in the belly of the fish

I am a huge fan of new beginnings. It’s why I love Mondays, the 1sts of every month, new years, new seasons, solstices and the like. I love that our lives are so finely ordered -- even within a single day, that I have new hours, new minutes, new and neat ways to cut time. It all comes down to time management I guess, or time acknowledgment, more accurately.

2020 has been an especially challenging year. On January 1, I was at a diner with my best friend, listening to Tears of a Clown on the jukebox. The rest of the year consisted of walking thousands of steps in the city of New York, hanging out with friends, wearing masks, reading poetry, becoming a US citizen, going to Arizona, Istanbul, Chicago, and ultimately moving back to Virginia, buying new jumpsuits, completing puzzles, celebrating birthdays during quarantine, fasting the whole of Ramadan with just my family, choreographing cowboy duels with my brother to be filmed in slow motion, starting consistent monthly contributions to organizations fighting for female liberation, becoming 23, finding a job, swimming, painting, embroidering, getting a haircut, and learning to drive.

The COVID scares and grief is also real. The longing, the faded frustration, the loneliness we are resisting day to day. Both of my parents lost uncles to the virus, both in Turkey. Having immigrated to the US 12 years ago, we are unfortunately aware of the pain that distance adds to grief. Not being able to attend the rushed funerals, not being able to console either of my grandmothers. Not being able to conceive really, that people I used to know and talk to, are no longer there. The next time I go to Turkey, I won’t be able to hug them or joke with them or watch them as they smoke cigarettes, leaning out of balconies.

Yet, despite everything, I continue to witness the infinite resilience of humankind. This week, while FaceTiming my grandmother who lost her younger brother less than a month ago, she told me and my younger brother a story from her childhood. When they were very little, and my great-grandmother was a single mom working as a nurse, she gave my great uncle some money and told him to get his haircut while she was at the hospital. My great uncle, being a child, spent the whole day outside and then used all his money to buy candy instead of paying for the haircut his mother told him to get. When he finally arrived back home, no money, and no haircut, my grandmother feared he would be in a lot of trouble so she decided she would cut his hair herself and they could safely fool their mother. But mind you, she was also a kid at the time, so the haircut was terribly botched. When my great-grandmother came home and saw the botched haircut, she originally feigned belief but later revealed that she knew the haircut was an inside job.

My grandmother says that laughing and crying are inseparable twins. So we cried and we laughed as we reminisced about her younger brother. His impeccably clean undershirts, his neverending stash of mints, the cats he used to feed outside of his house, and his flip phone with minutes which he had refilled before he was transferred to the ICU so he could call my grandmother and his friends easily when he would be discharged.

My grandmother Selma and her brother Arif, may God rest his soul

It is comforting to know that he is not gone in the way people have come to fear. He will never fade into obscurity, or become nothing – he continues to exist, not just in our memory but in the timeless knowledge of his Creator. I am grateful for that.

We are experiencing life and death in a warped and unusual way this year. There is also that. Spring and Winter, spent mostly indoors. We were wholly alienated from arguably the most natural reminder of the cycle of birth and rebirth. Unable to fully enjoy the new colors of spring, and similarly unable to realize how they leave us every winter. I think this exacerbated our collective hopelessness and existential dread.

Staying indoors, cut off from our emotional and social support systems and hanging by a virtual thread, we received (and continue to receive) a deluge of bad news. The deadly fires in Australia and California, the huge explosion in Beirut, the climbing death toll of COVID patients, the relentless violence of the state against black people, the femicide epidemic in Turkey, forced sterilization of women at the border, rising global temperatures, millions of evicted families...

I don’t think we were ever meant to be exposed to this much information with this much moral valence, at this rate. We are not really equipped to handle it, at least, I am not, and from what I see on social media, a lot of you aren’t either. The people who can handle it are in fact, the people who are NOT terminally and continually online like us. They seem to have heard the oracle of Delphi, and they have run with it. Know thyself, know thyself, know thyself.

Know your limits, know your weaknesses, know what triggers your relapses, know what leads to your spirals. Know what you need to feel motivation, and know when to stop so you don’t fall deeper into despair.

I did a lot of consuming this year, and not much producing. I don’t mean that in a disparaging, woefully capitalist way, I mean that in a regrettably consumerist way. I read a lot of articles and books, watched a lot of TV, listened to a lot of music, but I only wrote half-hearted and half-developed thoughts on Twitter or Instagram just to proclaim that I did in fact do those things. I know that when I sit down, I can churn out 5,000 words and maybe even more, about a single movie or a single episode of a TV show.

I settled instead, for 280-character tweets or threads consisting of 280-character tweets and called it a day. I didn’t take that many photos this year, I didn’t write for this blog, I didn’t make videos. I didn’t commit, I think, which is very uncharacteristic of me. I have never been one to shy from commitment, in fact, I probably take too much pride in giving things my all and being earnest against the backdrop of irony-poisoned contemporary culture.

Is that an inauthentic performance in and of itself? Tune in for an answer in my next blog post, but until then I just want to say, I am reclaiming my time. I think I wasted a lot of time this year, which is of course, extremely sad and distressing in retrospect. I learned about myself too, but still. I wish I was wiser (who doesn’t?).

I know that I won’t be orchestrating system-level changes by myself or through my individual decisions, but I want to commit in this new year, to plan a life that I love. I want to build habits that I enjoy, help in ways that are meaningful, and consume mindfully.

I want to take my time, I want to be deeply intimate with myself and my solitude. I want to live a life where I don't scramble frantically to fill every waking moment with distractions and coping mechanisms. I want to know myself so that I can stay informed and stay grounded in a sustainable way.

So on that note, I want to thank everyone who was a part of my life this year. I will step into 2021 with a renewed sense of self and exploration (God willing) and I am excited for myself. I pray that all my friends and family and readers who found their way here have a wonderful new year filled with prosperity and health as well.

Lots of antibodies,

Nur Banu