01/09/2026
I wrote this last night. A little about what it’s about.
By nature I’m a deeply introverted artist. My parents aren’t. They cannot, for the life of them, understand that my number one need is protected space and energy — no matter how many times I tried to enforce it: signs on the door (“Prohibited entry to anyone stranger to the Turk family”), telling people to leave, to knock, and to come in only if I decided to let them in. This went on throughout my childhood.
Instead of ever acknowledging my need — or adapting and implementing even one change that could make me feel even a little more comfortable and seen — they’d apologize to the other person, laugh it off with them, and make them feel good. Something like: “Every family has their crazy one.”
So I did the adapting. In my useful artistry, I became the author of it. I preempt. I build systems around me. I create boundaries before anyone else even understands what they’re about. And when those boundaries get violated anyway, it doesn’t just annoy me — it breaks me.
I spent two years back there when I was 23. I’m 36 now. I haven’t been there since, and I have no desire to. I don’t derive pleasure from contact with my family of origin. That basically summarizes my relationship with that whole city.
As the oldest child and female, and naturally good with my hands, I become useful. Useful becomes servitude — which is the opposite of artist. An artist tells a deep story through a project. In my case it can be a garment, but it doesn’t have to be.
This piece is about how I kept recreating the same equation, in different forms, throughout my life: service + strong boundaries + resentment. In early childhood it was survival — protecting my inner truth and controlling my projection: authoring the script without lying, so I could stay whole.
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