Where do I belong?
Looking at the reflection of my silent face in the mirror
not able to hear the answers in my silent tears
I asked myself a thousand times
at the top of the mountains
in the shadows of the trees
in the eyes of my mother
between the sentences of my father
I asked myself a thousand times
Where do I belong?
to the village, I was born?
to the hills, I ran?
to the obscurity inside my genes?
I asked myself a thousand times
I couldn’t get a reply
I ripped and threw out my heart
erased my emotions
Hanging in the air.
I could never belong anywhere. The problem wasn't just about the country of my birth, I couldn’t belong to the culture I grew up in. I didn’t belong to my family. I never felt I belonged to a group of friends. I imagined that if I could feel connected or that I belonged somewhere, then everything would be solved.
I accepted that I couldn’t be an alien as I got older, but I was sure I couldn't be an earthling either. I felt myself trapped inside a cocoon woven of my unhappiness. I was a thing apart. Other people were strictly separate from me. I felt this separation keenly. This distinction was so clear in my childhood, as a young girl and even now it is the same… For years, I established a completeness in my inner world with all my broken fragments. I found a way to get used to these feelings of disconnection by surrendering and accepting.
In my childhood, there were packets of chewing gum containing toys produced using lenticular printing. This printing technique meant that they would change their colours and images when they move, and for me it seemed that people are like this lenticular printing process, constantly changing, constantly in flux and contradictory, lacking clarity.
I constantly observed, read, wrote, examined, researched to understand people, but I never fully understood. It was strange as I could read the faces people didn't show but I couldn't see the faces people presented. This caused me a lot of confusion. I would listen to people's words and choose to believe them every time and yet their behavior was contradictory and at odds with their words. The more I believe them the more I got lost. The more I became lost, the more I wanted to believe them, and the more I believed them, the more I lost myself I was forever trapped in this circleMy unexplained illnesses were endless. When one illness was cured another illness would begin. My diseases were like a chain that grows constantly. My headaches, diğestive problems, and insomnia became a part of me. It became normal for me to be medicated and taking various drugs. Three days healthy, one day sick. Neither I nor the doctors could find out why I was always sickly.
I’m incredibly straightforward and trustworthy. Say the word and its job done if I say it’s going to be done. No excuses, it’s impossible for me to break my word. And I always believe other people are like me and end up disappointed. Sometimes I believe I'm stupid as despite all the disappointments, even today I still believe what people tell me and I believe in the importance of keeping one's word.
I am always searching for something. As I wander the narrow city streets, walking in the graveyards and in the parks, or moving on the waves of the sea, between the ancient trees, on the tops of mountains, between the shades of green in the valleys, along the ice-cold streams, and on the water lilies in the river beds... What am I longing for?I remember my loud screams. The times when I hit the walls with my hands and shouted: “I am unhappy”. All my life I fought not to be a victim, realizing now that I am.
Was I guilty? I didn't know what I was supposed to do, what I needed to ask. It was as if I inhabited a glass lantern made of broken pieces, constraining me, cutting me. Broken glass, broken feelings...
I have always accepted cold facts and nothing else. In order to survive, in order to find a balance in me. For that reason, I have never complained but always fought. I learned to build a completeness from my broken fragments. Without expectation, motionless, distant, introverted. I drowned in words, definitions, tasks… I forgot my essence.
We lived in mansions with swimming pools, maids, chauffeurs... I had everything but something was always missing. Writing saved me from going mad, it was an outlet and it allowed me to explore beneath the surface, beyond the superficial, but I was banned, defamed, slandered because of my writing. I was writing the truth as I saw it, and that wasn't popular.
The pain is within me, in my veins, in my breath, in my eyes, possessing my tongue, my aching teeth… “You are in pain because you always grit your teeth!” The same thing I hear every time I go to the dentist with a dead tooth. The anger and pain gathered in my teeth… More building up within me and my belly. If only enough pain was gathered inside me, I could just birth it and the pain would go away… Every day to be in as much pain as giving birth.
I created shadows. I played with shadows. I spoke with shadows. I took shelter in the shadows. As long as shadows shadowed the truth. I became what I didn’t know.
I’m “too” everything: too honest, too idealistic, too stubborn, too moral, too perfectionist, too serious, too ambitious, too emotional, too analytic, too much for other people. I always feel like a misfit. I’m like a soldier. If responsibility is given, it will be fulfilled at a cost but…There is always a but, I have always lived with but. But… I tried to understand myself. My fearless stance. My endless analyzing. A part of me that I know well, another part of me that I’ve never known. I’m in pieces…
I learned to mask myself because I have always been judged. I have a lot of voices in my mind, ghosts of decades-old voices. Telling me how I should be…“Do you really have to be so curious?”
“Why don’t you try to be the same as everyone else?”
“A married woman wouldn’t write novels like yours.”
“You can’t ride a horse after 30”
“You can’t learn how to play the piano after 40”
“No, you can’t dance on the streets”
“You’re a mother behave like one”
“You’re a writer, where has this idea of going pole dancing come from?”
“I don’t know if you’re clever or mad”
“You are this”
“You are that”
“You are…..
My soul always in pieces…
The puzzle is never completed
My hidden emotions suppressed desires….
I seem quiet, distant,
but there are screams inside me…
these screams are spreading
everywhere inside me…
I don’t want to see them…
I don’t want to hear them…
I don’t want to show them...
Suppressed, pushed away…
Comments