Valerie had said, we must never give the last inch of our integrity away. Clearly, Valerie has never gone through the extreme forms of depression.
The pillars of my integrity, the Circassian matriarch and the idealist researcher, shattered in my mind. I looked at my hands in terror, “Are these really my hands!?” They were white and shaking. Trying to exorcise the pain, sadness and fatigue away through music. Just didn’t work this time. It was goth/emo and the darker songs of the classics first. As the summer progressed, I got more into rembetiko.
“I have neither a home nor a road
Let me take this walk on an eerie May
Aren’t you ashamed my Motherland?
To sell your child like a slave…”
Reading “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk. Turkish translation is unintelligible. Still I got a word: dissociation. That’s it, dissociation explained the state the Turkish society was in after decades of political violence. My body was deeply dissociated as well. Quickly turned into depersonalization.
Smoking. Tobacco soothed some of my pain. All summer, I looked for signs from the universe. “Man, I feel like an alien in Istanbul. Should I apply to work or school abroad? Please universe, give me a sign!” I am in the back of a taxi, riding on the sea side road of my neighbourhood when these thoughts are streaming through my mind like fantasy flooding the reality. Before I have chance to look around, I immediately see a man wearing a t-shirt with an alien on it. The alien is silver and I think it was also smoking. The intense laughter me and my friend group had on university campus, watching Die Antwoord’s music video of “Fok Jule Naaiers” and misinterpreting the lyrics as “Even aliens are smoking!” are so far away from my mind. It’s as if joy never happened.
End of Summer. My neighbour from abroad was passing through Istanbul. The universe must have sent him to save me!
D e u s E x M a c h i n a. I had first heard of this term when I was 16 from Süleyman Dirvana. He was from my highschool, the German highschool, yet we were not quite study mates. While I was a subculture girl of the early ‘2000s, he occupied the student seats during World War One. He was 86 years old when he mentioned Deus Ex Machina to me, directly at the point where the Aegean Sea meets the Mediterranean. A champion sailor, and also the pioneer of medical surgery in Turkey, he told me how this machinery was used to suddenly appear on stage. I made the association with life, ten years later.
End of Summer edit: Deus Ex Machina did not work. I am in deep trouble. I rage at myself for having anticipated such a thing. Weren’t the people who have gone down in history looking for a Deus Ex Machina, the same people who have lost their independence, who were colonized, who lost everything? The ones who sold the last inch of their integrity, as Valerie puts it. My home, my country was also occupied from inside through abuse of religion, and yet, I was screaming for a saviour, a filthy voice from the pit of the disgusting and dishonorable swamp of History.
Dream and reality blur together: Do I really expect a Deus Ex Machina to do something, or am I still İdil and just playing the role to get some help? I am so scared. My body has no capasity to feel shame anymore, every inch already occupied by the pain of depression. The emotion of shame, all with its healthy and unhealthy forms, have left my body.
I look in the mirror. There is a crack on my face. I feel like I can not look at my ancestors in the eye. The Circassian matriarch which I was raised to be… I failed. And as a woman of the resistance? That woman wouldn’t have screamed for a saviour.
End of Year 2018. I remember going to Amsterdam. Dreams and reality blur again as I feel myself living in a dark fantasy of a Baudelaire poem. I portray myself as such on social media. Who cares?
I panic later on when my friends and family confront me and urge me to remove all of such content. I notice some people have unfollowed me. Normally in a healthy state, I truly wouldn’t care. I like the world to be a free place with free love… I do not need nor desire fake validation. Yet in my state, so sick and so afraid and so hurt, I needed the stable prescence my acquaintances could provide me more than ever.
But looking back, I do not regret posting that content. It was perfect for depicting my state of mind and self image at that point in history. Why are people so judgemental? This is just a segment of life. If you want my opinion, I find those people extremely pathetic and narrow minded. What, you thought life was gonna be some mediocre ride ? If so, hang on tight sweetie, because you are incredibly wrong!
I came across an artist’s account through Deus Ex Machina. This artist is very talented and brilliant to make me, a total stranger feel the following: I see myself in a lot of her works. It feels exactly as if she is depicting me. A lady in bondage, that is exactly who I am. A lady in the bondage of history, illness and misery. And yet… I had no desire to be like that. If there was gonna be a power relation, I saw myself as “Venus in Furs”, not “Lady Choked from all Sides”.
I feel like Deus Ex Machina is choking me too. His hands are wrapped around my throat. I can’t breathe. Sometimes, I have an image of him just staring at me silently, and pointing a gun at me without uttering a word.
I make a public post about feeling being choked from all around the world. I am humiliated, because I know this word is associated with eroticizing submissiveness in pop culture. These posts I make cut through my image of a strong matriarch who is also from a public resistance movement; which was fully based authentically on my personal experience and history. Yet, the tides have completely turned and crashed through my authentic social persona.
January 2019. The beginning of a new year. I am positive that something about my essence has been completely lost beyond the border of our world. Was it stuck at the Purgatory? Was it temporarily floating in Hades’ underworld along with other souls? I don’t remember where “I” was during that time. Where was I, that personality who was so much more than a body overflowing with pain screaming for a Deus Ex Machina in a modern secular country with modern medicine.
One month later. The doctor listens to me. He tells me that we all have defenses and mine have long been extremely tarnished. I wonder if those were the exact defenses which should have been protecting our integrity. He asks me 4 questions and I answer yes to all of them. Congratulations, you are psychologically fucked. Here is your prescription! Wow, I thought if I make my mind up to it, if I really take responsibility of myself and go through psychotherapy, if I avoid easy escapes and solutions and really put effort in processing my emotions, that I would never have to use medicine! Yet here I am!
After this, my life starts looking up. I managed to reach the correct treatment before I completely sunk into the underworld, with every inch of my integrity going down the pit of history. That pit of emptiness is what must have been lying outside of that disgusting swamp that is the other side of history. Lots of millenials in my country describe that swamp of history as “Geography is Fate”. I prefer a temporal metaphor.
Was all the things my body did, waiting for a sign, a saviour, spiritual remedies and solutions, outside of my integrity? Looking back, maybe it wasn’t. I am a playful personality and my comfort zone and the roles I can take up are way larger than what my social/political persona in daily life was narrowed down to. Maybe I was never meant to live in such a narrowed down way. As Zorba the Greek says, “You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else, he never dares to cut the rope and be free.” Well, nothing I lack there…
Valerie’s gran had said, “The God is in the Rain.” For me, the dignity is in the truth, no matter how “extreme” that truth is. And this is my extremely true story.
Naiada’s Dance Blog 