Growing Pains: Near the Shadow of Loss (Part Two)

The third entry in the column Growing Pains, written by Göksu Gündüzalp.

Photography by Göksu Gündüzalp

This column is centred on very gen z worries about the climate crises, different social  and political crises and is filtered through my experience of growing up as a young person  and imagining a future while feeling yearning and nostalgia for the past, lands and home.  I am a giant procrastinator and since I started writing this article, following first the  cancellation of Imamoğlu’s (Turkey’s leading opposition party CHP’s very popular next  president candidate) university diploma and then his arrest, so many people in Turkey  from very different political views have taken the streets, have been protesting, boycotting  government related companies, playing the pots and pans' music at dinner time. There  were 2.2 million people in a rally protest in Istanbul on Saturday, which is larger than 4  Edinburgh populations (Medyascope Haber Merkezi, 2025). I feel I am adequate as  someone to write about this only in an Edinburgh or foreign context as I feel mostly  outside, a privileged asshole who is sitting in the park or going to a party while people my  age are being teargassed, arrested, tortured. The police have been attacking and using  hugely very disproportionate violence against mostly young people and students in  Turkey. On the first day of Bayram or Eid, there were 301 people who had been arrested  since the start of the protests on 19th March and most of these people are young students  (Balkan, 2025). The students make up the center of the direct action and hope for change  in the conversations through phone and on the internet I encountered about the ongoing  protests against the government. The first days of the protests, I felt very sad, angry about  young people being given this responsibility within social media posts where they are  framed as the light of hope, future. Although I can understand people in their 30s, 40s,  50s have jobs, children which could make it harder for the constant attendance to protests.  At this point and in the presence of a violent and scared government, a simultaneous  boycotting with the rallies and protests could also appeal to and can be attended by a large  age group. As someone living abroad, I feel this weird tension between my family, friends  and country’s peoples’ realities and my more individual daily life abroad where I am  among either British people or international people who might have had similar  experiences of having to mediate this divided double agenda of their home country and a  social life abroad. I am not sure what use my writing here has but I hope it has some use. 

My childhood friend, living in Ankara, Turkey mentioned a year ago how she wished people in Turkey could care and deal with problems such as climate change instead of the  always busy political news, breaches of human rights, corrupt government and the  surrounding agenda. From how I remember she phrased this sentence, climate change  seemed to be lower on the list of societal worries and problems. I heard a similar  sentiment being shared by another Turkish friend too. There is also the very famous  saying of the Turkish writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, ‘Turkey doesn’t give the opportunity  to its young people to be occupied with anything except from itself (its agenda)’  (1000Kitap, 2021). While in Turkey the priority of political conversation might not be  seen as climate change, the change and losing of land, nature and resources is very tied to  the government and the fascist capitalist systems. I feel some other non Western countries  could maybe have similar dialogues around being worried about climate change being  seen as a lighter nicer worry, meanwhile ‘Global South’ countries seem to be the ones  who are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change first.  

Every summer when we travel to my grandmother’s summer flat, we pass through these  big vast plains on the way from Izmir to Kuşadası, we travel in a relieving plain after we  pass the town of Selçuk, on the Küçük Menderes delta. My mom and her three siblings,  their grandma, mom and dad would ride a car to the summer flat in the crowded big fun  apartment complex post 70-80s near Kuşadası. No AC and sometimes with a pet fish held  by the children tucked on the back, traveling within this beautiful narrow road surrounded  by two rows of long trees running the same speed as the cars, traveling under deep breezy  shadows. We now travel in parallel to that old road, in the bigger highway kind. We pass  by Selçuk, and see Ephesus antique city from afar. My mom says she lived in Selçuk in a  past life. My aunt said she lived in Ephesus in a past life, neighbour towns from different  layers in history. My aunt used to be a tour guide and would lead tours of Ephesus in  German. So me and my fam went to Ephesus one hot hot hot July day in 2020. We  walked to its port, covered in white marble reflecting shiny hot lights back on us. This  port is now far from the sea, the river, any water. In one moment I thought a body of  water must have been covering right where I was looking at, which in my memory, is a  green and yellow, dried out but alive field surrounding the marble port.  

When the port was built, it connected to the sea by a canal reaching the port. According  to an article in the magazine Izmir Dergisi, the sea near Ephesus, a 4 km distance that  used to be the sea near Ephesus, on Pamucak Beach is now land (Sönmez). This happened  because of time, the river carried and carried its alluvions that ended up accumulating  enough material to make up soil. This might be a rare instant where I don’t feel anger but  more of a curiosity about the land and geography changing. Also is Ephesus my city to  ask for its justice, its people lived more than 2000 years ago. But it makes me angry to see  a newsclip about sinkholes forming near Küçük Menderes delta in Izmir. They filled the  port of Üsküdar, Istanbul with cement and all. The beach by my house in Istanbul used to  have a lively ecosystem and even had natural beaches and coasts in early 20th century.  Will children born in 2070 think, in kind of a mirror image of my experience in Ephesus,  that where they know as the sea used to be places people lived in? What is the purpose of  these future fantasies and ideas? Are they negative and poisonous or are they calls to 

action? It feels good to talk about these worries but I don’t want to bring and radiate  hopelessness. 

Life washes up to the shore, cleaning itself of its aliveness and dries as the past. How  Efes’s port was surrounded by a canal that now is just land reminds me of the beginning  sequence of Annie Ernaux’s The Years which starts with the sentence ‘all the images will  disappear’, and describes a series of memories and Western cultural moments Ernaux  witnessed, from early and late 20th century that are mostly impossible for me to relate or  understand. This is why in my first attempt I gave up reading The Years within the first 8  pages. But in my second attempt at reading, how I was unable to relate to any of these  cultural moments made me think of how the memes, brat summer, ice bucket challenge  will all be undecipherable details to some generation in the future, and that is kind of a  relief. Through her own life, Ernaux wants to capture the passing of time, gliding  streaming through different governments, political and cultural eras. Personal stories  could be unique for everyone, but for the writer’s generation what is shared and is a  common experience is the passing and witnessing of time through the same decades  which she also calls a ‘reconstituting a common time’ (222). 

While the trees, colours, animals, birds of a place shape its personality and feeling, and  as these elements shape a land into the feeling of a home, these characteristics are  shifting. I wanna come back and find everything as it was. Is this a right? It feels more  like a privilege, or a very large group of people don’t experience this preservation even in  the short term. In Palestine, in Syria people’s homes, memories got destroyed. After  earthquakes that governments should have helped us get ready for in Turkey, Syria, after  storms in south of US, after the 2022 floods in Pakistan. ‘Future is you revisiting places  you’ve once been, with a fresh set of eyes. It’s the closest we can ever get to time  traveling’ says Shayna Klee in her poem Five Years Ago (2021: 78). I want to come back  home to the same cafe, park, restaurant every single time. That way I know I changed,  time passed and I grew up. How do I compare when all I have of the past is memory and  sliding changing decaying reforming surfaces and places? To reconnect and remember  who I was or am? Maybe people, friends community and family is that place. As I  change, mold, as I slime my way into the future, I want the places that my feet press  against to hold me, remind me of still being themselves, the spaces connecting me to the  before.  

Imagining and yearning for geographies, nature fulfills my need of melancholia and  nostalgia. Like the fresh sea, smell of summer bins and being under a shadow by the sea.  Or being in a vast field under the sun in a yellow beige white brown place. Vast fields  drawn by Georgia o’Keeffe and written by Yaşar Kemal. Land is a place of resort, to  come back to, to rest. We rest in it when we’re dead, we rest under shadows or the sun on  a used wooden or plastic chaise long or a shiny sunlit bench by the meadows. I go to a big  field inside my head and the emptiness gives me rest. Whats gonna happen to resting,  recharging, how are we gonna go on holidays in the summer? How are British people  going to go to their Greek islands and Magaluf and Ibitha :O? I feel so many middle class  pleasures are in danger of getting more and more exclusive to a smaller minority, or also  just disappearing and changing in form. 

The word solastalgia describes a feeling of being homesick ‘without ever leaving  home’ as the home changes and it describes ‘the distress caused by the unwelcome  transformation of cherished landscapes’ (Michelin, 2020; 2019:11 in Comtesse et al,  2021). The Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht came up with this term 21 years ago  ‘to address feelings of shock’ in a coal mining area in Australia where the land was  transformed into somewhere its locals nearly found ‘unrecognizable’(Michelin, 2020).  Galway and colleagues’ work points out to how Solastalgia can result in ‘cumulative  mental, emotional and spiritual health impacts’ (2019:11 in Comtesse et al, 2021). For  instance Michelin reports for The Guardian the serious recorded effects of climate change  on the mental health and wellbeing of Inuit communities in the north of Canada. 

 Albrecht introduced various neologisms such as ‘terrafurie’, meaning earth rage, or  ‘global dread’ through his book Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (2019)  which he calls psychoterratic emotions which are related to the ‘perceived or felt states of  the earth’ (Wray, 2021). Albrecht aims to expand ways of thinking about the nature and  future by bringing in new words and underlines the importance of positive emotions  related to earth, such as the word ‘soliphilia’ referring to ‘the love and responsibility for a  place’ (Delalonde, 2021; Wray, 2021). He says these emotions are the reason why we also  experience negative ones such as solastalgia, global dread. Albrecht believes a  ‘meauacide’ (meaning ‘the extinction of our emotions’) of positive emotions, is  ‘occurring at a rate that disturbs him, and shares his wishes for ‘positive earth emotions  within us to be nurtured, strengthened, identified’ (Wray, 2021). Jemaima Tiatia Siau, a  professor specialising in Pacific Studies, mental health and wellbeing points out to how  ‘like with so many western paradigms’, the term solastalgia doesn’t cover and consider  the full extent of Pacific people and many other groups’ relationship with nature and land  and the emotions arising through climate crisis, and adds solastalgia as a term has proven  useful for ‘settler communities that rely on their environment and land for economic and  social livelihoods’ (Tupou et al, 2023: Wray, 2021). 

Time slips like butter. Can we miss things and grieve without or before losing them? Is  this a way of being haunted by loss, a fear of it? Or it could be you keeping in mind the  reality that you will lose someone, and something. I miss my grandma like this maybe, as  someone I live far away from, knowing she is 92 years old. Maşallah. I long for Istanbul  with a fear of losing its buildings. I know I can lose some parts of Istanbul, as it is an  earthquake city where the government and regulations aren’t preparing us accordingly,  where tall buildings are made right near the shore where the fault line is closest to. Can  we miss people, places, things that are gonna be gone in a useful positive way, without  being haunted by the future? I think so. With an acknowledgment of and curiosity about  the vulnerability, fragility of these relationships and through giving them care.  

 Svetlana Boym says we live in an age of nostalgia, and we might as well ‘make the  most out of it’ (2007 in Leskovec, 2023). Nostalgia ‘can help us examine our current  issues through a historical lens and thereby can help us avoid the pitfalls of believing society is necessarily always progressing’(ibid). Leskovec points out to how anxiety and  worries about the future, and the ‘belief that the future is not given, but something we have to work hard for’, can cause us to take on more responsibility and consider the  decisions made today (ibid). 

 Do my grandmothers feel they miss things from their past which feels way longer than  my personal history of 23 years or do newer fresh things replace this yearning with new  things to do, new excitements, wants, unknowns? Maybe you acknowledge how you can’t  hold back time as you witness more and more eras, crises melt into and interlock into  each other. But when you are 80 at least in Turkey, I feel you are less too actively within  society, social settings so maybe you live in a larger relaxed time that is more time then it  is just 2025? Ernaux towards the end of the book which is probably set in 2000s says the  then recent deaths of her cat, the last aunt from her mom’s side ‘when she compares them  to others that happened longer ago, do not at all seem to have modified her ways of  thinking, tastes (…), which became settled when she was about fifty in a kind of inner  solidification. What has most changed in her is the perception of time and her own  location within it’ (219). The passing and witnessing of time is told as a shared experience  of a generation. What I understand from The Years is how we experience time also  changes with age and that is exciting to me. As a young person in 2025, I feel super  relevant to today. Do older people feel as relevant? In Turkey, since Imamoğlu was first  taken into custody, around 1500 people have been taken into custody, and a very large  amount of this is young people, students (BBC News Türkçe, 2025). 

 Ernaux says: ‘As the time ahead objectively decreases, the time behind her stretches  farther and farther back, to long before birth, and ahead to a time after her death’ (220).  This is so beautiful and interesting to me. So in that point, in 2000s and when Ernaux is in  her 60s, does the future and past both stretch to times when she isn’t alive, maybe she  becomes more timeless? As you get closer to death, do you become more timeless,  assuming you live a long life. But when you’re in the middle of this potentially maybe  long life, does it feel so in the moment? I am just imagining here and I’ve never been  older than I am. Most of the time we don’t even know what point is the middle of a life,  how long that life will be. My dad says older people are like children, the end and start  has its similarities. Ernaux says ‘what matters to her is to seize this time that comprises  her life on earth at a given period, the time that has coursed through her, the world she has  recorded merely by living’ (221). I am very curious about how our generations’ recording  of time will be different, in a world that vastly changes in its land and geographies, with  its ways of recording and holding information, with climate crisis and late stage  capitalism and AI and all that jazz.  

References 

Balkan, D. (2025). İmamoğlu protestolarında tutuklu sayısı 301 oldu, gençler bayramı cezaevinde  geçirecek. Sözcü. Available at: https://www.sozcu.com.tr/imamoglu-protestolarinda-tutuklu sayisi-301-oldu-gencler-bayrami-cezaevinde-gecirecek-p156950. Accessed: 30 March 2025.

Comtesse, H. et al. (2021) ‘Ecological Grief as a Response to Environmental Change: A Mental  Health Risk or Functional Response?’ International Journal of Environmental Research and Public  Health. 18(2): 734. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18020734 Accessed: 26 March 2025.  

Delalonde, M. (2021) ‘Tracing the watery self - A conversation with Marc Delalonde’. Interviewed  Myrto Katsimicha. The School of Infinite Rehearsals 2020-2021 Program. Onassis. Available at:  https://www.onassis.org/initiatives/onassis-podcasts/pali-room/tracing-the-watery-self-a conversation-with-marc-delalonde. Accessed: 20 March 2025.  

Ernaux, A. (2008) The Years. Fitzcarraldo Editions. London.  

Haber Merkezi (2025). Özgür Özel’in “2.2 milyon kişi katıldı” dediği İmamoğlu’na Özgürlük  Mitingi’nde neler oldu?. Medyascope. Available at: https://medyascope.tv/2025/03/29/2-2-milyon kisinin-katildigi-imamogluna-ozgurluk-mitinginde-neler-oldu/. Accessed: 31 March 2025. 

Imamoğlu protestoları: Istanbul’da 74 kişi için üçer yıla kadar hapis istendi. BBC News Türkçe.  Available at: https://www.bbc.com/turkce/articles/cvgw2dwlvjxo. Accessed: 29 March 2025. 

Klee, S. (2021). The Purple Palace & other poems. Shayna Klee. Printed in UK by Amazon.  

Leskovec, L. (2023). Negative Nostalgia: How we stopped believing in the future. Intermagazine.  Edition 58: Memory. Accessed on: 24 March 2025. Available at: https://intermagazine.nl/ edition-58-memory/negative-nostalgia-how-we-stopped-believing-in-the-future/ 

Michelin, O. (2020) ‘Solastalgia’: Arctic inhabitants overwhelmed by new form of climate grief.  This Land is Your Land. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/ oct/15/arctic-solastalgia-climate-crisis-inuit-indigenous. Accessed: 25 March 2025. 

Sönmez, T. Kaybolan Liman Efes. Izmir Kültür ve Turizm Dergisi. Available at: https:// izmirdergisi.com/tr/195-tr/bloglar/tumay-sonmez/1478-kaybolan-liman-efes. Accessed: 27 March  2025. 

Tupou T, Tiatia-Siau J, Newport C, Langridge F, Tiatia S. Is the Concept of Solastalgia Meaningful  to Pacific Communities Experiencing Mental Health Distress Due to Climate Change? An Initial  Exploration. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023 Nov 9;20(22):7041. doi: 10.3390/ ijerph20227041. PMID: 37998272; PMCID: PMC10671233.  

‘Usta Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’ın meşhur ifadesiyle:’. (2021). 1000Kitap. Available at: https:// 1000kitap.com/usta-ahmet-hamdi-tanpinarin-meshur-ifadesiyle--2607081. Accessed: 29 March  2025.  

Wray, B. (2021). ‘Are "eco" terms, like eco-grief, holding back progress?’ Unthinkable Times.  Substack. Available at: https://unthinkable.substack.com/p/are-eco-terms-like-eco-grief-holding.  Accessed on: 25 March 2025. 

Wray. B. (2021) ‘Fighting the extinction of positive earth emotions’. Unthinkable Times. Substack.  Available at: https://unthinkable.substack.com/p/fighting-the-extinction-of-positive. Accessed on:  25 March 2025.

Wray, B (2024) ‘Why the term “solastalgia” doesn’t resonate with some Pacific Islanders’  Unthinkable Times. Available at: https://unthinkable.substack.com/p/why-the-term-solastalgia doesnt-resonate?utm_source=publication-search. Accessed: 22 March 2025.