On An Absent Friend

On An Absent Friend

Sensory processing takes time for me.

It takes time before I realise that I am cold, hot, or in pain.. or that something is pinching me or even hurting me...

And I have come to realise that what I experience is in fact a condition with a name.

I have learned this at the age of 40.

At the age of 40, looking back to my past relationships, including friendships and companionships, and how I have established and preserved them, I have come to realise that I hold on for too long until I realise how much it hurts me.

I hold on to them when it is hurting and it breaks my soul in the end.

I picture this, in my head, like having a strong grip with two hands, onto what I have nourished. The grip is strong and I don’t feel pain for an unnecessarily long time.

I keep holding while pain is in progress...

First, the fingers get numb and I keep holding.

It then affects the hands, I ask questions. I ask them directly.

People however are never direct.

Let me go I say and they tell me to stay. So I do.

But the pain is growing and I now start feeling it. They shake me off which starts hurting the arms too. Fingers are still numb and the hands are still in pain.

I ask them to let me go but they never admit and it takes time for me to process it all.

I hold on for way too long.

I only stop holding when it is a full-fetched catastrophe. With the arms broken. That I have nothing left to hold onto.

I didn’t get the signals in time I tell myself.

And the absent friends regret the way they treated me, often years later.

Yet, when the regret comes, I no longer have the arms to open.

Because I held on to the absent friends for way too long.

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Narrative Bio

I grew up in a fishing village called Büyükdere by the northern seacoast of Bosphorus, Istanbul. After my third childhood hiking journey to the hills of Büyükdere, my parents realized that I might fly off the nest once I grow up. Although they have always been positive of the idea of their first born child to become an explorer, supportive to my decisions to live away since age 12, take a path different from theirs, even study social sciences (and not engineering nor medicine like the children of all Turkish lower-middle class parents want for their kids), they have finally started complaining about my explorations after my third year in Montreal (2008), Canada, almost 8000 km away from the “nest”.

By the time my parents started complaining about my life in abroad, I was starting my MA in socio/cultural anthropology and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. That was my third institution after Boğaziçi University in Istanbul (for a sociology BA) and Concordia University in Montreal, Canada (for an anthropology BA).

Cambridge was somewhat a “medium” solution to my thirst for anthropology and my parents’ demands to have their daughter closer.

During my PhD in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge (Newnham College), I was fortunate to have then William-Wyse Professor Henrietta L. Moore as my supervisor, who has proven to be one of the most exciting feminists to work with.

Between 2016 and 2020, I had been the Abdullah Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah Research Fellow in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, an Affiliated Researcher and temporary Lecturer in Social Anthropology, and Teaching Associate in Centre for Gender Studies, all at the University of Cambridge. Being at Pembroke College was the best part of my last four years at Cambridge. Back then, Lord Chris Smith was the Master of the college (he still is), who has been working hard to make the college an inclusive space - a task that was especially challenging at an institution (Cambridge) that is built on (and the castle of) systematic exclusion.

Currently, I am the PI of a large project funded by the ERC and Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Global Prosperity at the UCL - an institute established by a feminist anthropologist who believe that academia should be for greater good and prioritising the ivory tower will not bring any benefit to the world. She happened to be my former supervisor - so there's the nest I ended up going back to, that I chose for myself.