When The Ground Beneath Was Ripped Away

I didn’t find it a coincidence for me to be back home for the final few days of the year that ended.

I cried on the first night
when my father asked me
how I had been.

The emotions I had bottled up
for the past twenty-seven years
needed to scream.

Some closures happen delayed.
If feelings were heavy,
they linger.

Earlier in my life, my nervous system was hijacked by anxiety, always thinking about the future, trying to estimate what’s ahead of me. I clung to people as if they were life jackets, blindly following a state that overlooked how disruptive my patterns were. On a quest for validation, I remained reliant on other people’s judgement to attribute meaning to my existence.

An essence forged in avoidance,
running away from a self
that did not know how to ‘be’
when isolated.

Stillness
weighed on my chest
like a burden.

Suffocating in silence
even when my presence
was surrounded by others.

My inner voice never went quiet,
keeping me imprisoned
in a mind,
recurrently unsettled.

I attributed my agitation to hyperactivity at the time, but I now know better.

An inner world
that only came alive
under the presence of others
who merely recognised
my true essence.

And I remained unaware
of how much of myself
I had to sacrifice.

Whenever I felt breathless, I kept turning to writing, and as an aspiring psychologist, I’m not hesitant when I say journaling helped me a lot more than my former psychologist. The one who sat across, nodding, making me answer the same question twice, while I was already in tears from the first time I answered it.

My life was full of motion, and I had forgotten myself in its rhythm.

Then my health worsened,
and shame wrapped its arms around me
when I started walking unusually.

Grieving an old version
that became a distinct dream,
I was still hopeful at the beginning.

Inviting tenderness
that made me dangerously vulnerable
to the possibility
that hope itself
was false to begin with.

While I was in Brighton presenting my published paper at a psychology conference, the excitement of achieving a milestone I had dreamt of since I was a little girl was overridden by sorrow. I retreated to my hotel room on the evening of my presentation, calling my mother in tears, making her promise that she would find the right treatment.

That was how it always had been. I relied on my mother’s reassurance since the day I gained my consciousness.

I still secretly believe she won’t die because of the promise she gave me when I was seven.

So I returned to Turkey, with the idea that life will ‘work out’ in some grand, guaranteed way only to face the disappointment of everything falling apart in a single day.

I was walking to a doctor’s appointment one day, telling myself,

‘Just one more step to the left and I will be there.’

There was always a one more step that I just couldn’t take.

When I finally made it to the seat in front of the doctor’s desk, he looked up and asked:

“Is this how you really walk? Like, all the time?”

That was me walking better than usual. After the examination, the words I heard became the roots of my PTSD:

“Your best chance is to remain as you are, but the likelihood of getting worse is high. Even if we slow it down, the most likely outcome is a gradual decline.”

My universe didn’t shatter into a million pieces right then, but later, when I cried out to my mother in a whisper and saw her stand there, wordless and frozen.

It was the only time in my life she couldn’t offer reassurance.

Every day,
I started wishing I was dead.

Life didn’t make sense
knowing that my memory
was forsaken in a self
that had long drifted away.

Voices one after another,
all in a single day,
told me to go on antidepressants.

I refused the comfort
of a ready-made happiness,
the kind that promised a rescue
in the form of a future
I may never be able
to grant myself.

That was the only thing
that could torture me more
than the circumstances I was forced to face.

And so I stayed,
awake,
raw,
unprotected.

In that wakefulness, I learned the most difficult truth.

All that remained
was to carve meaning
from the rubble,
to make a life
from whatever pieces I still had.

I felt abandoned when all of my certainties and beliefs collapsed, disoriented as if the floor beneath me was being pulled away when I was left without any secure reference point. Milan Kundera would call this an existential shock, revealing the fragility of meaning and exposing the unsettling possibility that life may not carry inherent weight or necessity.

Think of it as a collection of shells we gather on a beach. Each one feels precious in our hands: a career, a relationship, a memory, a house key, a name we answer to. We line them up, admire them, call them our own. But tides always come. Waves sweep the shells back into the sea, sometimes gently, sometimes all at once.

What remains when the shells are gone?

Nothing. And it is not a void to fear.

It is an open horizon, an unclenched fist, a chance to walk barefoot without the weight of what you thought you must hold forever.

Nothing is fixed, nothing has to stay as it is, and because of that, everything is possible.

Losing myself, together with the certainty that I might never return the same, felt terrifying, because it stripped away the illusion of control and forced me to face my deepest fear. But it was only in its acceptance where I could face the gatekeeper of my next level. When I recognised it instead of reacting it dissolved, releasing me from the rigid structure my life once held, allowing all predetermined meanings to drift away.

In time, I learned how to “be” despite all my grief and sorrow.

I had nothing
but to accept my essence
as it is.

Slowly,
something within
began to shift.

Before everything happened,
I clung to other people
for meaning.

But the death of a self
that confined my essence
to an identity
never made of my own fabric
became my rescue.

A transformation began
not following my recovery,
but while I thought
healing wasn’t a possibility.

In truth,
I healed
even from the places
I did not know
were bleeding.

I went to hell and back, and when it lifted, I was unified with myself.

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Author’s note: I returned to a memory I hadn’t visited in a long time.
The one where my body learned fear before my mind could name it.

This piece came from sitting with that place without rushing it,
without rescuing myself from it,
without pretending it no longer shapes me.

I share pieces like this because they shaped me, because they taught me who I am, and for anyone out there who has lived a version of it too, I want you to know that you are not alone. I know that kind of pain, and I hope my words reached you in a way that made the weight feel a little less yours to carry alone. Some stories do not soften just because time has passed. Returning to these moments, naming them, shaping them into something that can hold meaning, it costs something each time.

This piece is free for everyone but if my writing has ever met you in a place you did not know how to name, or if these stories stay with you long after you close the screen, becoming a paid subscriber truly helps me continue doing this work with the depth and devotion it asks for.

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for letting my words meet you where they do.