When you say "I am like this"
do you know your self
Do you impose yourself?
Who do you do injustice to?
What do you mean "that's who I am"?
Is it your own potential?
with the one in your neighborhood?
Belief that makes you say "I am this"
You draw boundaries with your own hands.
Life is waiting for you,
Beyond the border.
Is the heart timid
in the face of the unknown?
Or to say I don't know
Is it the greatest complacency?
On the roadmap?
Unanswered questions
pretending to ask,
The answers she doesn't care about
On a blank notebook sheet
looking person,
You are repeating the grade.
The responsibility of an order rests with those who establish it, or at least it is accepted that it should be. Those founders promise themselves and each other to realize the harmony and continuity of the environment they have created at the very beginning, or at least the state of being livable throughout its continuity. We experience sharing responsibility, mostly in the togetherness we live in as adults, often in marriage, in our homes that we define as "home". Maybe we think we are.
It would not be wrong to say that there was an order in every house in the period before the pandemic. While most of the daily routines of a house were thought and implemented by women, especially women in working life shared the necessities of this responsibility not with their spouses, but mostly through their assistants. Therefore, before the injustice in the sharing of responsibilities of the spouses, who were the owners of that order, came to light, he had found a channel to flow into himself like a tiny underground water. Then, from a speck of dust on a coffee table, a very small virus created a huge fault rupture, and that invisible injustice emerged like a bubbling underground spring. Nowadays, all women, including those who continue their working life from home, as well as those who describe themselves as housewives, use their power to the last bit in an effort to keep up with everything.
As far as I could see and listen around, in some houses, one-sided calls for help seemed to be heard with faint tones, while in some houses, the cries for help echoed from one wall to the other and became silent. In some of them, after mutual conversations and listenings, "well, let's just do it" came into play. It was also a virtue and was not given by nature to some people or even to a breed. It couldn't be done even if it was wanted, it couldn't be done even if the responsibility was accepted. The redemptive sentence was the sentence “I am like this”.
What meanings does the word "I am like this" mean, in fact, after the above processes, it created a need for serious thinking in me. How valuable are people's self-assessments? What a great wisdom to “know oneself” and how respected this concept is in every society. know yourself; It has a positive meaning when it can be expressed as knowing your limits, knowing your limits, knowing your personal characteristics, the aspects that characterize yourself, seeing your shortcomings, realizing that you have to change them, making an effort to change them, accepting your reality about the features you think you cannot change, and so on. Based on these reasons, the phrase "I am like this" carries a wisdom in it, admittedly. It will probably have a positive meaning for the person who hears this word from the other person. However, is it possible to say that the person who utters these words knows himself, can take care of himself or knows himself when he uses it in the sense of "I am this, accept me as I am, I have no effort or intention to change"? In this latter case, is it better to speak of self-knowledge or self-imposition? On the other hand, is the person who uses this expression by choosing the easy way and seems to adopt this idea, in reality, is only unfair to the other person or is there an injustice that he/she does to himself/herself? Isn't the belief that makes one say "I am this" also open to injustice, such as limiting one's own potential with one's own hand? We cannot deny that the human being has a potential for improvement. When we consider such characteristics of our nature that we can put into action, such as the ability to wisely pass through the experience of pain and continue living, the effort to achieve long educational processes, creativity, and a dignified stance in the face of life's challenges, the effort to share the responsibility of a home's order seems a very trivial and simple example. may come. Is it actually so? This ownership, which seems to be the simplest, consists of a series of routines that are indispensable for the continuity of life and take its place in almost every day lived. It is a form of responsibility that should be adopted by every man or woman, and shared among the models in which living together is in question. The tragicomic aspect of the matter is that most of the time, this situation is experienced not as sharing a task, but with the mentality of helping the other person for a short time to their main task. Therefore, the gentlemen who take this "help" do not have any curiosity about how to do a job that is rarely done, and they act with the mentality of "as much as I can do now". It is not difficult to guess that these human conditions, which seem funny from the outside, are not at all sympathetic to the people living in them during the long and uncertain pandemic process.
I think that the inability to share this life, which exists in almost every family, is a clear reality of our society, and it has been revealed during the pandemic process. Based on this reality we face, I invite all students of life to see what we can do by embracing our daily responsibilities, to open up to our own potential, and to experience the joy of owning life together. Please don't repeat the grade.
February / 2021
Meltem Altinkaya