I would like to share this piece with all the people out there who have felt “awkward” at some point in their lives.

My name is Emily, I am a sociologist of German origin, living in Istanbul since three years.
I have lived in several cities in Europe and I absorbed their culture.
I consider myself one of the many Western women grew up with a void of truth and spirituality that neither the religious faiths nor the philosophical dissertations could fill.
I had a gap made of research, held open by a clear and honest obstinacy in knowing who I was.
The love for the truth prevented me access to social conventions that often keep human choices standing and balance them.
So, I passed from a mild discomfort perceived superficially to a clear concern of not belonging.
And I found in my individual problems, an attempt to answer the general ones.
Yes, because I have been patient, I researched and then I found out that I do not belong to an entire culture.
I understand that the identity of an individual is not unrelated to that of a group, but It often suffers guidelines and boundaries.
The idea of being different from what seems to have become your role in the world, it is perceived as a drama. Something exaggerated and to run away from. Because at the end, the balance that the feeling of belonging and of similarity bring with them, reveals the truth of diversity as a choice inconvenient.
So you accept to live with a distant and constant discomfort, but with the security of not being alone. At least outwardly.
But I believe that every man has his own vocation and that it is his duty to act to recognize it. Understand that the discomfort feeling is not obligated and does not constitute life. Indeed, even if we suffer privately, to act to get better is a social duty. Because we cannot be good if the others are not too, and in a certain how this doesn’t happen if we do not become the best person we can be.
I soon realized that there are always expressions, manners, interpretation of human gestures and aims of civilization, which vary and which are relevant when viewed in “distance”.
One should travel, compare different societies, different ways of expressing the same needs and the different ways in which different parts of the world it has come to resolve them.
So to understand that beyond the instruments and the human interpretations what remains is precisely the human need. That is universal. No geography. No history.
I have therefore taken myself to a place where I could act in harmony with my being without having to feign a mask.
Gradually my thoughts were fitting with reality. People saw what I saw, and in describing what they saw were describing what I would have described In my view. I felt finally to belong to one humanity. Gradually I recognized me under the mask I was wearing and I found myself.
The mask gives clear characteristics. Recognized qualities. Limits, equally recognized.
It gives you the ability to choose clearly what you can and cannot do. In accordance with society said it’s your role, your mask.
Moreover, as it is clear and unique, the more limited are the possibilities, but clear are the choices you have to do. The mask is simplifying an idea, a set of characters and it is unique. It ‘s a unique statement upon reality.
Me, for example, I have a cousin, and she is called Emily.
When we find ourselves at my grandparents’ house, I remember my grandmother when she needed to take something from the kitchen’s shelf called me to help her. To stand out, when both we replied, jokingly specified “the longest”, because between the two I was the “longest”.
To the eyes of the other people, we are often masks, and it is a fact.
More it is the harmony and love, the more we have the opportunity to mitigate and eliminate these masks. But to simplify, to generalize, to crop some aspects and focus on other is always a tendency to which we all have recourse when it comes to relating to one another.
What it is certain is that if after so much time one takes off the mask, it becomes really difficult to act. Everything becomes possible. Because thousands become his faces, a thousand interpretations of reality, and therefore the chances are a thousand and a thousand the choices.
It’s like a flight. And the air between the wings should certainly scare.
So what to do?
One should go beyond the idea of the feelings and feel.
One should go beyond the categories.
For example, In looking the face of a woman who is telling you with sad eyes how much she is in love with her man, one should go beyond the idea that she’s lying, and be able to hear just a person uncomfortable.
When you remove your mask is terrible facing reality because nothing more is clear. Nothing more is clearly unique, but everything becomes a personal choice.
Even deciding if a thunderstorm is an umbrella forgotten at home or the cold on the skin. Or the address lost somewhere of your only contact in a city you do not know. It’s up to you to choose it.
The mask lulls us, taking away freedom, but giving us certainties. Clear codifications of an infinite reality.
In my life, I have met people like me who were locked, wrapped in cultural fantasies thrown at them by those who just could not understand them nor, eventually, wanted to accept them.
And it’s as living in a den. Sometimes you go out. But do not leave it forever. We’re close and we turn around it. We make a few steps and when there is something that creates difficulties you go back into it immediately.
Even if you’re free, you’re not. Because your instinct is to react to things from inside the lair. And that it’s your only way to see and to relate to the world.
You do not know how to live in the free spaces of life.
Withstanding the cold, the view of the majestic trees, contain one’s excitement when guessing in which side will turn the path as you splash galloping and you rediscover yourself skillful.
But the truth is that the lair is within us.
Eventually, every man has one and he lives with the other in a larger one. It is like the myth of Plato’s cave, where men cannot see more than a wall on which are projected the shadows.
Those shadows are but those of other men.
I believe that we do not look directly. The only way to know is to know yourself and understand each other only through the similarities with what we have learned from us.
We do not know what’s out neither by our lair nor in the one in which we all live.
But some tend to jump off, others shut themselves inside.
Some, must know what they see, analyze it and understand it in depth. While others in order to understand and to analyze they must first act, touch and experience. Some are in the den, cloaked by an invincible heat, fascinated by a promise of infinite possibilities. Others are thrown out and roam subjected to the myriad of sensations.
Some people naturally rise masks. There are those who build, maintain and make masks to be worn.
There are those who by nature back in the den even when there is no more threat. There are those who come out ahead from the den instead and always tries to take out others from it.
As the electron spins around its axis in two opposite directions, so a man, in front of life’s questions can withdraw into himself or jump off.
Yet we need to find the balance of these two ways so legitimate and so necessary.
Den’s and grasslands’, if we were animals, would have been this the irretrievable distinction. But we are men and over the natural tendencies, we have the will to improve and act on the right.
Taking off the mask, having the courage to be naked when love seeks us. Jumping out of the cage when the answer to our suffering is a feeling. Throwing inside ourselves, when in fact the solution to a feeling is an idea.
In a careful balance between the ability to float, choose and define our actions, then again, and again choose to float.
All this is called living. And all this is the matter of life.
I realized that we are something beyond the expectations of those around us, behind the fears to change, over the ignorance in which we live, towards the experience that we have not yet.
Sometimes we have to do an action sometimes we have to give birth to an idea. Sometimes, facing the external judgment, we should turn in on ourselves and resist the tendency to react. Other we must react and resist the tendency to turn in on ourselves.

So here are my writings.
With strengths and weaknesses, with dark regions where heat and openings to see the sky may be found.

These dear friends are the crevices of my lair.