BY AYESHA BİLAL (PSYC/III)
ayesha@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Hello again, dear Bilkenters! This week’s piece starts off with a little personal anecdote I thought I would share with you all, and hopefully by the end of it you will be left with the same feelings and sentiments that experiencing it left with me. The past few days had me rubbing elbows with the idea of freedom and independence a lot—and it seemed that every day was serving me a chunk of wisdom regarding my typical young adult longing for autonomy and my growing attainment of it.
I spent the past week with the idea in my mind to be adventurous and spontaneous, so as to take advantage of the Bayram break by touring Turkey’s beautiful coast. It filled me with a sense of freedom, especially since my company was for a change my friends and not my family, and so I felt quite liberated. After a few days of breaking rules, gathering silly experiences to share and having a classic young-adult-defined vacation, it was time to head home on the eight-hour bus trip back to Ankara.
It was on this ride home, when I was exhausted but still filled with a sense of excitement and mental energy, that I found myself seated next to an old man who at first seemed to be the kind of person who would like to be left alone. I did not mind this at all, since engaging with strangers during long journeys is not my cup of tea. So when he got intrigued by hearing an exchange going on in a foreign language and struck up a conversation, I was not expecting it to last more than five minutes because, on top of everything else, a significant language barrier was almost certainly present.
But to my surprise, the gentleman spoke perfect English and seemed very well educated and cultured. In the way of normal small talk, he inquired what my friends and I had been doing the past week, and when he found out that I was an international student and my family lived miles away, he asked if I didn’t miss them terribly. My ongoing excited state of mind led me to shrug and express my love for my newfound independence, and he nodded knowingly, all too understanding of my young lust for self-governance.
He then began to share his side of the story, the parent’s side, which we as young adults can imagine and which we roll our eyes about, commenting on how they simply need to accept our growing independence. However, it is always different when you hear a person’s tale as told by themselves, with their emotions raw and thoughts unadulterated.
He began by telling me how his son, who is like me an only child, took his first flight out of the nest when he was preparing to head to a university in Europe. That was almost 15 years ago; now, freedom from parental oversight is not something he longs for but something he had to get used to while growing up. Let me elaborate on that; there are two dimensions to being independent from our parents, and while one of them is something we all experience in our young lives as the opportunity to have unrestricted and unsupervised fun, the other runs alongside it in a subtle manner, and gradually begins to overshadow the sense of fun and liberation with a feeling of responsibility and ownership of oneself—finding a stable career, ensuring there’s food in the fridge, being able to pay rent every month…and the list goes on and on.
As my seatmate told me how his boy had manifested his delight in his newfound freedom by indulging in wrongdoing and challenging his limits beyond what he could handle, and how he eventually caved in to a breakdown of his state of mind and stability after spiraling downward in life, I couldn’t help but feel this father’s plight and at the same time not be surprised at the ease with which things had gotten out of hand for his son. As a teen growing up in various countries, I had become well aware of how people possess different levels of resistance to peer pressure and how some cross the fine line between responsible independence and uncontrolled chaos. However, this father’s emotions went beyond regret over his son’s mismanaged freedom; they also had an element of guilt, a feeling that things might have been different had he not let his offspring go off into the wild so early, had he not let him off the leash so suddenly and completely.
Our conversation spanned a couple of hours, and we both ended up taking something away from it. For him, it was a sense of understanding the teenage drive for independence and, as well, a sense of liberation from the heaviness of guilt and thoughts about what could have been. For myself, it was a strong urge to message my mother and thank her for gradually entrusting to me her own responsibility for her only child, yet still leaving the door open to ensure I didn’t stray too far. Let’s face it, independence is not only a vacation with friends or the end of curfews—it is a gradual transition into adult life, which makes it a very confusing road to travel on. It is only with the guidance of those who set us on that road that we can make it safely to stable ground. With great freedom comes great responsibility; we must not abuse the privilege entrusted in us, and we must not abuse another’s privilege to make that journey on the right path.