Writing Led Me To See The World Differently — Not Just Traveling.
How to initiate healing, growth, and discover meaning in adversity.
It’s been a long journey crawling my way out of depression and complex trauma.
I’ve always been an ideological dare-devil — not the kind that jumps off planes but the kind that dares to dream outside of my immediate context…
You know, the kind that is often labeled as disruptive, rebellious, stupid, undeserving... and eventually—a "piece of shit".
At least that's what my family calls me when they feel challenged.
I studied languages in college—Turkic Languages at the University of Washington.
I picked a language group that was supposedly opposite from my own cultural upbringing—growing up with a mother who was constantly using her culture card to cover up anything that she did not wish to face was both emotionally exhausting and intellectually draining.
After college, I taught at a local community college for 2 years before I decided to move to Turkey.
In Turkey, I was free to explore—within the confines of a very controlling and avoidant partner, that is. (Subconsciously, being around yet more manipulation and put-downs felt familiar to me.) I made a lot of friends there and had a great job. I was having all these experiences that my friends back home could only imagine, and yet, I had never even thought of writing anything down. I was just — living in the moment... at least that's what it seemed at the time. Looking back, I was living in an inner hell that I had never had anything better to compare to.
Until I hit my 30s.
Divorced.
First-time business owner.
Very fucking depressed.
After 6 years of creating my own paychecks and having more free time than I had hoped for, I felt stuck. I didn't see the point in what I was doing, after all.
I needed a bigger purpose, so I looked for an answer by resuming my philosophy and religion/spirituality studies—something I have loved since childhood. This time, I erred a bit more on psychology and personal development instead of theories.
But learning a ton of information does not equate to gnosis—a genuine "knowing" through lived experience plus mental processing.
What would’ve helped to improve my situation (aka “to get unstuck”) were tools and finding an actual direction by clarifying my deeper values—not necessarily a walk in the park if you have had very complex life experiences.
I lost direction after reaching my first milestone in adulthood because I failed to realign my values as my life phases changed. Like most survivors, I went with the flow without understanding the depth of my complex upbringing and how relentless interpersonal traumas had profoundly shaped me.
Fortunately, I am never afraid of moving into a new space. I became interested in the content economy, and that’s when I first realized the importance of writing, more specifically, the development of therapeutic writing.
My writing journey has been a personal development journey with its own soul. I could not write when I first started, nothing made sense. It was embarrassing but I wrote anyway, that's the upside of being a "disruptive, rebellious, stupid, and undeserving piece of shit" sometimes.
I went from writing research paper-style articles (that was all I knew) to learning how to write marketing copy, to becoming more and more fluid with my self-expression. All of this worked out for me once I developed a system, and I am verbalizing this therapeutic writing system into a comprehensive book.
Traveling in my 20s exposed me to new perspectives and challenges I wouldn’t have encountered in my familiar environment. Without a doubt, these external experiences shaped me, but it wasn’t until I began writing consistently that I started to process them fully.
Although no longer traveling the external world like before, I now see writing as a great tool for inner exploration and transformation.
All the external experiences that we can have in the world are meaningless if we do not have access to process and integrate them.