by Beren Guler
I was lying on my bed, vibing to the songs playing. I had my hands in the air, waving them in a scissor-like motion, flowing with the rhythm. Then suddenly, the achingly true bundle of words hit me: How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22? My arms froze right where they were on that thought and slowly found their way back to my chest in the shape of an X. If only I had kept my promise to myself to listen to anything other than Taylor Swift occasionally while I was alone. I might have still been enjoying my anxiety-free time
I mumbled, “Alexa, stop!” while slowly turning on the bed to bury my face in the pillow. As Alexa couldn’t have cared less about my command, I watched the purple and blue images forming on my eyelids due to the pressure of the pillow on my eyes. This wasn’t depression again, was it? No. Calling this a depression and whining about how I always feel awful would be the easy way out. I knew how it felt to not feel a positive emotion and cry my eyes out all day. This wasn’t it. This was about having it all figured out and feeling invincible until I was 19 and about all that changing in the blink of an eye after moving from Istanbul to Munich to attend university.
It took me a while to realize the images on my eyelids started to hurt. So I turned around to face the ceiling again. The images were dancing on the white ceiling now. I had it all figured out, you know? Ever since I was a little kid, I worked hard. I had all the energy in the world to fight for what I believed was true. We weren’t rich, but I was privileged. Privileged in the sense that I could have been born into a family in Turkey who believed education for girls was unnecessary, or I could have been forced to work in the fields during the summers instead of riding my bike. I lived like a regular European kid in Istanbul. That’s why I kept dreaming bigger and bigger and believed nothing was unachievable.With the sudden necessity to start adulting earlier than expected, discovering that maybe I didn’t want to be an engineer anymore like I used to, and feeling too much like a member of an underrepresented minority, I lost all sense of myself and my dreams. Three years ago, I imagined becoming a world-class community with bright minds. Now, I was a member of an unrecognized minority with lost souls trying to make it in an unexpected reality.
I forced myself to sit straight and put my feet on the floor. As my sight went dark for a split second from standing up way too fast, the cold, hard truth hit me like the ground beneath my toes: I have been thinking and whining about specific themes for a very long time now, yet I never wanted my voice to be really heard. It was finally time. Time for me to stop making excuses for refraining from writing, produce something, and put it out there. I stood up and put clothes on which looked like something Carrie Bradshaw would wear. Not that I had her as my author-idol, but it seemed easier in the beginning to look a like a person who got up, got dressed and wrote on a daily basis, instead of my lost self.
I packed my laptop and headed to find a café in Munich I hadn´t been to before.
© Beren Güler 2023-08-14