This Story Doesn’t Begin With Me is the first performance in the Waking Up Iranian American series. The project is an autoethnographic work focused on the ways cultural exchange develops between a performer and a participant. These encounters create a space where people are invited to participate in discussions and actions about being between cultures, nationalism, and Islamophobia, so that we might move beyond antiquated notions of free and oppressed. In this sense, the dialogical framework of the performances is a form of collaboration and, in its broadest sense, a key to changing power relationships between performers and participants. In Waking Up Iranian American, social intimacy is used as a strategy to counteract the positioning cultures of fear intend to create.