I am writing these lines in the last days of September, watching the full moon reflected in the lovely water of the Aegean. It is well past midnight. The air is still, left over from summer, and the smell of autumn has slipped lightly into the night.
For anyone who knows me, this is quite a surprise. At this time of year I would have been expected to mix into city life, busy and anxious, and at this hour to be deep asleep. But my life has changed... Even in a world where, thanks to social media, we are used to issuing regular declarations, I want to pour myself out, selfishly, granting from the start that my life may not be very interesting to anyone. Inside lives that grow lonelier as they grow more crowded, the fellow feeling I find through these lines is too much to dismiss.
For as long as I can remember I lived inside the accepted norms. The drive to "be accepted", which most of us probably need, had become part of me in childhood, through the reflex of "fitting in". I studied at good schools, and I was a good student, and the moment school ended I started work at once, as I thought was expected of me. Looking back today, I see that my career as an architect was shaped by coincidence more than by my choices. It is a good while since I left behind the illusion that the control of my life sits in my own hands. I have been working for about twenty years, for as long as I can remember. I have always loved work. In one way or another I was always attached to an institution. In a way one does not often meet among people my age, I spent fourteen years of my career at Yapı-Endüstri Merkezi, taking different roles, inside a stretch of time that deeply shaped the person I am and the way I do the work. After that I was Deputy General Manager at Seranit for two years, and for nearly two years Coordinator at Ferko İnşaat, and so I took on almost every role an architect can hold in the building sector outside "architecture", and I closed the circle.
For those of us who work a corporate life, the most important part of our time, of our lives, passes at the workplace. The hours you spend there, the people you work with, cover a large territory of your life. I was almost born into this order, and yet the feeling of "having no time", and of "being squeezed", which had been seeping into my heart for a long while and, for the last year, into my words, had reached a point I could no longer deny. I went on under the pressure of my own plans and dreams pulling against what corporate life required, and, as usual, the decisions I took were against myself, until life brought me to a turning. From the conferences I attended to the jokes I made talking with friends, in every setting I prepared for this day by saying, "I was born on the SGK, I will die on the SGK." The SGK is the register of a salaried employee in Türkiye. I know that a person never makes an effort to declare something they feel they already belong to.
As I have said before, "my life has changed". I have given up my corporate roles. I have weighed anchor from the harbour I found safe, and that had grown quite narrow for me. I set out in an amateur way, in order to be, "professionally", the manager of my own life, my time, my money, my success, my failure. I am still at the very beginning of the road, trying to remember the person I was before all this order, trying to remember myself.
The first days after I left passed with me swinging fast between a terrible happiness and a deep anxiety, and with the need to define myself inside the frame I was used to.
The last days of summer, of course, the salt sea of the Aegean, talk with friends, the books one has missed, the mornings of waking with no alarm: these wash a person through, and they settle the anxiety. During this very stretch I realised that for some time I had been quietly preparing for these days, without even telling myself, so that I could be captain of my own ship. In the last two years I helped prepare, for TRT, the content of a documentary about my own profession, and I presented it. At many conferences I was invited to, I accepted the speaking and the place on the jury in my own name, not in the name of the institution I worked for. I managed to finish my master's thesis at Istanbul Technical University, whose cover I had not opened through years that would have been far more convenient, a full fifteen years later, while working at a pace I cannot describe. Because somewhere inside I already knew that I no longer wanted to be a channel. I wanted to be a source.
The first days, like waking from a fever, passed between defining my own worth through myself and tasting freedom. My voice grew softer. My heeled shoes stayed on the shelf. My clothes grew easy. I used to think I was not a person of the night. But the nights when I know I will get up at my own hour the next morning, and the next, and the morning after that, pass more happily, and they last longer. I can wake early, and fresh. Without asking anyone's leave, I can travel on a sudden decision, and without calculating every stop in fine detail beforehand I can enjoy simply being there. Is life rose-coloured? Of course not. Only different.
I know that some of you, reading this, will ask what I am going to do now. Life taught us to put that question first.
From October I begin teaching three separate courses in the Faculty of Architecture at Medipol University. Being with a school, and with students, has always made me happy. A book project sits on the table. A few people who believe that the experience and the relationships I have gathered in the sector over twenty years will be of use have already begun to ask my advice, without even knowing of this decision... I will go on making things, trying to earn a living from the work my hand can reach, and to take pleasure in it when I can. I have succeeded at every job I did with pleasure. I hope it will be so from now on, too.
The news that a new period has opened in my life is, in fact, the closing sentence of this piece as well. The hard part of writing a text, I think, is ending it. For me the hardest thing has always been "finishing". This time I will take the easy way, and leave the last word to someone else. I think Bob Dylan already said it best, in 1964: "The Times They Are A Changin".