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.