There Is No Bottom to the Worst

It is as if you are not living in this country at all — imagine you are in a dystopia; a swamp where the more you struggle, the deeper you sink, and the more you try to escape, the further you are buried.

Mud up to your throat; the more you try to breathe, the more it smears across your mouth, your face.

The more you retch, the more you want to retch. Filth like carrion has wrapped itself around you from every side.

Or you are inside a tunnel of fear, in pitch darkness; no matter how far you go, you cannot see the light at the end.

Not just you — all of us...

We do not know where to hold on, where to lean; where to find support — everything we reach for crumbles in our hands.

A rot and a putrefaction beyond description! The air is unbearably heavy; is it even possible to endure?

We are trapped in a siege we cannot break. They have surrounded us on all sides.

And yet we keep trying to resist, to push back.

Let us not drag this out!

It is very, very hard to answer the question of what it feels like to live in Turkey in 2025.

Our sentences, our words fall short. Where do we even begin, how do we explain it!

Can this be easily described?

A heavy feeling of hatred blended with rage, helplessness, suffocation, constriction, and entrapment... But beyond all of that, the pain of being unable to find a way out — or of having surrendered under the weight of accepting the darkness within.

Perhaps a vast sense of emptiness born from having consumed and destroyed, over the last quarter century, the very values that made us who we are.

More grievous still, and more devastating: the pang of conscience from having failed to adequately protect what was entrusted to us.

At the end of the day, a sorrow that reveals itself through exhaustion, disillusionment, and finally a few drops of tears — a faint ache in the heart.

They robbed us of our joy of living long ago; whatever we tried to nurture in our lives, they smashed and shattered.

Those who descended on this country like a nightmare some quarter century ago by a twist of fate are now pressing down on us harder and harder — to fully seize our souls, our bodies, our minds; to exploit our marrow and our bones even further.

They are pouncing on us savagely.

Humanity, compassion, conscience... Search and see if you can find any.

It is clear which dark circles they serve, whose direction they follow. They do not even feel the need to hide it.

After all, the dark masses they have fed on ignorance are always behind them.

They want to bury us once more in medieval darkness; to castrate our minds with Arab superstitions from fifteen centuries ago, so that their pipes may play forever.

But we have run out of breath. Our air is cut off, and will be cut off further.

We have also learned that there is no bottom to the worst.

The moment we say "surely it cannot get any worse than this," something far worse appears before us, leaving us frozen, not knowing what to think or what to do.

There is no longer even a place we can escape to in order to at least preserve our mental health. They have handed every corner of this country over to one person or another. Our mountains, our plains, our plateaus, our lakes, our seas — they recklessly seized them all, plundered them, destroyed them.

We want to keep going, stubbornly and persistently, saying "If hope runs out, it falls to us to make it grow again." As the saying goes, a person begins anew precisely at the point where they say "it is over."

Have we reached that point — or have we long since passed it, and are we now at the stage where the doctor says "let them eat whatever they want"?

What can we say; if I speak, it has no effect; if I stay silent, the heart is not at peace.