, no longer sleeping properly — not because they lack talent, but because no one ever showed them how to stop doing everything themselves.

AI, when I truly understood it, felt almost unfair in its power. Not magic — but the return of human energy to human work. The chance to lift weight that was never supposed to be carried by people, and watch what happens when a business owner finally has room to think. To lead.

That's why I built AI Profit Lab. Not for the technology. For the people drowning underneath the weight of it all.

I grew up where women's choices were made for them and the internet itself was used as a cage.

I left. I built it. I decided.

Everything I am creating now is mine — completely, unapologetically, on my own terms.

And this is just my start in my global presence.

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