Is Your Father Proud of What You Do?

I’ve always likened Turkish society to gravity and dreams to flying balloons. While all the dynamics society brings with it want to keep you on the ground with all their might, your dreams, your decisions, your determination, your desire to be different, your desire to exist are the only things that will carry you up to the skies.

When I remember deciding what I wanted to be, I was in my second year of high school. I loved computers; I’d always enjoyed tinkering with them and fixing the little problems that came up. In fact, whenever someone’s computer broke down in the neighborhood, everyone knew who to call. That’s why I always got home late: whenever my mom sent me out to buy bread, somebody would always call out, Ahmet, the computer won’t connect to the internet and there’s no picture on the screen either, could you take a look, and I’d fix the problems with solutions I found on Google and become the neighborhood’s hero of the moment. You should have seen the way I walked out of those houses. You’d think I had just made the greatest contribution to world peace to date.

Those were the first times I was appreciated by society. As someone who had broken his arm four times by the age of 13, I was, as you can guess, a very naughty kid. People were fed up with my behavior; you could easily tell they thought this kid would never amount to anything from the indifference they amateurishly hid behind their smiling faces. In an environment like that, with the irresistible satisfaction of being appreciated, I set my mind that day on becoming a computer engineer. That I didn’t become one is another story.

I have to confess, neither in high school nor at university, in fact never in my entire education, was I a successful student. I got into university late, for example, and not on my second try or anything; I only made it on my third attempt. But the moment I understood why I hadn’t gotten in and where I had gone wrong, the moment I grasped that what I wanted mattered more than what my family wanted, that moment, the doors of a new world swung wide open. The moment you dare to stand up to your family, to all the norms and monotony society imposes on you, to the magnificent education system that creates identical people, to the existence of people who measure success in life by the houses and cars they buy, to the neighbor’s kid who solves a thousand practice questions a day, in other words to all these forces trying as hard as they can to make you one of them, the moments when you start achieving things begin too, and it doesn’t matter at all what it is you achieve!

I come from a family where almost all my relatives are civil servants. Coming from a family of civil servants, where no option other than studying and landing a government job will ever be accepted, creates the pressure that every decision you make about your career and your life must lead to a single outcome, and that is becoming a civil servant! It doesn’t matter at all that today you’re steering million-dollar projects and investments at Turkey’s biggest companies or winning a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions; if you come from a family of civil servants and you failed (!) to become a civil servant, you’ll always be looked upon with pity. At family holidays, while your cousin who somehow managed to land a government job proudly sips his tea, you’ll always be seen as the one who never amounted to anything.

The point I want to make is this: I’ve always likened Turkish society to gravity and dreams to flying balloons. While all the dynamics society brings with it want to keep you on the ground with all their might, your dreams, your decisions, your determination, your desire to be different, your desire to exist are the only things that will carry you up to the skies.

The reason I made the title so aggressive is this: it doesn’t matter at all who you are or how strong an image you project to the outside world. Human beings, by nature, crave and need appreciation. We all want to be appreciated and to be a source of pride, and of course especially to those closest to us. After working on a project for months, achieving very significant successes and sharing it with your family, getting the reaction “so what now, what good is this going to do” and still carrying on is not easy at all, and unfortunately, in Turkey, parenting is not an institution practiced the right way. It’s certainly not an institution people put any thought into. If only fathers could appreciate their children, if only families could stand behind the decisions their children make, could accept that they are now individuals and understand that they need to make their own decisions. The world we live in is a battlefield; in this world there’s no room for the indecisive, for latecomers, for emotional gaps, for the slightest weakness, and unfortunately, as long as families act on their protective instinct, they don’t realize that they themselves are opening the biggest gap!

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