Onto new realms

When I created the first draft of this post half a year back, I had no idea what was coming next. After all, now I feel like it's time to write the second half of what I started. I had quite different goals and direction in mind back then but lots of things changed around me ever since.

If I had to summarise all this time with one word, I would say dark. I have been through lots of different seasons but in no particular order. Some days all of them came tumbling down suddenly. Other days, I had to endure through the long winter nights. If I had to summarise what I did all this time with one sentence, I would say that I embraced my fears in so many different parts of my life both literally and figuratively.

I think now is the correct time to start all over again. I feel now is the right time to let go because I feel like I gave everything I had without limits. I know now is the time to rethink my intentions because things got complicated.

One of the intentions I set at the beginning of the year was to end the wars I have been fighting in my heart for a long time. I thought I set clear values in my heart back then and as long as those values lived in my heart, I was only going to protect my borders. I was never going to offence. Even though it is very difficult to admit, despite the intentions I set at the beginning of the year, I found myself fighting all kinds of wars all over the place. In my heart, at my home, with my family and against the darkness.

I saw many signals to stop in the first times. However, I simply could not acknowledge my limits. I could not accept the reality of things which were beyond my control. I was shocked deeply from what I witnessed and I blindly ran all over the place for days and nights. I dissolved into thousands of pieces. After facing the death day and night for weeks; at some point I started feeling the smell of the dead from thousands of kilometers away.

It was around that time when I set stricter borders around my values. There were no more grays or shades after that point. There was only the dark and the light for me after seeing the death. After the massacre I witnessed, I went all into that fight in my circles and with my family actively. I needed help and when I needed the help the most, there were two kinds of people around me. Those who reacted in some way to this darkness eventually and fought against it. And those who stayed in the dark all these months up until now.

Throughout this journey I have been through, I made hundreds of mistakes. I literally exhausted what I was capable of and poured all the energy I had, without thinking. One thing that scared me with all my being was not the darkness itself. It was how darkness got into me with its own ways here and there. There has been days when I mentally fought my demons to not to take a step back from where I was standing. I was trying to make sure that I stood by the light. In other days, good and bad was so mixed within one another. The people who were with me were also showing corrupted behaviours. And I was ashamed of myself when I realised I was bulding empathy to understand how a person carried so much dark in them.

I caused lots of harm to myself with starting with good intentions. Some days I was naive and just did not had the vision. Most of the other days, I was blindly pushing further even though I had to stop. Because it was not sustainable. The recreative routines I had in my life was not sustaining the anger, rage, darkness, sadness and shame anymore. Years of work building my inner mental wealth was gone just like that. I literally lost my inner balance for months. I knew that I had many tools to recover from that situation. Though, I still had to go through these unease emotions for months to come. Now I am not sure if it is even possible to recover fully from what I witnessed anymore. However, moving through different landscapes and perspectives, I feel like it is time for another ritual for me.

For the past couple of months, I did countless workouts and exercises to transform all this negativity. One thing I missed the most during these stormy weathers was to forecast myself internally. That's why, I started writing down how I felt to make sure I acknowledged how I was doing mentally and emotionally couple of days per week. What came next after the forecast was setting new intentions. This time, I set my intentions for returning to my routines. In the past month, I dusted it off with my exercises routine. Now it's time to clean my home and my heart. I set my intentions for moving forward and changing one more time in the light of this summer season. As the third and last step of this ritual; I am feeling thankful for discovering yet another meaning for my life. Despite being emotionally, physically and mentally drained, I am grateful for all of these events for showing me which side I want to stand by one more time. Although there were dozens of moments where I could give up, I am grateful for that instinct to find even the smallest meanings out of whatever happened.

"What does freedom mean to you?

Freedom is inside me. It means that I am not hung up with like, anybody's idea of how I should be. I'm outside the society. I am not afraid of death, no. It's like I'm not afraid of anything except the fear itself. That to me is the greatest thing to fear, fear itself. Collapse of the imagination.

One thing my father believed more than anything was the development of the country of the mind. He believed that the mind was a country and he had to develop it. You had to build and build and build and build the mind. That was his whole philosophy, development of the mind. My mother believed in the development of the heart. And I believed in the development of the hands.

I do what I do. Ten people come, ten million come, great. What I do, I believed in."
— Patti Smith