People invest so much in where they’re from.
Where they were born. Where they belong. What belongs to them.
As if it’s an achievement. As if they worked hard to earn it: the chance of being born into one language, one place, one identity. As if arriving just a few meridians to the right or left wouldn't have made them a different person.
Years ago, when I was still living in Türkiye, writing a sweet little blog with 500 followers, I named it “Nowhere.”
Even back then, I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere.
I think this random allocation of souls (the lottery of birth) shapes us more than we care to admit. As long as we let it.
Where am I from?
When my son was four years old, an elderly gentleman asked a similar question on a lift in a Waterstones. 'Where are you from?'
He wasn't unkind, only curious. Turkish people - not dark enough to be located in Middle East, not fair skinned enough to be labelled as European - must be familiar with the curiosity.
I repeated his question in my head before replying to him - I knew where I come from, but my son didn't come from anywhere. He's born in the UK.
The year was 2017. I had just obtained a British passport. UK felt close to home.
But that question cracked something open.
My son would not be like me. He was from the UK and I was not.
No matter his genes, son would grow up as this part-Turkish, mostly British being, in a family that mixed languages and habits. His father and I would always be the weird Turks - the ones who didn’t eat pork, put yogurt on pasta, and far too comfortable showing heavy emotions.
And then his primary school hit me like an avalanche.
The school expected us to be British parents, of course, they did.
But I wasn’t a British parent and I didn't want to be one.
And so, I found myself asking, over and over:
Where was I from? Where?
I wasn’t from Türkiye. Not anymore. But I wasn’t from Cambridge either. I wasn’t born here. These habits, sayings, rules, rhytms weren't mine. I was an immigrant.
Don’t get me wrong, Cambridge has, at times, been a home in ways Izmir never could be.
But I will always be a foreigner here. It’s in my accent, my face, my habits.
It’s in the longing for the little things: the street cats you pet on your way home, turning up at a friend’s house unannounced, sitting outside your door on a warm summer evening, eating watermelon and chatting with your neighbor. These longings are only mine, they don't have a place in Cambridge , so....
I had to be someone else. I had to be from somewhere.
That’s how I started writing my book.
It came from the longing to become something: someone who didn’t need to be from anywhere.
This is how I became a writer.
I made friends who wrote.
And another realisation settled over me:
These people, these writers, some younger some older than me, weren’t from where I was, but they were so much like me.
They didn’t belong anywhere either.
And it was okay. It was okay to be from nowhere.
Never mind the big scary world outside:
I was from my mind.
I lived in my mind.
I was fiction.
I am fiction.
I’m this version of myself, written by me. ❤️
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