i don’t know what to say about this year. it was scary, confusing, surreal. the first half was close to heavenly, and the second was close to hellish. i say ‘close’ because i couldn’t help but find heavenly moments in bad days and melancholic moments in good days.
confusion became my best friend over those months. while the first half of the year i was lovers with gratitude, confusion came one day in June or July and snuck its way into our bed. i became an ambiguous amalgamation of loneliness and wholeness, joy and sorrow, love and fear — so much fear. in the first half of the year, i lived my days in childlike astonishment. i woke up and thought the same bubbly thoughts and did the same things; but i wasn’t the least bit bothered or bored because a sense of joy was dancing around me. i was gliding in an ocean of gratitude and joy.
come summer, my arms began feeling weak. i couldn’t peddle with ease anymore. i could see myself pushing up the stream rather than flowing through it. a part of me was sitting there watching, still and surrendered, knowing that this was just another lesson for me to learn. yet the majority of this nation of voices that make up my earthly self were raging. i spent the summer holiday in my favorite places on the planet, İstanbul and Seefeld, yet allot of my poetry was the blood of my melancholic body rather than the nectar of my joyous soul.
however, i can’t deny that even in my sadness i found ways to find joy in my days. i would wake up early every morning and go for a walk either by the sahil in İstanbul or amidst the mesmerizing greenery of Seefeld. i would have a book in my hand, and an audiobook in my ears. i would be inspired by the pure oxygen and breathtaking scenery to unleash my inner turmoil in letters that i would email to my dearest friend who was in the opposite side of the globe. i would sit at one of the handful of cafés in town, order an americano, and i would lose myself in words, reveling in this gift of nonjudgmental and uncensored self-expression that i got to share with the most loving soul that sees light in my darkness and talent in my nonsensical blabber. i would walk out of the café, reentering the world of people and the intangible feathers of laughter they spread in the air, feeling refreshed and alive. my eyes would gleam like two full moons reflection the sun of my soul. my body would be bursting with vitality from the love pumping my heart and it would be full of energy from the euphoria of having written something beautiful.
August came with a wave of melancholy climbing my bones and wrapping itself around my body like a cloth. time lost its meaning and my body completely lost sense of it. doubt crept up my veins like a disease. i lost sight of my ambitions and aspirations. like a deflated balloon, i descended from faithful joyousness to doubtful stagnation. the hopeless old woman in me snorted once and said that my joy was a phase of wishful ignorance. her stubbornly hoarse voice was in a constant one-sided brawl with the innately joyful child in me that knows nothing other than an utterly pleasant existence.
i would sleep as the sun was rising and wake up as it was setting, spending the hours in between either reading or watching something to keep my attention as far away from my conscience and sadness as possible. a few days into this, my hands picked up my laptop on a whim and began writing what i suspected was a short story. it was inspired by my current state of unexplainable sorrow; it was the fruit of my pain turning itself into art.
as i worked on it every evening for two months, it grew from a short story to a novel whose writing was cut short due to my subconscious resistance to completion and success. the only thing i knew was that i wasn’t dying before finishing it. that was September, and it was the first time in my life that i had something more dear to my heart than death; something that would replace my lingering plea for cessation with a sweet feeling of wanting to live, wanting to be here in this world.
in October, the knot of fear that had been hiding in the darkness of my being came to light. the rebel within me that thought it was strong and could handle to actually live its unconventional ideas got slapped with the reality that i was only rebellious to what i was forced to do, and that my urge to rebel gets deflated the moment i do what it says and face the fear and decide to go back to the easy way of living where i do what i’m meant to be doing at the age of 18: studying, because high school graduation doesn’t mean the end of academic education.
November was a continuation of October’s unpleasant discoveries. what i found out about myself during those 30 days could make up an entire book of agonizing and disconcerting self-reflection. what i discovered was so painful and embarrassing that i couldn’t even admit to myself what i knew had just come to my awareness.
all i can say is that i’ve come to the conclusion that being human is — as silly as it sounds — very much like being an onion. multiple layers are covering your true essence, and you must peel them as you go, your eyes burning and weeping at the effect of the shocking sight of what you’ve been accumulating in your psyche from the moment you were conceived in your mother’s womb.
the most significant example of how this year entwined good and bad in such an impeccable and bewildering way is that while my problem with food and my body had been resolved in an effortless and unexpected manner, my sadness still remained. it’s as though the heaviness had transferred from my body to my very being, my very existence.
to put this year simply, here’s a comparison: in January, i was a blooming sunflower amidst a field of blooming sunflowers feeling utterly grateful and blessed and lucky to be me; in December, i very often caught myself wishing i wasn’t me, that i wasn’t this girl in this family, in this life with all those distant dreams, in this human vessel living a life that lacks true meaning and fulfilling purpose.
