Mira Nassiri was 15 years old when she began writing under a name that was not her own. To express her true thoughts freely, she needed to adopt a pseudonym and a surrogate character. That character, Iranian blogger Sarah Shams, existed only online. There was no record of her in school, nor any official trace of a person by that name, but the blog posts were real, and so were the ideas that Nassiri was trying to put across.