drive yourself home. it will never be the cure because it cannot be cured by an external force. it is what can be clearly revealed to you when you squeeze that one person out of the picture for a minute. what is present in your life, with you, without that? it is why we so romantically say you take me out of myself because we start thinking of ourselves completely consisting of the instances of being with that person or thinking about that person. so, what you have after squeezing that person out of your life is what’s actually yours. the more you keep your focus there, the easier life flows. the easier your mind can be.
so, it is what you already have. what do you already have? a life you are building step by step, that is in the process of being formed. a pure excitement that is yours. a profession you are trying to master. a book you’re in the middle of reading. the songs you’ve been playing on repeat recently. something to look forward to. a friend that always calls. something you are ready to try. thoughts to write about. conversations to write about. your birthday. new plans. new decisions. new steps to take with that new attitude. only you to persuade.
a room of your own is what you have. oh, and it was regarded as prosperous, it was deemed precious back in the day, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” says Virginia Woolf. what you always have is the freedom to shape and reform yourself over and over again. reinvent your approach, restyle your image, explore your mind further, make yourself happy over and over again. what you have is the freedom to be creative.
use that irresistible force to dive inwards. to meet yourself there again. because the cure cannot come from an external force. the key you attach from the outside does not match the lock inside. it is one more lock away. then he can try. but first, unravel yourself to you. find the key inside, really. busy yourself with that for a while now. drive yourself home.
a new identity and i am not sure why i crave it. not necessarily a brand new identity but a return to home. the classic returning home theme in myths and all of literature. we all come back to ourselves. it is all a path to finally arrive at the starting point. who you were in the beginning. who you have been all along. but there was too much noise. too much noise to realize. all your life you try to sculpt yourself an image that you deem good or important. because you hear too much noise and the mold clearly shifts shape all the time. so you are left with confusion, not knowing which pieces fit and which pieces do not, all the while your shoulders were tight, your jaw clenched. all the while, it was already there. you just had to loosen your shoulders and unclench your jaw. you didn’t need to be anything else than what you already were. the attempt to sculpt an identity was in vain. it was already there, right behind the tight shoulders and a clenched jaw.
“no need to hurry. no need to sparkle. no need to be anybody but oneself.”
Virginia Woolf
as for me, i am doing my best to discover the unhidden depths of what i have always been behind the mountains of failed sculptures, right behind the clenched jaw and tight shoulders. i am subtly planning a return to home within myself. how long was Odysseus gone? trust me, i am doing my best to stop taking myself so seriously and let myself just be without sculpting anything else on top of it. i am getting closer and closer to finally cleaning the mirror.
and the fog disappears. when played back to back, the end and the beginning of the songs i naturally like and listen to start fitting each other. not the songs you listen to because you want to impress someone. not the songs you tolerate because it is cool to listen to them. what i find naturally cool starts feeling like my cool. the colors i want to wear are finally mine. the colors return. the books return, the music returns, scrabble and chess return, beauty returns, friend in me returns, gentleness return, what i actually do to make me happy return. and i return home to myself. and every myth ends that way.
and every morning i feel the flow of being me running through and between my legs. and it wants to spend some time with me. and i finally clean the mirror. and what i see is not strange, it is not brand new, it is what has always been there. there was just too much noise. and there was just too much dust. this is how far i have got, i will let you know when i get to loosen the shoulders and unclench the jaw.
this saturday, i put on my makeup for myself, held my hand and took myself to the cinema to finally see devil wears prada 2. the last time I did this for myself was when Barbie came out and I think there is magic in women taking themselves to certain places only for their own pleasure.
i was moved by Andy’s urge to riot about how we suck the soul out of everything one by one. a true change we should be having our eyes and ears on when thinking about 2006 and 2026. in writing, in words, in art, in design, in vision, there are fingerprints of our souls. not person by person, not the way liberalism taught you. but, think about it, why does Andy approach every single person with kindness and thought and care in devil wears prada 2? no matter how evil they approach her, no matter how irritated, upset, or insulted she feels. because the purpose of the concept of a soul is not to divide or individualize, it is to remind us that we are all connected. and we are not connected because we are the same. we are connected because we get inspired by each other’s differences. we are all the same soul, not divided, but scattered in different forms, experiencing life in different tones, to the level of understanding of our own.
why are there so many different forms of paintings, so many different feelings we get from reading different authors. countless ways to imagine something, undeniably various shades of love that can be experienced and how many people experiencing love in their own ways. so many uniquely interpreted designs. all of these show how differently we look at things, how variously we perceive things. how one designer’s interpretation of a bag can be totally different from another designer. architecture. poetry. clothes, movie direction, life direction. in everything that we created in our time as humans, in everything we love, we have fingerprints of our souls. so, Andy is right, we can’t suck the soul out of everything. that was what Miranda Priestly was silently crying about as she was walking out of Milan, life is all about change but the way we live can’t be an affront to everything we care about.
the inclusion of the concept of AI taking over, not hysterically as it was shown in movies before the decade, but in an undeniably real way. we are losing our ability to perceive in our own way, to put and take meaning in our unique ways, to interpret differently, and eventually removing every fingerprint of a soul from everything that we do, in a disgracing attempt to get everything done fast, produce and consume everything hastily.
the soul is not to individualize, but to keep us connected. we are in different forms, experiencing everything from the point of our unique shades of glasses, and everything is our interpretation. certain differences irritate, upset, or even humiliate. but as Andy knocks the door of Peter and realizes, we can be not perfect together. Tom Robbins says, “We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.” and that’s sort of the whole point. not only in love interests, but in all forms of relationships and human touch. the message is not a basic and cult nobody is perfect, but we can be not perfect together. in our edgy differences, we are inspired by each other. and we put our souls into everything we create.
so, no, we can’t suck the soul out of everything.
watching devil wears prada as a kid and watching devil wears prada 2 as a grown woman was an experience, an experience that does not need shiny adjectives. it was revealing in so many ways boys wouldn’t get. boys wouldn’t get half of the depth of being a teenage girl, ever. to comprehend the unimaginable horrors beyond our imagination, at 13, we had to enlarge our imagination. and, oh, have we stopped ever since. those frozen stares of a 13 year-old girl on the swing were something beyond maths class. the black hoodie you pull over your head meant something else for the girls. it wasn’t as endearing or as rewarding as it was for the boys. but it allowed us to become more aware of our surroundings and pushed us to think and create.
perhaps looking backwards is really the only way to move forward. i have done some pretty stupid things in the first five years of my twenties. took fast and curious steps. lost many qualities along the way, acquired so many new ones. the things that make me happy and the way i choose to be happy changed. now i realize how stupid i was being when i thought i was so smart. how i thought i knew everything but knew so little about so many obvious things. but i think the smartest thing i did was loving who i was becoming in all of those chapters.
i look at photos from 2022, mulling, and that’s a whole other person walking on earth. the hair is different, the clothes are different, the light in the eyes is shining differently. more importantly, aspirations, admirations, missions, and outcomes are different. and i would definitely hold my hand and take myself out of so many rooms. but probably some of the rooms i loved standing in would also shrink and be left out of this reality.
then my hair changed. my clothes changed. people around me always change. except for some, but they also change within. paintings on my skin change. the fights i choose to fight change. so many things i saw as freedom shift shape and look like traps now. a lot of the things i let happen seem like weird visions. as if a curtain had fallen over my eyes. i thought i saw the true colors of life but they were just the colors of the curtain over my eyes.
it’s 2026 and i feel so much younger now. so much brighter. still with a lot of qualities and burdens i know i should be shaking off. still know i am probably making some decisions i will look back at and think to myself “are you serious?” but that’s the sweet bite. i am a child of this reality. i may fall and bruise my knees along the way. i may make mistakes and dumb decisions. i may let things i should never let happen, happen. but i know the vision is getting clearer. i feel it creeping.
i stick to old photos. i stick to old collections. i stick to playlists from years ago. i stick to clothes. i stick to books and lucky pens. ever since i have known myself, this has been the case. me and sticking. perhaps shedding skin is not so bad. perhaps it won’t make me feel so cold. perhaps it is like turning the cold water on after a warm shower, it may feel tense at first but you get used to it so quickly, and you immediately see it feels a lot better. and the feeling sticks with you after the shower. you get scared of being cold but it actually prevents you from getting cold after the shower. perhaps that’s life.
it feels like i have been asleep and just woke up. is this because i am close to 25? or is it the new moon? to my surprise, a lot of people are actually right about some points of life, including mom and dad. well, especially mom and dad. i still find them to be wrong about so many things but that’s for other reasons. but in general, i may be approaching closer to a wider perspective. i find many of my previous decisions dumb. and knowing that i did all of these while thinking i was being smart, is sort of funny and sort of disturbing. because who knows how many things i am doing wrong right now while thinking i am being smart? not me. what i know is that i am so much different than i was in the beginning of my 20s. at least i didn’t get married.
oh boy, it’s happening. the urge to read poems. the urge to cry with bursts of excitement in the event of absolutely nothing but a thought. the urge to scream without any warning. the impulse to imagine outcomes relentlessly. the drive to play well written plays of kisses and making love in your head.
no matter how much you grow up, no matter how much you think you evolved and matured, love will always make you someone cringe. we need to make peace with that. that feeling of liking someone at 17 will haunt you forever. it will shift shapes but it will always find a new form. you will say that you are done for good, it will begin again on a random friday.
you will be 24, thinking it can’t find you anymore, it will knock on your door and the urge to scream will be undefeated. you will be 28, firmly stating that you cannot be entertained that way again. it will prove you wrong and mock you. at 36, you can still get a headache from thinking about someone too much. what’s more, at 60, you’re still not safe. that same feeling you had when you were 17, catching stares at the high school playground, will haunt you down and creep out of you even in your last breath.
so, you better make your peace with it. i love you and it’s cringe.
i don’t know how any of this feels wrong to you, but it does not feel wrong to me. i just think we would make so much sense if we kissed and i am about to be 25 for fuck’s sake. we would make so much sense if we touched each other’s bodies and push and pull each other.
i just think it would make so much sense for us to argue with each other. in at least two languages. don’t you think it makes so much sense? don’t you think we make so much sense? as if it is written on a script. the thought of what can be is much more powerful than all of the things that happened. so i don’t know how you think any of this is wrong. i don’t think you should keep yourself from imagining your hands all over me. when i see myself going crazy over your brains i know i am back to being me.
what if i told you i am all over the moon to have someone to inspire me? i really needed this for my writing. so thank you for standing in your suit all smart and collected and charming and witty. i never wanted to play with anyone ever since i was a kid. this is the first time i want someone to be my playmate. i think i am finally ready to share my toys but they are all in my head. that’s what they didn’t get. they thought i was being greedy but all my toys were always all in my head. i think i am finally ready to invite someone into my mind. so, are you coming over or what?
it’s cringe as fuck and you don’t even know i love you.
p.s. i can’t believe i just attached a Harvard Business Review article about how love makes you more successful in your career somewhere in this piece, due to crushing on someone smart. at least we now know stupid, slow, and useless was just a phase, and not a type. anyway, embrace the cringe and free yourself.
i have to write this one in black ink because it is the only one i have with me at this moment. but i will underline every word with the purple ink once i get a grip of it, promise. isn’t it also the entire manuscript of life itself? you have to do it with what you have first. then you can underline every part of it with the one you love. and it’s not because you don’t love black ink. it’s because it is not the one you love.
write what you know. then you will learn more. build the wall first. then you will get to paint it with the color you love. perhaps, get the bed and lay there first. then you will embroider it with the one you love. make the coffee with the French press first. then you will get the machine. but don’t forget that you may miss the taste of the one with the French press if it was enjoyed with the one you love. passion loves synchronicity with love.
everything in life consists of being present at a certain place in a certain moment. meaning is built on the road. the road earns meaning at the stop. be there and do that. let the feeling of new beginnings creep in. but make sure to add passion to it. and perhaps, you should stop before you move. perhaps you should stop because you want pace.
and you believe in love. and you miss love, if it is something you could ever miss, for you should first have it to miss it. right? but you do not miss any of them from your past. you say no to every almost love knocking on your door to welcome the real one, if it’s ready. attention doesn’t do it. sex doesn’t do it. passion, all passion wants synchronicity with love. to be complete is never about the person. it’s about all sorts of passion falling into synchronicity with love.
so, in a sense, you stop feeling your existence for a while in order to be able to say “i’m here” with the full weight of a full life.
the one who says “i’m here” combines the consciousness of waiting and being in the start of the road in her attitude. she knows she is standing still, waiting, perhaps for something or someone that will not come. and she knows it. but at the same time, she knows that when the time comes, she is certain that she will hit the road. when she says “i’m here” she is also ready to say “when the time comes, i won’t be here”, “once i find the way, i’ll hit the road”.
includes a reference to the author and philosopher Oruc Aruoba, with a piece from the collection titled “the self“, translated by me in my comprehension.
wuthering heights by Emily Brontë, written under her pen name Ellis Bell, is an epitome of a gothic novel. the atmosphere, metaphors, and symbols are all carefully presented in a way that can engulf the reader into the darkness of the book. it is melodramatic in the best way possible. wuthering heights will melancholically show you the subversive nature of “love” and how it bravely haunts the two souls it invaded forever. tragic, melodramatic, dark, and haunting. it is so easy to find yourself trapped inside the darkness when it comes to something as strong as love.
“you said i killed you, haunt me then. the murdered do haunt their murderers. i believe, i know that ghosts have wandered the earth. be with me always, take any form, drive me mad. only do not leave me in this abyss, where i cannot find you!”
love isn’t a feeling. it’s the mixture of so many dense feelings all at once. that’s why it is so complicated. love breeds many more emotional complexities along with itself. it brings joy, hope, lust, vulnerability, disappointment. you get to know yourself once again when you are in love. it is so complex that people know themselves once again when they are in love. perhaps that’s why we don’t say “she loves” directly but we say “she is in love”. that preposition could never be this powerful. you are in love because it’s a state of mind. a strong one. a brutal one. a haunting one.
some stories cannot be surmounted by weak sentences. the story of Catherine and Heathcliff is one of those stories. Emily Brontë shook the hearts of the ones who would otherwise claim to have a strong stamina to such a dreary atmosphere. criticized by contemporaries, adapted to cinema with erotic takes in modern movies with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, Brontë keeps the ghost story of the Yorkshire moors mainstream.
love is haunting. every love story becomes a ghost story eventually. the pleasure that makes you feel like you are going to die in the beginning, ends up killing you. the stars you see in the eyes burn so bright that they turn you into ashes and dust. then a funeral is thrown for the undying love. if one is brave enough to be haunted, love is buried and blankets are thrown over its cold ghost. then the other one starts watering the flower beds on the grave with crocodile tears. but when she haunts you, you will feel the coldness of her heart, in your heart. when she calls for you, you will hear the echoes in your mind. her tears will be on your face. her blood will be in your hands. and when she finally hears your fearful steps following her, her ghost will ask for one last dance. every love ends up in a ghostly scene. grace is overrated when it comes to love. curses don’t work. freedom shakes your body every time her ghost passes through you. the wailing woman reigns your hills. your disquietude means nothing to her.
in the end, the every love story becomes a ghost story. and generally in the end, love takes the woman. the woman takes the man. because being soul bound is stronger than any desire. no spoilers for the movie.
your romanticized solitude and your overstuffed melancholy will be the end of you. your devotion to desperation is almost like feeding your soul with poison. the idealization of the individual being good on its own is the modern tragedy. it creates a generation that doesn’t know about being home sick. disconnected from reality. disconnected from pain. disconnected from empathy. disconnected from trust. disconnected from each other. the price of the dolled image of solitude is putting you inside your houses, alone, isolated from human connection, so that the only way you can feel connected to others can be through buying things. the secret they don’t want you to know? people need people.
yes, you have responsibilities toward other people. no, you are not cool for saying “this is who i am”, “i don’t care about anyone else”, or “i only need myself”. you are a part of something bigger than yourself. the later you accept this the longer you will suffer. “i don’t owe anyone anything”, yes you do. you owe the friend who said “text me when you get there” a text. you owe kindness to the kids to prove them that it still exists, that there are still things worth getting better for. you have the responsibility to ask people you love how they are doing every now and then. no you’re not an individual who is outside of the commune. no, that doesn’t mean you’re free. it is quite the opposite. you’re less free every time you get fooled by the “you don’t need anyone, you don’t owe anyone anything” propaganda. because people need people. all the time.
the same structure that makes you believe you don’t need anyone, the same structure that takes away your ability to trust people, connect with people, befriend people, and care for people is going to sell you trust through baseless modern day therapy. it takes away your ability to trust and love people so that you can pay someone to listen to your stream of thoughts and pain like a friend. without judgment. the same structure locks you inside your house behind closed doors so that you can only feel connected to other people through purchasing things. but all of this will feel odd. it will never fill the void. because it lacks what’s human. sympathy. that’s why, people need people.
“emotions are not a luxury. they are complex helping hands extended in the midst of the struggle for existence.” (António Damásio)
but don’t worry. the road teaches you how to walk. you first become human when you think you are going to die from nonphysical pain, but you don’t. because if you never go to sleep with the sun with something aching inside you, you can’t make it alive. so cling to that. you lose yourself because you reject to accept the suffering. you become arrogant because you refuse to feel shame. you are avoidant because you build your walls too high. your pieces are shattering in different places of your life because you refused to cry that night, when you should’ve cried. because it ached. and when you love, scream. scream it inside. scream it outside. but accept it and live it. unconditional and unrequited sincerity is the pedestal love is sitting on. life beats right there. because people need people.
in his book “la distanza della luna”, Italo Calvino says at one time, according to Darwin, the Moon was very close to the earth. do you know what happened next? the tides gradually pushed her far away. the tides that the Moon herself causes in the earth’s waters, where the earth slowly loses energy. he says that the moon was closer back then. climbs up on the Moon? of course they did.
today, there is a new moon in capricorn. the moon may not be as close as she used to be, but she is still above us. and i still feel protected and nurtured by her.
they say that the new moons are the ideally divine times to set intentions. so, here i am. and tell me this, how impressive and beautiful it is that the new moon falls into monday, in other words, the Moon day, when the theme of the whole day is intuition. i love it when the universe sets us up for such emotionally tingling coincidences.
in the middle of everything that has been hanging from the corner of a magical propeller that is called my life lately, the only thing i manage to know for sure is that i love words. i have always believed in the power of words and have always tried to combine them together in ways to understand myself, understand others, and understand the universe. i have always tried to build them together to make myself feel the life again, and again, and again. so that perhaps one day, when someone else reads those words, they get to feel it again and again. and we make it immortal. romance can be immortal, love can be immortal, a thought and a feeling can be deeply immortal. that’s why, i have a tattoo right above my right hand, the hand i write with. it says “we write to taste life twice“.
simply put, i want to keep writing. just like i wrote when i was 8. i am incredibly content that i have never abandoned my one true love, which held my hands in the darkest of times and in the prettiest of it all. and my intention is to keep writing. my intention is that one day, my words will be heard and seen and celebrated. and my words will touch a 14 year-old girl’s heart. my words will hug a young woman in her twenties. after all, the joy of writing turns into the joy of reading. after all, the agony of the writer turns into the shelter of agony for the reader. after all, i am meant for this.
i do want a life of my own. i do want a story that is mine and i know i will be proud to call it mine this time. and for every girl who yearns for a different life, i want to prove that the propeller is going towards the right direction. even when it feels like it’s not, it will make you land on the right spot. and for every girl saying “it doesn’t rain in Septembers where i live“, i want to say “you’ll have new Septembers“.
don’t lose your lust for a better life. when i take a step back and look at my life from the outside, i see myself being thrown under earth. and then i grasp all of it. and then i scratch again. because i take my light from the moon. even though she is not as close to us as she used to be. the distance of the moon doesn’t mean she gave up on me. the distance of the moon doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel me.
when i was 19, i wrote a piece called “not mine” and depicted the yearning for a life that is not mine. i begged for a story that was not mine. everything i lived and the way i lived them made me crave for a life that was not mine. then, on may 13, 2023, when i was just about to turn 22, i wrote this.
murphy on the bed.
“i moved into a new flat with one of my best friends. the flat is just like the ones i dreamt about when i was a kid. so, the child in me is probably very happy. i finally found her a place to be. a place where she can belong. a real home to feel safe and loved in. we also have a cat, she makes the house a “home”. i think i really found a place for my inner child to finally feel safe in so that i can move on with myself.
i can perhaps finally turn to myself and give myself the time and space to grow and glow. i can write for myself again, i can read books again, i can drink coffee for just the melancholy and peace of it. these are my last days in 21. i’m turning 22 in 19 days. i wonder what is there to come. will i fall in love? will i write poems? will i find myself and take her with me to the next date i go?
in any scenario, this is a new life. and every piece of it is mine. that feels amazing. every piece of it is mine. a story that is mine. and i do not think i want a story that is not mine anymore.”
today, i am 24. and i am cautiously optimistic that the marvelous and creeping feelings of new beginnings will find me again. and perhaps life is all about endless loops between craving for a story that is not yours and feeling glad that the story is finally yours. and for some reason, i can’t stop myself from smiling at my 19 year-old self and my 22 year-old self, just like i will smile at my 24 year-old self in a minute. because in a minute, those marvelous feelings of new beginnings will be knocking my door again. and in a minute, i will be glad that the story is mine again.
sparking blog 