Asking a person living on Earth, “Have you ever been injured?” is like asking, “Have you ever drunk water since you arrived on this planet?” That person who meets the wound as a child. For example, he collided with a friend while running around in the schoolyard, or he was the target of a slipper thrown by his mother at the last limit of her patience while misbehaving, the speed of which has not yet been calculated. At least he hit the little toe of his foot on the iron leg of the bunk bed. It doesn’t take long for a person to meet a wound.
How beautiful it was as a child, when the definition of a wound was purely physical. We didn’t know that there would be injuries inside. How were we supposed to know? As someone born in the eighties, we were a generation that was fed and cared for, and the generation that raised us was not so fortunate. Half hungry, half full, they were saplings, each wearing each other’s old clothes. No one asks how they are this year compared to last year, how many centimeters they have grown or if they have given a new branch. A generation that can get lost in the crowd, occasionally get stuck behind a single rebel who comes out of their midst, and still be able to say a few words without bypassing safety precautions by taking refuge in the Creator – in order not to leave it to chance… Let me leave the generations before that out of the mix. Silent travelers of life who have handed over all their rights to speak to their parents in an unwritten contract without their knowledge, who have no name, whose existence can only be proved with a head paper. They have come and gone quietly from this world. They wore the dress they were assigned and completed the day by munching and munching, even if they couldn’t swallow the bite-sized morsels to their liking.
Ah ah! I questioned my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother a lot. My great-grandmother is the last root I can trace. Let me tell you a little bit about them, adding myself at the end. I don’t know about their childhood, they never told me. It is debatable whether they ever became children. Why? When my great-grandmother, called Peri Nene, was thirteen years old, she was married off to a widower with two children. He himself married my grandmother at the age of fifteen. My grandmother killed my mother when she was seventeen. So they’d say “little bride” instead of “big girl”. My mother made me a bride of my own free will at the age of twenty-four, and at the age of twenty-seven she barely convinced me to divorce her. Grandma Peri didn’t know the meaning of school. He couldn’t ask my grandmother to go to the school she never knew. When my grandmother lost my grandfather at a young age and became a widow, she suffered from illiteracy and gave my mother permission until she completed secondary school. When my mother tried to continue reading, she hit a hard rock and had to stop, bleeding painfully. I was brought up to run away from the greatest sin I was taught throughout my childhood and early youth. To look up from the book was the greatest evil I could do to myself and to humanity. I didn’t lift a glass, I didn’t do a handicraft. I was banished with my mother’s motto “Embroidery and sewing is unnecessary work”. I read it comfortably. I didn’t see a hand gate at a young age, but I still complained a lot. I have never been happy with anything, even though I am the luckiest of four generations. My life has become a wall of ambition full of comparisons. I wrote, I drew, I broke it all the time. Why was it like that and not like that? I was furious. This anger drove me to unimaginable places and eventually I found myself in a position I had never imagined.
Fires broke out in various corners of my heart. For each of my complaints, I threw a log on the fire and made it blaze. I turned it into one big fire. I could not choose the profession I wanted, my choice of profession was not in parallel with my success in the university entrance exam, but in line with my father’s financial concerns at that time. In addition to that, I had an unhappy marriage that ended in separation, an unaware motherhood to a tiny baby and tons of people I blamed. Anyone who prevented me from building the world I idealized was to blame. They made me this way.
What do people cling to when they are wounded inside? It varies from person to person. Some people have fun in the outside world and forget for a while, others turn inward and search for answers. I’ve done both. At first I just ignored it and tried to pass the time. Hiding behind the famous cliché “Life goes on”. Life really went on for a while. I didn’t feel any pain. Then the slaps that brought me back to my senses began to explode one after the other in my face. I fell before I had time to stagger from the force of the slaps. I couldn’t take it myself and tried to get up immediately. It didn’t happen. I tried over and over again, but each time I would get dizzy and fall down again, like a person who tries to get up suddenly from a sitting position, but his blood pressure drops and he can’t stand up. There was something I didn’t know, something that made me weak in the knees.
One day I gave up and decided to give up my effort to get up quickly and turn inward, to face whatever was undermining my effort. Wherever I saw it, I asked that “one who knows”. The same word kept coming up in response: Trauma. When I asked what this trauma was, they said “wound”. Well, I already knew that, how to solve it was the information I was after. When I deepened my research, experts and books came to the rescue. The house where I was born, those who raised me, those who raised those who raised me, and even those who raised them, a list that goes on and on, have we entered into each other with the generations I have questioned for years?
For years, I tried to complete the knotted, incomplete stories. When I thought I had solved one, the other one came crashing down on me, but I am not lying, each professional work was very useful. As I began to understand what was happening and why, the criminals became fewer and fewer around me. Those whom I had previously labeled as criminals turned out to be well-meaning officials who came to bring me together with the real me. From seven to seventy, dead or alive, everyone on the list… Everyone did what they knew, saw and learned. That is what happened, but my arrogance did not settle down. His intention was to turn my story into a detective narrative. Someone had to be guilty. There must have been pieces somewhere that I hadn’t realized and hadn’t yet put together. I didn’t let it go. But when my search turned into a nose picking session, the system got confused. How? Let me explain it like this: Sometimes when we feel something in our nose that bothers us and interferes with our breathing, we go to the sink, maybe with a little water, maybe with a spray, to clean our nose and relax. It’s a very human condition, but sometimes someone like me comes along and can’t be satisfied with the relief. Unable to silence the voices in his head, he begins to tamper with what is to find out what is not. He pokes and pokes and finally touches a vein he shouldn’t touch and makes that dear nose bleed. He opens a wound with his hands where there is no wound. Then it hurts for days. It also itches. The more they intervene, the worse they are. Even if he regrets it, he cannot go back. He keeps looking for a solution. The most ironic thing is that someone who recognizes his pain – you know, the one he had sessions of therapy to forgive – comes along and solves the problem in a flash: “Stay out of it, it will heal on its own.” And so it does. He whom he judges to wound, heals.
What a strange creature man is, sometimes he loses himself while trying to find himself. He forgets the grace of his Creator, he goes beyond his limits. The wound opens a path to the truth, and the truth seeps through the heart. The trick is to break the mind’s games. Wishing healing to the wounds.
