The One With All the Socialization
BY MELEK CANSU PETEK (ELIT/I)
It was one of those nights again. Her neurons were resisting every single stimulus. It was quite interesting, if you think about it -- there wasn't a single moment she stopped talking (even in her sleep) during the week: to her friends, to herself, to the walls and to various other inanimate objects. Yet Tuesday night, biweekly, was the time she lost the last crumb of her thoughts except one: "What on earth am I going to write about?"
Then she started her writing ritual again. While pacing back and forth in her little room, she heard the faintest whisper in her brain. Hanging on to that whisper, she ran to the kitchen to make some coffee, emptied the vending machine to get some chocolate and then began filling that page as blank as her brain.
"Who is that incompetent writer wannabe?" you ask. Of course not me! As incompetent as I am, I do have some ideas, though not many, on what to write. I even have a little note section on my phone -- possible column ideas. However, that doesn't make the process less painful. It takes some time for an idea to develop into a column. I can try and force it before the time is right and the idea is ready to be watered with ink, but if I don't enjoy writing, you won't enjoy reading. Hence I started to rummage through that garbage heap called my brain and thought about the last week I had. If I were to come up with a theme for that week, I'd say "family."
If you're like me (and for your own sake I hope you're not), you can understand why I've always envied people who can be best friends with their parents, who have a lot in common with them and can go beyond talking about the weather. Well, I hope you're one of those lucky people, but I wasn't. I'm still not, actually, but it doesn't bother me half as much now, probably because my conception of the family has changed in the past few years. The obvious definition is the biological/sociological one-- family is the people you are related to, without your consent. Though that's true, I'm happy to say that there's more to it, and I would go so far as to say that unless you discover what family really is, your life will be incomplete. I know, that's an outrageous claim-- how dare I-- but let me explain myself first, and if you still don't like it, we can yell at me together -- oops, here comes schizophrenia.
"A group of people who are related to each other" is the first definition you see for "family" in a dictionary. Take that word literally, and you'll have blood relations only. Take it metaphorically, and there you have what I call a family; it's the group of people you are connected to by at least one string of shared thoughts/ideas/beliefs. Isn't it wonderful? That means you choose your own family, the extended version of it, by only one criterion: who you really are.
That's how I started to build my own family, those people I share a part -- either big or small -- of my life with, and last week I saw my hard work (!) finally pay off. For the first time in my life, I was out all five weekdays with different groups of people -- different branches of my family. Does that sound very normal to you? Well, it's something I couldn't have possibly imagined a couple of years ago. I have serious social problems, or anxieties, to put it better. When I enter a room full of people I don't know well, all I can think of is to make no noise and be invisible. If it's a class I'm taking, and, let's say, I drop my pen, blood rushes to my face and I get redder and redder with every passing second. I'm quite terrible at introducing myself, or taking the first steps to meet new people. After the awkwardness of that initial phase of friendship is gone, I'm the most chilled person you could ever imagine, but up to that point -- Oh, no! Weirdo alert!
That's why I was so happy to realize that there are many people who have put up with my weirdness and stayed with me until I could start to be myself -- although I'm not sure whether that's any better. Therefore, I'd like to take this chance to thank them all -- all those wonderful family members I have now. And you! The person who read this column to the very end! Let's be friends, but I hope you don't mind taking the first step!