In Praise of Clumsiness

Rastinews — "They're so clumsy, always hurting themselves," one says. "Nothing's wrong with them," another adds. Then comes the line: "When they get bored, they cut their arms."

Yet that may be exactly the point.

What we call clumsiness is not always mere carelessness. Sometimes a person cannot harm themselves outright, yet cannot quite protect their body either. Constant bumping into things, falling, cutting, bruising — perhaps this is psychological pain finding an indirect way into the body. Clumsiness can become an oblique form of self-harm. There may be no conscious intent, but the body still carries the weight of the mind. People make their inner disorder visible by colliding, falling, bleeding.

At times, these indirect injuries give way to something more direct. Psychological pain that cannot be put into words is converted into physical pain in an attempt to make it bearable. The mind's vague ache becomes the body's tangible wound. Physical pain is visible and has boundaries; the pain of the mind, most of the time, is neither seen nor spoken. Clumsiness, too, may be the unconscious's silent scream: "Something is wrong here."

Do you love Müslüm Baba?

Sometimes this state turns into something almost spiritual — not feeling pain, or even mastering it. A person seems to stand not inside the pain but above it. The screams that rise while listening to Müslüm Gürses come not only from pain but from pleasure too. It is taking pleasure in pain, except that in that moment the pleasure grows stronger than the pain, covering it, even surpassing it. Like a chorus built from screams — a frenzied sense of belonging lived through pain.

In this state, the body no longer feels itself as a separate entity but as part of a larger whole. A desire emerges to merge with Müslüm Gürses, to become one with his voice, to fold one's own pain into his. It is like a denial of separateness, of otherness, of suffering alone. A person finds their own wound in someone else's voice, then loses that wound inside it. Pain thus stops being a private ache and becomes a shared ritual, a collective scream.

Experts call this, variously, borderline organization, self-harming behavior, or a difficulty regulating emotion. But seen from the inside, the matter is often more naked than that: people try to feel alive by hurting themselves. Like someone pinching themselves to confirm they aren't dreaming. They want to test reality, to hold on to the edges of the body, to be able to say, "I am here, I can still feel." As if pain were the only proof of feeling anything at all.

Sometimes the body becomes the language of a mind that cannot speak. When pain cannot turn into words, skin becomes a page and the wound a sentence. For some people, a cut is not merely an injury; it is the bodily translation of psychological pain. Every mark drawn onto the body with a blade may be a line from a story that could not be told. A person turns their body into a canvas, trying to write in scars what they could not say in words. The blood that flows is the invisible pain carried inside made visible at last. Perhaps the mind's silent scream has begun speaking on the skin.

Yet even that blood is often met with mockery. People look at the wound but cannot see the pain. They see the mark, not the story. They judge the behavior without asking about the inner world that produced it. "Nothing is wrong with them," they say. Yet perhaps their greatest trouble is that no one ever sees it.

Self-harm most often arises not from a wish to die but from an effort to cope with unbearable psychological pain. Tension that cannot be held inside is discharged through the body. Pain the mind cannot contain is forced into the boundaries of the body instead. A cut, at times, is not a desire to end life but its opposite — an attempt to stop the mind from falling apart, to give shape to pain that has overflowed inside.

The human mind sometimes entrusts to the body a burden it cannot carry alone. When the mind cannot bleed, the body bleeds. When the mind cannot speak, the body speaks. And sometimes the deepest wounds are the ones that cannot be seen. A person makes their body speak in order to render an invisible wound visible. That is why not every wound on the body is simply a cut in the skin; sometimes it is the last language the mind finds to say, "I am in pain."

"As if showing a friend one's wound." — Ahmet Arif