Different From the Majority

Rastinews — As Pliny said, every man is a lesson unto himself, so long as he knows how to look closely at himself. What I do here is not to tell what I know, but to study myself; I am not teaching anyone else, I am teaching myself. Yet I do no harm in sharing this with others: what serves me may perhaps serve someone else too.

These lines, quoted from Montaigne's Essays, capture exactly what drives me to pass things on, to tell them to others.

I wanted to leave this brief note for readers who are about to encounter my writing on RASTÎ for the first time.

The piece I have chosen to share with you was written in 2023.

I read it again. I thought it over again.

And I saw once more that my personal transformation never stops.

Perhaps, at some point, I will share with you the journey of change I have been on these past three years. Who knows…

I want you to ask yourselves the question that made me write the piece you are about to read.

Have you ever thought about it?

Are you different from the majority?

If you'd rather not, don't tell anyone.

It's enough that you know the answer yourself.

Creon asks Antigone, "Aren't you ashamed to be different from the majority?"

Is being different from the majority really something to be ashamed of?

Every journey of change begins with asking the right questions.

A salute to the brave souls unafraid to ask them.

With love,

Anjel Dikme

March 14, 2026

8:41 PM

Alfortville

BEING ANTIGONE AND ANJEL

It all began with Sophocles's Antigone.

It was a reading assignment for my literature class.

I read it and took notes.

What intrigued me most was Sophocles himself.

I wondered about the mother who raised this man — the mother behind a playwright who, writing in ancient Greece, made a woman his protagonist — and about Sophocles's own spirit, his thoughts, the way his face must have moved as he spoke.

In the next class, when I shared my notes with my teacher, she assigned one of them as my new homework.

Creon angrily asks Antigone, "Aren't you ashamed to be different from the majority?"

My teacher then asked me, "How does one become different from the majority? What about you is different from the majority?" — and told me to answer it.

What, really, made me different from the majority?

The more I thought about it, the further back into my past I traveled.

And at certain ages, I identified things I had done that the majority would not have done.

I'll tell you about them, starting with the earliest.

I am five years old.

I am eager to learn to read. My family enrolled me at Surp Mesropyan Armenian Elementary School in Gedikpaşa before I even turned six. I started at the mangabardez — the kindergarten. I am overjoyed.

I don't know if it still exists, but back then we worked with colorful craft paper.

One day, in class, we took out our craft paper.

My mama had bought everything the teacher had asked for, down to the last item.

I wait, curious and impatient, to see what we'll make.

It's still the beginning of the school year. I don't even know the name of the girl sitting next to me.

I noticed she had nothing on her desk.

"Don't you have your papers?" I asked.

Sadly:

"No," she said.

I couldn't bear to see her so sad, so I gave her all of my own supplies.

The teacher began walking up and down the rows, checking.

She stopped at my desk and asked:

"Don't you have your supplies?"

I didn't say I had given them to my friend. If I had, it would have hurt her.

"No," I said.

She glared at me. She was angry. She scolded me.

I didn't know Armenian yet, so I didn't understand what she was saying.

But I could read her fury in every wrinkle of her aged face.

Never mind… The relief I saw in the startled eyes of the friend whose name I didn't know was enough for me.

Looking back on it now, I can see that this was the first time I put into action the two principles that would guide me for the rest of my life:

"To find happiness in giving."

"To find happiness by making others happy."

My formula was simple.

"If, in every relationship — with our partners, friends, family members, or within social and civic groups — we think of others' happiness and act accordingly, everyone comes out ahead. Since everyone will be looking out for everyone else, no one will be left unconsidered."

For me, it was that simple.

I still believe it, with the same innocence as that five-year-old girl.

If we can make this formula work, what comes back to us will be a wonderful kind of gain for everyone involved — a whole way of behaving in which everybody wins, and one that I believe suits being HUMAN better than anything else.

I am ten years old.

I met pain. And I grew up…

Before I even finished the mangabardez at Mesropyan, I had already been enrolled at Bezciyan Armenian Middle School.

This is where I study.

I had finished every year of elementary school ranked second or third in my class.

In my first year of middle school, I brought home eight failing grades in the first term.

That wasn't like me at all.

No one made much of it — except me.

Even though no one else cared, I knew why this failure had happened and what it meant.

As I write this now, I wonder — did they perhaps think, "She's finished elementary school, that's enough"?

I don't know.

These were the most painful years of my childhood, the years when I first met the darkness of loneliness and first felt myself drowning in it.

I brought home eight failing grades because I couldn't concentrate on my lessons.

My mind was consumed, day and night, with what I was going through and with the question, "What can I do?"

When my first-term report card turned out so badly, I came to my senses.

And I made a decision.

I would study. A woman's liberation, her escape from being crushed, her freedom, all ran through economic independence. What I needed for that were diplomas.

I was going to earn those diplomas.

I would not end up like the abused women around me.

At ten years old, I was REFUSING TO BE A VICTIM!

At sixteen, I am in high school.

It was only once I started at Bakırköy Girls' Vocational High School that I understood the nine years I had spent at Bezciyan Armenian Middle School had given me a measure of shelter.

My childhood on the streets of Kumkapı had been full of the word "gavur" — infidel — hurled at me in the street, in daily life, humiliating and othering, along with the chases that came with it.

If I add to that what I lived through in Laleli — the essay that gave its name to my book Kimlik İstemem (I Don't Want an Identity) — I should, in truth, have already been used to what being the "other" brings with it.

At an age when my questioning had not yet run its course, weeping over my notebook from the pain of the humiliations I suffered because of my ethnic identity, I scrawled down these lines:

"God, if my dying and rising again and again in pain will bring peace to this earth, take me as your sacrifice! I accept dying and rising again and again in pain. So long as peace comes to this earth. So long as people can live happily!"

Today, I can recognize this for what it was: the awareness that I would die, if necessary, for the earth, for humanity, for peace.

My anguish was not for myself, but for the friends who lived with hearts full of the hatred they bore toward me — the other, the gâvur-Armenian.

I was ready to die to free them from their own unhappiness.

So long as peace came to hearts, and peace came to the earth…

I am seventeen.

We live in Bakırköy-Kartaltepe.

I am a very good observer.

It's part of my character.

The women in my neighborhood are under my lens.

My mama, first of all, of course…

Almost every woman around me suffers some form of violence, physical or psychological.

Our neighbors across the way are a family from Çermik.

The mother of six or eight children — I don't remember exactly which, now.

Because the buildings were built to the same plan, our kitchen faces theirs, our living room faces theirs — that's the kind of neighbors we are.

One day, her husband pins her against the kitchen door and beats her.

From across the way, we watch the father punch the mother again and again while their grown children stand around them.

I am losing my mind.

"You can't interfere," they tell me.

I already live with the worst of male violence in my own home.

I hate the male sex.

One day, this neighbor comes to our house with her daughter.

Other neighborhood women are visiting too.

I hold conversations that question why they put up with this, why they submit.

"Don't accept it — without you, that husband of yours is nothing!" I say.

Once I started talking, I would get carried away, and the more I talked, the more I tried to explain what troubled me.

They would just look at me as if I were the strange one.

After they went home, when my mother said, "Daughter, why do you do this? Be quiet, let them call you a lady. Don't talk like that," I would lose my mind.

"Mama, don't let them call me a lady. Don't let them like me, so I know I'm not one of them!"

I set this memory down as a note marking when my anger, my rebellion, my refusal to accept being a woman subjected to violence began.

I am in my forties.

The concept of power has become my trouble.

Humanity's chief affliction.

They asked a sage:

"When will peace come to the earth?"

"When mankind gives up the ambition for power, then," the sage answered.

And he added:

"And when I say power, don't just think of sitting on a king's throne. The rules a woman sets in her own house are also a form of power."

Isn't the sage right?

Let's multiply the examples.

Isn't it the hunger for power among those who wear uniforms, the officials sitting behind their desks, that turns all of your lives into a prison?

Isn't it the ambition and rage that those who cannot exist without holding even a small domain of power feed to protect that domain, that makes everything ugly?

The most harmless-looking (!) example: some mother-women dislike anyone entering their kitchen.

Because that part of the house is her domain of power too.

University students who come from Turkey to study in Paris often visit my home to talk.

"Anjel abla, there's something different in your home. It's as if we're in our own home," they say.

I hear this sentence often. I smile.

My nieces and nephews, born and raised here, say the same thing in Armenian (Hayeren):

"Hokkur ku dunut uriş pan ga. Çem uzer dun ertal."

I give them all the same answer:

"You feel this because I own nothing.

Every object in this house is here for our comfort.

All of it is at your disposal.

Look, children, people forget a simple truth.

In fact, we own nothing.

If I don't wake up tomorrow, it's over…

The old ones summed it up well: 'A shroud has no pocket!'

I say we don't even own the two-metre grave we'll be buried in, because a few years later someone else will be buried there too."

I set this memory down too as a note on my stance toward the concepts of power and ownership.

I am in my fifties.

This is exactly the point in my life's journey where things came to a head.

I have had AS since I was twenty-five. That's what it's called in Turkey.

In full, spondylarthrite ankylosante — ankylosing spondylitis.

Back home it's also called Suna Pekuysal's disease.

I have summed up my life to get this far; now I find it hard to go on.

My illness means being abandoned by those I love most…

My illness means learning what true loneliness really is…

Loving life this much, yet growing so weary of every joint in my body aching at once, without pause, that I asked my doctor for euthanasia.

When I made that request and said, "Do you know where the irony is? I love living, I love life so much!" my doctor cut me off and finished my sentence: "But not like this. Not in this state. There's a new drug. An injection. Still in the trial phase." I leapt at it and volunteered myself as a test subject.

When my sister learned I had agreed to this, she asked anxiously, "What's in it, sis?" And I told her:

"I don't even want to know what it is. I'd rather live five years without pain than ten years with it," and as I learned to live again with my illness, my life turned into a new chapter.

The story of the road I have travelled with my illness is the subject of my third book, and it is far too long to tell here. So I will skip the details and go straight to the outcome.

Years had passed and I was still standing upright.

This disease was supposed to deform my body. My specialist (rheumatologist) expected it to leave me bent and twisted.

That didn't happen.

I won that fight too…

At one of our appointments, my doctor asked me, "Madame Dikme, what are you doing to stay so upright?"

He was asking in search of a remedy for his other patients with the same disease.

He had been following my case for years. We met twice a year.

My prescription was always the same.

While he wrote it out, we would talk about philosophy, current French politics, many matters concerning humanity. He knew my life story to some extent, too.

My answer was this:

"You know my life hasn't been easy. Because of my illness I have lived through abandonment, betrayal, slander, betrayals by people I thought were friends, and much more that I still can't put into words. Despite all the harm done to me, I have not harboured the slightest ill feeling toward the people who did it. I understood it all, and I forgave.

Let them not give room to bad feelings in their souls.

Those feelings only serve to destroy the person who holds them.

While the people who fed those feelings don't even know about it, you go on corroding yourself.

Let them nurture good feelings inside.

There is a tree of love in my heart, and I have spent my whole life watering it.

What is healing me now is that very tree of love I have grown inside myself.

Tell this to your patients. My formula is the one thing that will heal them."

He smiled and said:

"Mais, Madame Dikme, vous êtes adorable!

Anjel Hanum, you're wonderful!"

After all the painful experiences life had put me through, I had managed, stubbornly, to remain in love.

As Antigone says: "I was born to love, not to hate."

Today I am 61 years old, and at this age, in pursuing the question my teacher set me as homework to answer, I find that I have ended up analysing my own personal history.

I know no other way when I meet words.

Drawing on my reading and my own lived experience, I have always told, and still tell, what troubles me this way.

As for how all this connects to Antigone…

I believe I have now answered the question that is the subject of this piece.

Antigone and Anjel.

One is a literary heroine written in ancient Greece.

The other is a woman living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

They meet in the same concern, the same struggle, to uphold ethical and human values.

As Antigone says, "I was born to love, not to hate";

Anjel keeps saying, in answer to those who ask her to describe herself, "Love is my religion, life is what I believe in. I am a novice in the effort of learning to be HUMAN."

Both take their stand on the same side in rebelling against, in standing up to, the impositions and tyranny of the ruler and of the society they live in…

Every moment of our lives passes under a siege of choices.

And it is in these moments of choice, in which side we choose to stand on, that the future of the earth itself is decided.

Sometimes one person's choice decides the fate of whole societies.

Human history stands before us with thousands of examples of this.

How good it would be if, in making our choices, we took a little more care to act with awareness of this responsibility, never forgetting that the decisions we make can also shape the fate of the society we live in…

Only love holds real power.

It is not enough to speak of love.

All the healing we long for is possible only by being love itself.

Whether it is individual, spiritual and physical healing, or the healing of society, it all depends on this.

Being love itself is like the skill of not staying imprisoned in the numbing effect of merely hoping, but instead existing through the very acts of being hope itself.

To be different from the majority, to my mind, is to keep watering the tree of love in one's heart despite all the pain one has suffered, all the injustice one has been subjected to.

It is to stop merely hoping, and to become hope itself.

Everything beyond that is just talk, what the French call "bla bla," of no use to anyone, including those who utter it!

Greetings to those who remain in love, who are love itself, who do not merely hope but become hope itself!