The Tailor Who Couldn't Mend His Own Seam

For twenty-five years, I wore the black robes of a criminal defense attorney in Istanbul. In drafty courtrooms, before impassioned judges and solemn prosecutors, I fought for one foundational cornerstone of civilization: **the presumption of innocence**.

Every human being is innocent until proven guilty. I shouted this principle until the wood panels rattled. I poured my health, my intellect, and my resources into rescuing clients from wrongful accusation.

Yet when I walked out of the courthouse, took off my robes, and closed the door of my home, a very different trial began.

In my own mind, I was permanently seated in the prisoner's dock. And the verdict had been delivered thirty-six years ago, when I was only eleven years old.

When my father abandoned our household at eleven, vanishing to a coastal town with his second wife without even a parting handshake, an 11-year-old boy in eastern Anatolia doesn't conclude that his father was weak or irresponsible. A child concludes: *I am to blame.*

Later, an authoritarian schoolteacher uncle treated me as though I did not exist, punishing me for family disputes in which I had no part. My stepmother dismantled my sense of self with daily cuts. Without a single word spoken in my own defense, I was sentenced to endless restlessness.

In Turkey, we have an old saying: *'A tailor cannot mend his own torn seam.'* I spent a lifetime stitching together the torn lives of strangers, all while bleeding through my own.

It was only when I sat across from my therapist—and began pouring the wreckage of my memory onto paper—that the truth hit me with the force of a gavel:

*Why does a good person commit injustices against themselves? Isn't that just doing the wicked's work for them?*