The Winter I Failed This Self

Up until a certain point in my life, I strived to diminish uncertainty, trying to predict all possible outcomes, leaving no room for chance, inevitably casting wonder aside.

The result of always living in the future cost me my calm and I grew restless over time without ever feeling grateful toward the present. The kind of ungratefulness that caused me my health once.

When I was a child, people kept asking me,
“What are the three most important things in your life?”

Although their rankings would change, my top three would revolve around family, friendship, love, career and fun.

Forget making it to the top three, health wasn’t even in my mention at the time.

I was ungrateful like winter, arriving without warning, just as my foot injury did when I fell from an ATV during a safari ride I went on with my sister in Bodrum.

We had rented a house by the coast during a summer where I could hear birds singing beside the jingle that came from the wind chime every morning.

Peaceful it was.
Still, I kept nagging my parents for taking me away from my friends for a month, asking what we would be doing when the boredom arrived.

Without being bored for once.

Experience follows the energetic shape of what is being stated or inhabited, not what is being rejected.

Law of Attraction claims that the universe responds to our focus or emotional state.
If we focus on something, we attract more of it.

While I thought, “I don’t want to be bored”, my attention was still centred on boredom.

The universe didn’t treat that “don’t” as removal but only as attachment to the concept.

In the end, I was left with an injury that required three stitches, forcing me to memorise the entire TV stream while everyone else went for a swim. My sisters went out at night while I remained at home, sobbing to my parents while I kept blaming myself for always asking for more within.

As I grew up, my hunger for more merged with my hunger for excellence and I became a perfectionist that turned into my identity.

While I secretly found solace in finding a label that I could identify with, I didn’t realise how much it took away from the hazards of possibilities that could’ve happened any minute.

Until those harsh months where the London sky mercilessly deprived us of the sun for 55 days straight, where I felt like I rotted, staring at that bricked wall through the corner of my L-couch.

Day by day, I grew distant from who I thought I was.

My house turned into a mess that could be thrown away to the trash all at once and I grew estranged from the only place I could ever call home in my life.

It wasn’t these four walls that led me to suffocate under the heaviness of each day I woke up carrying a burden on my chest. While the days stretched endlessly and I kept finding reasons to grind every night, my environment was mirroring back my inner state.

I no longer had the will to prove to the world, but most importantly, my harshest critic, that I was enough. Yet, I drowned myself in past experiences, using them for my writing, not allowing the tides to sweep away the remaining ruins that kept me stuck in past hurt, pain and trauma.

Until last Saturday, when me and my sister started our afternoon with a pub crawl.

It was all laughter and giggles under the sun while more than a couple of pints became our companions.

While I do not know how many friends I asked if I could borrow money that night for a couple more cheers, it didn’t matter as long as me and my sister were having a good time.

Until we didn’t.

On our last stop, we started speaking of our other sister who is about to be proposed to.

Suddenly, a wave of rage in me began to take root.

According to Eckhart Tolle, humans carry an accumulation of old emotional pain within them. Painful experiences that were never fully processed don’t completely disappear. Instead, they remain as an energetic and emotional residue.

When we stop reacting from the present moment and instead react from accumulated past pain, we start being controlled by our pain body.

Our conversation turned into a fight between me and my sister that left me crying at a bus stop on a windy night, sitting on cold steel with bare legs, wearing a thin coat.

Only then I realised, I left my keys at home.

We took refuge in a hotel lobby , sitting apart from each other while I kept crying as my mind itched with self-destructive thoughts.

My alter ego left the wheel when the alcohol in my blood dissolved.

I went over to my sister and without a word I gave her a hug, allowing myself to feel her warmth.

We rode back to my place when the clock hit a decent hour for us to ring my neighbours, laughing about everything that we’d been through. I ended up climbing a six-foot-tall gate and making a jump that I am still proud of.

That morning, before going to sleep, I kept staring at those rotten roses, white and red, that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away since the beginning of the winter.

Throwing them away meant something to me, yet I did not know what it kept hidden while my gaze kept drifting toward them during those lonely nights.

I know now, I was holding onto a self that confined me to an identity I was never meant to be fixated on.

I failed this winter.

And that is precisely why I remain hopeful for tomorrow.

Because this winter taught me that I wasn’t who I thought I was and I find solace in not reaching for clarity.

I now embrace each dawn, for it offers me a chance to begin again, unchanged in essence yet reborn in spirit.

For with each sunrise I return to myself, for every breath is a beginning, every awakening a silent revolution of becoming, and every dusk a farewell to my old self that is retiring.

I threw away those roses today because their death was never there to destroy me, but to remind me of the urgency of life.

By sharpening longing into clarity and turning desire into motion, they stayed close enough to whisper that one’s life is anchored in time.

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