Being a Friend to Myself

“You need to start being a friend to yourself.”

“…What does that mean?”

I see a psychologist every Wednesday for 45 minutes. I have been seeing her for a month now. I finish up my physical science class at 12:20. Catch the 6 bus downtown. I arrive at her office a little before 1 PM and I press the little button that tells her I am there. She comes and gets me. I sit on a comfortable, oversized couch, move the Kleenex tissues closer to myself, and tell her things that are on my mind. She asks me questions, follows up with things I said before, watches me cry, and gives me a task at the end of each session. 

This past Wednesday, one of the things she told me was that I had to start being a friend to myself. 

I do not know what being a friend to myself means. 
I do not know how that manifests. At all. 

I came to the States in 2008. I was 11 years old. I started middle school here, in Fairfax, Virginia. My brother was born two years later. I am 19 now. I am in college. I haven’t been a friend to myself in 8 years. 

Perhaps, things would have turned out differently if I hadn’t come here and if I had continued living in Turkey and I was still an only child, or maybe if I had a twin sister, etc. There are a countless number of what-if’s in my head. But what matters is what I am living now, and I am living this. 

I never had to be a friend to myself before I was 12. At least, I don’t think I did. I was myself, I was happy, I felt loved, I felt worthy, I felt strong. I made people laugh. I led people. I was sure of myself. As sure as I could be, when I was 11 and 10 and 9 and 8 and 7, and 6 even. 

It all changed obviously. I came to a different country with a different culture and a different language. Had no friends, and not even a sibling. Whatever. Life was hard. I was resilient. I survived. That’s what matters. Right? That’s what I am supposed to say? I finished middle school, I learned English, I got into one of the hardest high schools in the country, and now I attend an elite institution for higher education. I am almost done with the checklist, no? I will graduate, get a job, an MS, a PhD, a few awards, a few publications, a family somewhere in there, a nice house, and a car, and then, before I know I’ll be retiring, and I’ll have money to retire safely, and it’ll all be okay. It’ll be over. 

To say that I am hard on myself is an understatement. The relationship I have with my ‘self’ is rather complicated. I don’t hate it. I don’t love it either. I have a fundamental problem with its existence – in how it exists and how it continues to exist – but I don’t know what to do about it. 
That doesn’t make sense. 

I respect it the same way you would respect someone’s right to freedom of speech. On principle. That’s a good way to put it. Anything I do that gives the impression that I am confident, self-loving, or with a strong sense of self – is calculated and on principle. Let’s think about it like that. 

When someone is rude to me, I know to be offended. I know how I should react. Ideally. So I do. It’s like this: my sense of self is like the Big Bang theory in science. Everything depends on it being true, but in the end, it is but a theory. If it were to crumble, it would bring down entire fields with it. It would shake the foundations of scientific method. It would collapse reason on itself. Etc. 

So we just operate on the axiom that it’s true. It’s the best we got, and we don’t want to dig too deep into it. That’s my sense of self. I know I have to balance an entire universe on it, so I don’t dig too deep into it. I let it exist in theory and be supported by observation. What works for the majority and what doesn’t. And go on my merry way. 

(That is – I don’t.)

The whole reason I am seeing a psychologist is because I am tired of living as a theory. I am tired of trying to uphold this tower that’s my life, when it’s been built on sand that’s slowly giving way. 

And so my first task should be to prove that my self exists, so that I can build on it. And my second should be to befriend that self. And to befriend anyone, you have to get to know them. 

So… all of this long-winded, choppy, and unpredictable block of writing is to tell you (and me) that I am trying to make changes in my life so that I can develop an authentic sense of self, first – and then become a friend to that self. 

Practically, this looks like further elimination of useless media I consume. Thus the deletion of my Twitter and Pinterest accounts, as well as various Tumblr blogs. The bittersweet goodbye to my Snapchat friends (& streaks). The restart of my IG feed. Rearrangement of my daily routine to enable more reading and writing, and less dependence on my phone and electronic devices.

My reason for these changes is that I have felt uninspired and resentful of my art, in any medium, in the past two years. Just today, going through some old photos I had taken, and poetry I had written – I felt an extreme sense of anger and disappointment. I have made art in the past that made me proud. I don’t claim them to be objectively good art, but rather art with a unique voice and vision. I seem to have lost something. 

My camera, Barnabas, is a sad example of how things have changed. There was a point in my life when I put everything on the line to get that camera. A point where I carried it everywhere with me. A point where I would take interesting objects and go on spontaneous photoshoots. I named it, for God’s sake. I named my camera. There was a point in my life where I did that for all the things I loved. For all the things near and dear to my heart. And now? People have to tell me to bring my camera. And each time it happens, preemptive dread fills me. I imagine the weight of it around my neck, all the blurry shots I’ll have to delete, what people will think of the photos that end up being usable. Even the little technicalities overwhelm me. I’ll have to make sure to charge it, and bring the right memory card, and transport all the photos etc. etc. 

I haven’t written a poem in almost a year. What happened? It’s not as if I stopped feeling things. What did I lose?

I had fun projects, and interesting ideas, and things I enjoyed doing for myself. 

Am I in a constant state of performance? Perhaps. Am I trying to live through other people? Person X does photography, and Y does art, and Z is a good writer. And they are all better at it than I am. I’ll kill my own passion, cloak what I am doing as collecting inspiration, and then be miserable but not show anybody. A perfect plan.

In any case. I hope this will help with the calibration process. God willing.

Life Updates & Manifesto of Some Sort

I had quite the summer in these past three months and I am coming into this school year with a lot of new understandings and realizations. So here are some relevant updates, outlooks, ideologies, etc.

Just as a recap, after school ended in mid-June, I traveled to Turkey and I hadn’t been there in six years so it was definitely a remarkable experience. I was there for a month and a half and I had a bunch of epiphanies and also lived through an attempted coup, an airport attack, and a two-week long panic about how I was going to get back to the States. After (ultimately) making it back to the US, I helped my parents move, stayed with them for 35 days, and then came back to Chicago to train for a weeklong pre-orientation program in which I had a leadership role. And tomorrow, school is starting, so… busy summer.

Last year was my first year in college and it was overwhelming. I did a lot of things and got involved in a lot of stuff that I had no experience in. Towards the end of spring quarter I realized how emotionally and mentally drained I had become. I thought about this during the summer and reached the conclusion that I needed to change some things in my life so as to not burn myself out.

I was involved in a lot of student activism and organizing on campus – and as much as I admire activists and all they do, I have realized that it is, in the end, not for me. Not everyone is fit to be an activist, not everyone wants to be one either. I never considered myself an activist in high school and I never had a goal in life hoping I would become a radical revolutionary. I have friends I can’t relate to who wish to get arrested for doing righteous things, but alas. After a year of being engaged in all sorts of activism, I see myself taking a step back from the scene and leaving it to people who are sincerely passionate about it. This has come in the form of unsubscribing from political news, news outlets and sound bites; not publicly sharing every article and blog I read with reactionary commentary; being more conscious on social media; and not having opinions on things I am not fully informed about. 

I am, of course, not becoming apathetic – I feel things deeply and am easily affected by any kind of an emotional overload – but I am choosing to reassess what I consume, how I react to it, and what I regurgitate.

After I came down from the high of the past year, I think I was packing my clothes to move out of my dorm room when the Orlando shooting happened. Shortly after, Huffington Post and AJ+ started a live stream of Donald Trump giving his public statement on the tragedy. The election cycle had already been hurtful enough but that was kind of the tipping point for me. For about 20 or so minutes he bashed on Muslims and Islam and got praised and lauded at every sentence. I realized that I no longer had the emotional energy to listen to or deal with Trump and that I also just didn’t have to. Because I also understood that trying to battle Trump and co. is not my responsibility.

I have always believed and continue to believe that people do terrible things due to a lack of morality and integrity. Therein lies my field of interest – aka. looking for the meaning of life, the philosophy of our being here, how we interact with each other, with our surroundings, what principles govern those interactions, and all the existential questions we can think of.

I once had a heart-to-heart with a friend who told me that their identity was so linked to a certain thing that there would be no them without this thing. I think for me God symbolizes the same thing. Meaning that my identity and who I am as a person is so inextricably connected to God, and my (hopefully) lifelong quest/journey to know and understand God, that there would be no me as I am today without God. (I mean, also literally there would be no me without God but I digress).

Getting into the topic of identity, first and foremost I consider myself a Muslim. For me, this doesn’t mean that I am part of the second biggest religion on earth and do XYZ acts like fasting and praying five times a day, but rather I am someone who is always, actively, trying to believe in and submit to the oneness of God, in every instant of life. I want to explore this further and calibrate my life according to it. I want this to be the foundation for how I build my life. And it's kind of a hard thing to do when I have hours and hours of emotional strain on me every week.

In addition, while I have a great respect for big projects that start at the grassroots, my philosophy is to start change within myself, and then my family, and then my friends, and then my immediate social circle, and grow from there. An exponential growth. I wrote about this way back in 2013 (get ready for a cheesy as heck blogpost from 16-year-old me). I hold the same belief today. If I can change myself, and three other people, and those three people change three other people, we can change a million people in just 13 iterations and so on.

There is a saying in Turkish that’s along the lines of, if everyone cleaned their own doorstep, all the streets would be spotless. And in the spirit of Malcolm X, people work better within their own scopes, and within their own spaces. A collective responsibility in all of humanity would fix all our ailments (God willing).

Trump and all the white supremacists, racists, misogynists, bigots, etc. like him belong to certain communities and it’s those communities that need to take care of them. To resist their rhetoric and to stop it from spreading.

It’s not on me to solve people’s unfounded problems with me. It is not my responsibility to humanize myself or justify my existence. It is not my duty to go out of my way to educate other communities in how to be decent people.

I have myself and my communities to improve first.

I think it all comes down to self-awareness. We need to be self-aware of ourselves, of our people, of our communities, of all the identities we don and all the associations we make. We have to be aware of all the problems our communities have and work to solve those problems.

I do not mean solve problems that only concern members of our communities but rather solve problems that we have within our communities. As a Turkish Muslim woman who is living in America, I belong to many different communities. And I believe that my talents and convictions are best put to use when I am working with the people I relate to. The Muslim community has problems – whether it be with domestic violence or with LGBTQ+ friendly spaces – I am much more effective battling these problems within my community, where I know the people and the culture, than going out to communities I have no relation to, and preaching to them.

Making this decision, writing this post, going through the actual mental process to come where I am now, made me feel really anxious all these months. I fear that my friends might disapprove of this decision and judge me/unfriend me. Obviously they have the right, but in the end we all want acceptance of some sort so I hope and pray that I retain all the beautiful friendships I have made over the last year.

People change. I’m changing the direction and flow of my life to be more conducive to my soul-searching (even though now I sound pretentious… oh well).

So here is to a new me. May this new year bring good moments, good conversations, fulfilling experiences, and supportive friends.

Eid Imagined

I had written this for my common app, senior year. It's a mishmash of some memories and some dreams. I haven't been to Turkey in 6 years, this is the first day of Ramadan, and I really miss my grandfather – so I thought I'd share this snapshot of what Eid will always look like in my mind.

Here’s how it goes. We are fasting the day before Eid when we board the bus that’ll take us to my grandmother’s house. The ride is two hours, and I sit next to my mom, alternating between reading the book on my lap and looking out the window.

I have different landmarks for this journey, each one a measure of how long it takes for me to read a chapter from my book, and how much closer we are to the small county of Gemlik. I look for the huge McDonalds billboard first. A business trying to sell fast food in a country that has 81 provinces, 7 regions, and 21 sub-regions, each with its own intricate and unique cuisine. There is a tunnel that goes through a hill, and I stop my reading in the dark. As if on cue, my dad leans over from the seat behind us and comments on the wonders of humanity. How marvelous it is that even small mountains can’t stop humankind when it needs roads to follow.  After the tunnel, there is only a lumber mill and an orange apartment complex before I’m leaning over my mom and finally looking at the Marmara Sea.

The sloping hills and curving shorelines of Gemlik are welcoming in their geography – relaxed, like the people who have abandoned their usual routines this month. Most of the street vendors are closed, as are the family restaurants, and most adults are sitting under trees, watching their children gulp down glasses of lemonade and eat ice cream. But don’t be fooled. In a few short hours, the city will be buzzing with energy and renewed joy for the three days that follow.

Later that night, we break our fasts and file into the mosques. I pray on the second floor because from up here, I can see everyone moving together, standing in perfect lines, and prostrating at the same time. Around me, there is centuries old architecture, glass chandeliers, and prayer beads in between people’s fingers. I want to take their photographs, and write their stories. And I do. I record snippets of conversations overheard and snap pictures of neatly folded prayer rugs. It’s a narrative of unity.

We reach my grandmother’s house when the sun starts to set. She and my grandfather live on the second floor of a three-story apartment. The first floor is a shoe repair shop; the third houses the landlord. I can see my grandparents in their balcony from a hundred feet away. My grandmother watering her plants, my grandfather smoking a cigarette, waving at people periodically. I wish I had a Polaroid camera to capture it, but for now, the Nikon D3100 will do.

They rush downstairs the instant they see us walking up the sidewalk. As soon as we are inside, my grandmother pulls me into the kitchen and shows me the stuffed grape leaves. Next to it, of course, is yogurt and baklava, along with freshly brewed black tea. We sometimes joke that it’s tea running in our veins and not blood. After all, we Turks are the largest consumers of tea in the world. In the morning, if it’s chilly, my grandmother and I will fill the old wood stove with logs and paper and brew a new pot of tea. We are both early risers.

But now, we are all sitting on the ground, a big tray in front of us. We have cold water, dates, red lentil soup, grilled Turkish meatballs, and flatbread from the bakery across the street, but our glasses and plates are not yet filled. The call to prayer starts across the city, all the mosques in nearly perfect synchronization. I close my eyes and listen. There is no impatience here, only serenity.