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

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

I love being emotional sad ‘hüzünlü’ about the past. Turkish has the word ‘özlem’ meaning to miss, yearn, long for. Özlem is filled with hunger, fantasy of what you can’t have, what you used to have, an obsession with what you are not surrounded by in the present. Maybe a close word for özlem in English is wistfulness, or yearning. It took me some time to find out about the word ‘wistful’, I am suspecting its not a very commonly used word. My personal relationship with wistfulness, melancholia and yearning is built on my mistakes, and the possible journeys on paths I didn’t choose to follow. Chances I missed and people I didn’t say hi to. My friend said to me in October that if after not doing something I feel yearning and regret, it is better to just do it ™. Now I am more successful in avoiding my inactions that cause yearning afterwards.

Graphic by Göksu Gündüzalp

Even if the global warming level doesn’t exceed 1.5, according to BBC Earth writer Henriques the scarcity and damage to crops ‘could lead to global food crisis’ and still exceed the ‘climate tipping points such as Arctic ice melt’ (2024). NASA scientists’ research shared in 2024 Earth’s ‘average surface temperature was the warmest on record’ and that ‘the temperatures in 2024 were 1.28 degrees Celcius above the agency’s 20th century baseline (1951-1980)’ (Bardan, 2025). Climate Analytics’ researchers point out to how it is still possible to achieve the Paris Agreement limit to restrict the temperature rise to 1.5 degree celsius but this requires strict ‘emissions reductions until 2030 and achieving net zero by 2050 are required’ (Schleussner, 2023). This makes me feel every action we do is trying to take back, save as much, even if little, from what will be affected, gone with the 6th mass extinction. I think of how we will loose the resources, nature we have now with climate change in the future and how we could not have lost them. We’re in an ongoing present that we can change. Will we feel regret and a burden about not having done more when areas of London, New Orleans, Shanghai, Alexandria are ‘below the annual flood level’ in 2050? (Climate Central, 2021) In the future, in 40 years will these big mistakes, grief of having lost animals, land, people, some characteristics of the geographies and atmospheres we grew up in, the nostalgia and burden of the past and guilt about our inaction, will these affect how we see humanity and ourselves? Am I exaggerating? I feel I am slightly fascinated about thinking of a future affected by climate change in a way, a fascination with the idea of doom and disasters because it requires my imagination.

I miss home, I fantasize about taking the ferry in Istanbul from Kadıköy, about the trips to Izmir from Ankara we’d take every school break in February when I was in middle school. I miss my grandma’s old house in Cebeci, Ankara on the steep sudden and long hill. I miss the feeling of a protected yellow orange not so exciting weekend at her house. The plastic wooden-looking bowl that holds yellow apples with freckles. Yummy. And endless chocolate and sugar and a bakkal (grocery store) on our door step, TV on our foreheads. I enjoy this melancholia&sadness of fantasizing about the gone past sometimes. I remember being in a swimming practice when I was 8-9 and our trainer asking us what we wanted to be when we grew up. I said I wanted to be an archaeologist and added I wanted to stay as a kid when I grew up. I just had an urge to be melancholic and intelligent as a 9 year old leaning on dirty dirty feet and chlorine smelling plastic pool grills. I heard the adults say they wish they were kids and I was interested in their longing that I didn’t experience yet. A substack article by Mary Retta says yearning also didn’t use to be a common word until its revival during the pandemic and was associated with ‘popular literature of 18th and 19th century by female creatives’ such as Virginia Woolf (2020).

People binge watched a lot of old shows like Friends for comfort the years after covid. I wanted to go back to 90s. I wasn’t alive in 90s, but from watching Friends and movies of the time I thought friendships and people seemed more naive and hopeful and less cynical. When I’m wearing my y2k purchases, I look like how my mother dressed up in my childhood photos. Maybe I am trying to live the young adult life I thought I would have as a kid, the version I dreamed of back then. Nostalgia is a method of bringing back elements and inspiration from the past into our lives and bringing new ways to relate to the present, in comparison to the past. The dazed article by Dominique Sisley In 2024, everyone is yearning but what for? talks about how 2024 was a year full of yearning, we heard of it so much in social media, personally I heard of it from friends a lot (2024). Retta connects this increase in the demand and consumption of ‘yearnbait’ media such as the show One Day to how after the pandemic, many young people feel ‘somethings have been stolen from us’ for multiple reasons such as the cost of living crisis, and having lost some of our years to fuck up, experiment and socialise (2020). As I search online more what yearning means, I get more confused. I don’t know what it means fully. Retta associates dreaming with more unattainable things and yearning with the longing and the desire for things ‘that should be within reach’ (ibid). This has a political undertone to my ears.

My feet right now not being in Istanbul makes the idea of being there so much more desirable. I imagine my feet dangling by the wood and metal side of the ferry with wind blowing and the bubbles and waves flowing behind my Birkenstocks. I walk my streets in Istanbul on Google Maps as I sit in the library. This flower shop I love passing by, with the funkiest font, near Fenerbahçe Stadium closed down over the summer because they are taking down the building and making a new one that will probably be taller and uglier. I feel sad I forgot to take a photo of this flower shop, but Google Maps takes me back to this street in March 2023. Istanbul has been going under urban transformation where buildings are knocked down and remade more actively since the 1999 earthquake, but the transformation gained speed after the 6th February 2023 earthquakes, in the shadow of the Istanbul earthquake that will happen one day. There is a serious economy and sector of remaking new apartments for this ‘transformation’.

There are losses that await us, not in a necessarily bad way, maybe you could call this change. But some losses create anger, regret in me. Losses of land, geographies, places. They make me question my agency. I am thinking of how much of this change happens because of time, or more naturally and how much of this loss and change in places, land and nature could have been prevented. Man-made, anthropocentric losses. The loss of buildings and flower shops and cinemas and unkept memories of old, rootful cities like Istanbul make me angry. The news I see about the sinkholes that formed near İzmir, where my father is from, makes me worried and angry. Konya, a city in Inner Anatolia and a persisting area of agriculture has nearly 3 thousand recorded sinkholes because of drought and misuse of water resources (TRT Haber, 2024). There are losses and changes that are easier to digest and make peace with and ones that are political and very relevant to our time. I wonder how we will loose our lands, geographies with climate change. How will we miss the things that won’t be around us in the future? We are sadly responsible for our future. The imagination and projection of losses and change call us to action. We live in continuous events, wonders, disasters that happen. The droughts, fires to come are of the present time in how now flows to the future continuously. We exist in this time and are relevant and are the main characters. This reminds me of Annie Ernaux’s The Years which I will be talking more about in the next column, the second half of this writing.

Hello, If you have any comments, or recommendations, feedback or questions please get in touch through either my mail address: goksu.gunduzalp@gmail.com or my instagram @goksugundzalp ! See you soon.

References

Bardan, R. (2025) ‘Temperatures Rising: NASA Confirms 2024 Warmest Year on Record’. NASA. Available at: https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/temperatures-rising-nasa-confirms-2024-warmest-year-onrecord/#:~:text=Earth's%20average%20surface%20temperature%20in,the%20record%20set%20in%202023. (Accessed: 28 February 2025).

Climate Central (2021) ‘Land Projected to be Below Annual Flood Level in 2050’. Available at: https://coastal.climatecentral.org/map/11/30.0695/31.1136/?theme=sea_level_rise&map_type=year&basemap=roadmap&contiguous=true&elevation_model=best_available&forecast_year=2050&pathway=ssp3rcp70&percentile=p50&refresh=true&return_level=return_level_1&rl_model=coast_rp&slr_model=ipcc_2021_med. (Accessed: 1 March 2025).

The link above takes you to a map where you can see which land around the world is projected to be below annual flood levels according to the data from Leading Consensus (IPCC 2021)

Google Maps (2023) 26 Kördere Sokaği. Available at: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Fenerbah%C3%A7e+%C5%9E%C3%BCkr%C3%BC+Saraco%C4%9Flu+Stadyumu/@40.9855929,29.0373846,3a,75y,174.71h,89.88t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sLwPXOQ7Gfn-KQEzIX14iQQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D0.12211425716134272%26panoid%3DLwPXOQ7Gfn-KQEzIX14iQQ%26yaw%3D174.71440580920367!7i16384!8i8192!4m6!3m5!1s0x14b4cf9bdb308293:0xd4af0b8bcf36954d!8m2!3d41.4396642!4d27.7012928!16s%2Fg%2F11t_h589wx?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDIyNi4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D. (Accessed on: 27 February 2025).

Henrique, M. (2024) ‘Climate change: The 1.5C Threshold explained’. BBC. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20231130-climate-crisis-the-15c-global-warming-threshold-explained. (Accessed: 1 March 2025).

Retta, M. (2020) ‘Why we yearn’. Close but not Quite. Substack. Available at: https://maryretta.substack.com/p/why-we-yearn. (Accessed: 2 February 2025).

Schleussner, C. F, et al. (2023) ‘Is the 1.5 °C limit still in reach? FAQs’. Climate Analytics. Available at: https://climateanalytics.org/comment/is-the-15c-limit-still-in-reach-faqs#:~:text=These%20reductions%20need%20to%20be,of%2067%25%20or%20less%E2%80%9C. (Accessed: 15 February 2025).

Sisley, D. (2024) ‘In 2024, everyone is yearning - but what for?’. Dazed Digital. Available at: https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/61932/1/yearning-memes-social-media-tiktok-one-day-netflix-love-longing-2024. (Accessed: 25 February 2025).

TRT Haber. (2024) ‘Konya ovasında obruk sayısı 3 bine yaklaştı’. Available at: youtube.com/watch?=QP16HXeH9UQ. (Accessed: 24 February 2025).