For the longest time, all I wanted was security.
Not success. Not adventure.
Just the absence of chaos.
A night without shouting.
A week without a hospital.
A home that stayed in one place.
My childhood wasn’t a disaster.
But it was loud in the wrong ways, and quiet in the wrong places.
There was love, yes.
But also alcohol.
And the kind of illness that sneaks in through the side door—
the kind no one controls, and no one talks about,
except in whispers after you’ve left the room.
One uncle died too early.
One aunt disappeared into the grey of mental fog.
One parent lost their job, then lost themselves in the bottle for a time.
The world didn’t fall apart overnight.
It simply frayed at the edges.
And I learned to stay quiet, to clean up, to take on more than I should have.
I remember once—age nine or ten—
I found my mother crying in the kitchen,
holding a spoon over a pot she had forgotten to stir.
She wiped her eyes and said she was just tired.
But the soup was already burning.
That moment stayed with me more than any birthday.
It felt like being handed an invisible suitcase.
Heavy. Mine. Forever.
So as I grew, I chased peace with everything I had.
I made my bed every morning.
I kept my grades up.
I didn’t ask for much.
Later, when I had my own apartment, I filled it with silence.
Tea towels folded the same way.
A small ceramic bowl for keys.
My socks lined up in perfect pairs, like well-behaved soldiers.
This, I told myself, is what safety looks like.
Predictability. Clean lines. No surprises.
And for a while, it worked.
But the universe, it seems, doesn’t believe in finished stories.
Even when I had built something quiet and dependable,
it always cracked open again.
Inviting in wind.
And strangers with wild eyes.
People came into my life and nudged me off course.
There was the man who slept on my floor for three weeks
after missing a flight back to Istanbul,
and then convinced me to ride a train across the Balkans.
There was the woman who kissed me mid-sentence in a laundromat,
and said, “You need to learn how to let go of your furniture.”
And I did.
Each time I thought I was done with risk,
something pulled me back into movement.
A whisper. A fire. A train station in a country I hadn’t planned on visiting.
And oddly—these moments didn’t destroy my peace.
They deepened it.
Made it less brittle.
More like water, less like glass.
There was tragedy in my past, yes.
But also beauty.
A kind of beauty only those who’ve wept in locked bathrooms understand.
The beauty of surviving things you didn’t ask for.
The beauty of still wanting to dance.
Of laughing with someone in a café,
even though part of you still carries the echo of old grief.
I used to think I had to choose.
Security or adventure.
Stability or risk.
But life is not a coin toss.
It’s a tide.
It moves forward, and back.
And you learn to stand inside it,
sometimes soaked, sometimes held.
There are still nights I wake up and check that the stove is off.
That the door is locked.
That I haven’t lost the peace I worked so hard to build.
And there are mornings I walk with nothing but a backpack and the impulse to leave.
No plan.
Just a hunger for wind and strange languages.
Wabi-sabi lesson:
Safety is not the absence of storm.
It’s the knowing that you’ve been through worse.
That you can carry both grief and laughter in the same pocket.
That peace doesn’t have to be perfect to be real.
You build a quiet life.
But you leave a window cracked, just in case something beautiful wants to come in.
You make your tea.
And you learn to pack quickly, when the moment calls.
life 