By: Feride Güney

Sometimes you read something and stop. The writer has not taught you anything new; on the contrary, they have said, before you could, something you have carried inside you for years without ever finding a name for it.

Perhaps that is part of what writing is.

Sitting beside a feeling everyone knows but no one can quite put into words, and giving it a name.

Sometimes I wonder: if all my labels were taken away, who would remain?

I am not a mother. Not a wife. Not a woman. Not a writer. Not someone’s child, someone’s friend, or someone others happen to know. I have also set aside my past, my successes, my failures, and what other people think of me.

Then who am I?

Most of the words we use to describe ourselves come from our relationships with others. To one person we are a mother, to another a friend; to someone else, good, bad, successful, unsuccessful, beautiful, ugly, strange…

Throughout our lives, we sew identities for ourselves, until we begin to mistake what we are wearing for our skin.

Perhaps what frightens us is the possibility that all of it can be taken off.

Because we do not know what lies beneath.

But sometimes I feel the opposite: what if there does not have to be anything underneath?

What a strange freedom.

A place where I do not have to explain myself to anyone, prove myself, or make myself complete; where I do not try to fit inside a label.

I simply exist.

Perhaps we come closest to ourselves when we no longer have a magnificent answer to the question, “Who am I?”

And perhaps that is exactly what a good writer does:

They do not always tell us things we do not know.

They say what we know very well but have never quite been able to say.

And when we read it, we close the book and sit in silence for a while.

Because in that sentence, it is not the writer we have caught a glimpse of.

It is ourselves.

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Feride Güney is a Kurdish writer based in Ankara, Türkiye. Her writing explores memory, grief, womanhood, belonging, and the inner life. Her short story “The Dead Are Cold” has been accepted by Literally Stories.