Chapter 1 - Testing
This will probably be the only piece on this blog where my tone sounds this personal. Most of the time I am more comfortable observing things from a distance than speaking directly about myself. I prefer dissecting patterns in people, culture, and belief rather than exposing the person behind the observations. But this story cannot really be told from that distance. So if you are reading this, consider it a rare moment. This is not really an essay. It is simply me speaking to myself while you happen to be standing close enough to hear it. The rest of what I write here will probably return to its usual colder tone, but this story needs to remain personal because it explains why any of these words exist at all.
Writing was never supposed to become anything serious in my life. For most of the years I have known myself, it existed quietly among many other curiosities I picked up along the way. I have always been the kind of person whose mind refuses to stay in one place for too long. Throughout my life I have drawn obsessively, learned instruments, thrown myself into sports, swimming, dancing, and languages simply because the structure of a new skill fascinated me. My mind collects things like that. Writing lived somewhere inside that restless collection, and to be honest I never even considered it my strongest one.
I make my living with my voice. Conversations, negotiations, reading people while they speak and adjusting the direction of a discussion while it is still unfolding. My instincts have always been sharper in spoken language than on paper. Writing never felt like a weapon or a talent. It felt more like a quiet place where I could test my own thoughts without anyone interrupting them.
But the habit itself began much earlier.
When I was a child, my father gave me a notebook. It had thick paper and no lines, the kind that is usually meant for drawing. At the time it was supposed to be my sketchbook. The pages were strong, slightly textured, and meant to hold charcoal or ink. But somewhere along the way I started writing in it. Slowly, page after page, that sketchbook stopped being a place for drawings and started becoming something else.
It became my diary.
At first it was the same kind of childish diary every kid writes. Small records of ordinary days. Today I built a sandcastle. Today I planted something in the soil. Today something funny happened. Those early pages were not reflections. They were simply proof that a day had existed.
But somewhere along the way the notebook changed its role in my life.
Without noticing when it happened, I stopped writing about what I did and started writing about what I noticed. Mostly about people. Small reactions that felt strange. Moments where someone’s words did not match their behavior five minutes later. Contradictions that stayed in my mind longer than they should have.
At that time I did not have the language to explain what fascinated me about those observations. I only knew that something about human behavior kept pulling my attention back to it. And maybe the truth is that the diary slowly became something more than just a notebook.
It became a kind of friend.
Because when I was younger, I never really knew how to make friends properly. ADHD has a strange way of isolating you while still making you incredibly social. I have always been an extrovert. I can talk to anyone, anywhere, and conversations come easily to me. But forming stable friendships took much longer to understand. For a long time, I did not know how to stay inside those relationships.
So the notebook listened.
And I kept writing.
Around the time I reached high school, another habit began to grow next to it. My obsession with memorizing things.
It started with languages. Whenever I encountered a word or phrase that fascinated me, I felt the urge to remember it exactly as it was. This weird obsession or skill, whatever you wanna call, cost me to learn 4 language by the time I was 25 years old. Later that same habit extended to literature. That was when Attila İlhan’s poems entered my life.
For reasons I still cannot fully explain, those poems stayed with me. I began memorizing them almost instinctively. Not casually, but the way someone memorizes something they feel compelled to carry with them. I would repeat the lines quietly while walking somewhere or doing something ordinary, almost like a prayer whispered under my breath.
The strange part is that the emotions inside those poems were describing things I had not experienced yet. Heartbreak, tragedy, betrayal. I did not fully understand them at that age, and yet repeating those lines felt important to me in a way I could not explain.
Looking back now, I think those poems were teaching me something before life did.
They were my strange way of becoming human through someone else's pain.
I repeated them the way a religious person repeats sacred words, hoping to become a little closer to holiness. Except my prayers were not meant to make me holy. They were meant to make me human.
“ Jezabel kan içinde yatardı…” Sinful Queen, Izabel.. poor damned soul.
Even when I did not fully understand the meaning of those lines, repeating them allowed me to memorize the emotion first. The experience would come later. But the feeling was already waiting somewhere inside me.
Somewhere in the middle of those years I also tried writing a novel. I think it reached something around one hundred and twenty pages before I stopped. I barely remember the plot anymore. What I remember clearly is what happened after I finished it.
I could not keep it.
The idea that those pages existed under my name made me deeply uncomfortable. I ended up giving the entire manuscript to my best friend at the time, almost like handing over something fragile that I did not want to carry myself. I trusted her to keep it somewhere safe.
It was not embarrassment exactly. It was something closer to shame.
Writing reveals too much of the way your mind works. Once those pages existed, I could no longer pretend those thoughts lived only inside my head. They had taken a form outside of me.
And letting someone read them felt strangely similar to standing naked in front of someone without knowing whether you actually trusted them to see you like that.
For a long time after that, writing remained private for exactly that reason. The diaries continued, the observations continued, but they stayed inside notebooks that belonged only to me. Those pages were never meant to be shared. They were meant to function like a mirror.
I would write something down simply so that months or years later I could return to it and ask myself questions.
Why did I think like this back then?
Why did this belief feel so obvious at the time?
Why does the same idea feel different now?
Eventually that quiet habit decided to turned into this blog.
Not because I suddenly wanted readers. The idea of people reading these things still makes me slightly uncomfortable. I will keep my blog as a secret as well. But I realized that I needed a place where I could keep writing freely without constantly adjusting my thoughts to other people’s expectations. Think of it as a suicide notes. I don't want my loved ones to go through bunch of papers to figure me out, or if I ever decide to share my darkness and shadow of my mind with someone, I want this platform to be used as a summary to years of collection.
Or maybe, simply, I need a quick access to my thoughts at this point.
Most personal blogs today are either self-help diaries or aesthetic mood boards. I never wanted mine to become either of those things. What interested me was something closer to personal anthropology, using my own experiences as a lens to observe patterns in people, belief systems, and behavior.
Because even when I write about my feelings, what I usually end up examining are the structures around them. The cultural assumptions people carry without noticing. The emotional reflexes that repeat across different lives. The invisible rules that shape the way people behave without ever being spoken aloud.
That is the real reason I write.
Not to impress anyone.
Not to educate anyone.
Not even to express emotions in the way people usually expect writing to do.
I write because it allows me to observe my own mind the same way I observe the world.
Writing creates distance between the person who experiences something and the person who examines it later. A sentence written today becomes evidence tomorrow. And years from now, when I read these pages again, I will probably meet a version of myself I barely recognize.
She will have different beliefs. Different conclusions. Different certainties.
But at least I will know how she thought at that moment.
For most of my life writing existed privately for exactly that reason. It was never about producing something beautiful or persuasive. It was about leaving traces. Little pieces of evidence about the way my mind worked at a particular time in my life.
Publishing those traces here still feels strange sometimes. Because every page carries a version of me that cannot hide behind distance anymore. It is simply there, thinking exactly the way it did when those words were written.
Years from now I will probably read these pages and feel like I am meeting someone I used to know very well but no longer fully understand.
But maybe that is the point.
Because writing was never meant to create a perfect version of myself. It was meant to document the imperfect ones as they passed through time.
And if one day I return to these words and realize how much I have changed, then at least I will know one thing for certain.
At that moment, whoever I was when I wrote them, she was honest about how she saw the world.
And sometimes that is the only thing writing is truly capable of preserving.
For those who will read this, welcome, with my deepest regards. It is a strange honor to host someone who will examine my mind the way I so often examine the minds of others.
And for the version of Güneş who might return to these words years from now, I am sorry you had to walk through the small hells you created for yourself just to burn here once again.
Sayanora..
