BY MELEK CANSU PETEK (ELIT/III)
petek@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Welcome back, dear Bilkenters! I’m pretty sure that starting school again isn’t the most positive aspect of your life right now, but I hope you had a nice and redeeming break nevertheless.
I honestly have a hard time figuring out what a break is supposed to look or feel like, so I don’t really know if I had a good break—was I supposed to sleep all day, sit around and do nothing, or go out relentlessly to hang out with friends and family? Should I have been mentally preparing to fight my way through a new semester, or just pushed the thought of it completely aside to enjoy the moment? As is obvious, I’m not that good at pushing thoughts aside, so I ended up pondering a lot of things during the break, when I wasn’t too busy devouring books.
Since my family lives in a considerably warmer part of Turkey, being on break usually means taking a bus or a flight down south, and I get excited every single time because I love the idea of traveling, even when it’s to a place I’ve been to so many times. Yet, excitement isn’t the prevailing emotion in these trips—there is also restlessness. It has been almost eight years since I left “home,” but the problem is, I don’t know if it ever was a home. Don’t get me wrong, I like seeing my family, but to me, home is where you belong, and that has never been a part of my family experience. Perhaps being a naturally awkward bookworm personality doesn’t really help with that experience, but all I know is that I’ve been longing to find that home where I can fully bloom without being apologetic for who I am.
This will probably be a lifelong struggle, but I believe I’m still making progress in my quest to find that home where I belong. One instance of such progress was reading “The Book Thief” this break (I know, I should have done it earlier). As I was reading that fascinating book, I kept thinking about whether it’s even worth trying to find a home on this planet where people have no problem with killing one another simply because they think differently or belong to a different race. I felt the pain of Max Vandenburg, the German Jew who was persecuted for something he had no control over—his heritage. I identified with him, thinking that he too did not belong, but at the end, he was the one who brought hope to the darkness of my thoughts by saying, “Often I wish this would all be over, Liesel, but then somehow you do something like walk down the basement steps with a snowman in your hands.”
Though he may be a fictional character, Max said words that tug at my heartstrings; he knew what it meant to be homeless, but he also found the cure for that through the acts of a little girl—making a snowman down in the basement, hugging him tight, or bringing him a piece of a cloud. Then I decided to look back at my own Liesels, the ones who have brought laughter and joy to the basement I so often hide in, and realized that home doesn’t have to be a place; it can also be people, and every once in a while, when I’m with those people, I feel like I do belong.
Max made me realize one more thing through the adorable stories he wrote for Liesel—that writing is another form of belonging. He made himself visible in the words he wrote and the pictures he drew, and revealed his heart to Liesel on paper. Writing is dangerous in that sense: you can get away with putting walls between yourself and the reader, pretending to be someone else, since, unless they know you personally, the reader will only see you the way you choose to present yourself. Yet, there is also the possibility of showing who you truly are, unfiltered, revealing the good and the ugly, and asking the reader, indirectly, to be a part of your home. That is what I’ve been doing for the last two years in this newspaper. I have written many personal columns and freaked out every single time, thinking that I had exposed too much, but also secretly hoping that there would be readers who would understand and even appreciate that honesty. The experience and the responses have been beyond my wildest expectations; my words have met so many beautiful souls, and I have found so much encouragement that I wanted to take a moment to thank you all for being a part of my introverted world. I also want to start the semester with a blessing for all of us: May it be a season where we find homes for our souls, places and people we truly belong to.