The Long Road Towards the Inevitable in Turkey

 

The Long Road Towards the Inevitable

Tomorrow you’ll wake up realising that all your hopes and promises of happiness are not there. The comfort of a house, a pair of loving arms and the job are gone. As well as the emotional balance and self-esteem. Everything vanished a month ago when your now ex-husband shut the apartment door on the last day of your life in common. You know that all those things have been slowly disappearing along the last 10 years but now you have the perfect person to blame.

Then the weight of emptiness takes in. You feel it in your shoulders as if you were carrying a backpack full of rocks. You want to run away. Maybe quit. But go where? Quit from what? You start regretting every choice you’ve made in life. Because all of them led you to the unbearable being you are now.

You regret the 11 year-old you dreaming about becoming a famous writer. You were the shy little girl who valued the company of written words. While your colleagues made fun of your loneliness, you felt relief in words. They wouldn’t disappoint you.

Until the day you had the courage to show your writings to an adult. A friend who’s opinion you valued. After a quick reading, she gave her sentence: shallow, amateurish. You were devastated. You don’t regret you showed her your work. You regret having believed her to the point of quitting writing for several years.

As you regret when you realise that this was only the first of many times you putted your writing aside just because someone made you believe that what you do isn’t of much value. “Being a writer is not a profession” has been the repeated mantra from people around you. You heard it so many times that you believed in it. Now you know that your insecureness is what you regret the most.

An insecureness that empowered others opinions over your will. You start letting go of your dreams believing that happiness could be in a place where you cannot be judged.You also end up quitting travel after someone telling you that this kind of life doesn’t fit the normal patterns of society. You choose normality. A job. A career. The harder you try to fit in the less normal you feel.

Believing that something might be wrong with you, you quit your job. You start your own business. It doesn’t take long to realise that nothing really changed. Now you have even more hard and unfulfilling work. You regret being your own boss and have the extra responsibility towards the people working for you. You regret compromising your freedom even more.

Travel and writing become a vague memory and it scares you. You start suspecting that life is shorter than it seems and you regret wasting most of it. You quit again.

You start a journey of self discovery. You study many different subjects. Chinese Medicine, Meditation, Chi Kung. You change your perspective, you shake your beliefs, you challenge your comfort zone. Then the husband comes.

He brings his beliefs into your life. You mistake love with something else. You know that writing and travel means uncertainty. And you let yourself be convinced that uncertainty doesn’t go well with marriage. You opt once more to put your dreams aside and help him being successful supported by the romantic idea: “if you’re happy, I’m happy”

When regret arrives again you understand you were wrong. Romantic love is not a good excuse to avoid taking full responsibility to make your dreams come true.

You tell him you need to change. That you are suffocating your true nature. You need to write, to travel. You’re not a housewife. A few month later he tells you “I can’t be with a woman who travels. Not knowing when you are home or for how long you will be absent creates too much instability in my life”.

He leaves and you feel again like the devastated 11 year old who believed a bad review. You regret letting yourself guide by other people’s opinions. You will regret it for a whole month. You’ll cry, you’ll be angry and you’ll pity yourself. Everyday.

But tonight I promise you it will be different. It will be the first day you haven’t cry in a month. And just before going to bed, you’ll realise that the cause of your regret is your tendency to overvalue what the world thinks of you.

Hang in there, my dear me, it is almost over. Tonight right after buying a ticket to Istanbul you’ll finally make an important decision. Maybe the most important in your whole life: You choose writing. You choose travelling. And you are grateful to every one in your past that led you here.

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2 responses to “The Long Road Towards the Inevitable in Turkey

  1. Hi:
    A visit to Turkey is a cure for unhappiness and a gift of love for the soul. I have been fortunate to visit Turkey twice, both times basing myself in Istanbul. The Turks are warm and embracing, and have a true sense of family and when I think of my experiences in Turkey the call to prayer is present in every one.
    I hope your time in Turkey brought you peace and a sense of well being, and I wish you luck on your journeys. Louise

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