Newsletter #5 Holiday, Family, Empty Streets, and Rest
The scoop on what's happening since last week
Hello from the 5th issue of this newsletter, which means we’ve covered 5 weeks so far! It’s unbelievable how that much time has passed since I began sending out this newsletter.
It’s Sacrifice Feast here in Turkey, and in the other Muslim areas of the world and we have a weekly holiday thanks to it. Though I’m not religious myself, it’s customary in our culture to celebrate “Bayram” with your family. It’s more so a cultural thing rather than religious.
In Bayram’s, we visit our relatives, eat delicious food and catch up with each other. Yet it’s also fairly popular to go to tourist places and have a vacation in these holidays.
Thanks to that, the normally loaded city of Istanbul now feels like it’s abandoned, as everybody migrated to sunny coastlines.
My family and I didn’t go on a vacation on this holiday and enjoy this unusual emptiness of the streets and trafficless roads, yet I still miss Istanbul being at least a little bit more lively.
In the following days, we have plans on visiting more family members and touring Istanbul when it’s empty like this. This holiday is also an opportunity to relax and rewind.
Though I’m not planning on giving a break on writing and publishing on Medium, I will try to be a little easier on myself and rest from time to time.
What I wrote this week
This week, as I promised you in last week’s newsletter issue, I put my life in some kind of order and got back to writing. I have 4 finished articles submitted and waiting to be published and 2 articles published this past week.
Unexpecting of myself, I wrote 5 articles the past week and 1 at the start of this week, which is a good amount for me. I also have many other ideas I’m working on and are in incomplete draft forms.
Here are 2 of my newest articles that were published this past week:
The 6 Most Common Misconceptions About a Psychology Degree
I love to write pieces on psychology and self-improvement yet I noticed I never wrote on such an important issue, as a psychology student myself.
As a 4th-year psych major, I so far have stumbled upon many stereotypes and misconceptions placed upon a psychology degree and on psychologists.
I wanted to correct these misconceptions with this short and easy-to-read article. I hope you’ll find it insightful and learn something new.
You Don’t Have To Write About Your Vulnerabilities To Be a Successful Writer
This was a rather unconventional piece for me yet I decided I want to take some risks and write from different perspectives. The article is about how you don’t have to open up about your vulnerabilities if you don’t want to, for becoming a successful writer.
You should draw the line for yourself on how much you want to disclose about your life and don’t feel guilty if you don’t want to share all the intimate details of your life as a writer.
The article touches upon many issues from the social media of writing to privacy to feeling obliged to overshare in such a transparent environment.
This week’s highlights
What I’m reading? Remember I told you that I was reading Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy? I finally finished reading the third novel as well, The Locked Room, and may I say I was most impacted by The Locked Room out of the three.
Yet I can’t decide if my favorite one out of the trilogy is “City of Glass” or “The Locked Room”. But all the novels in the trilogy were, both individually and as a whole, breathtaking.
I strongly suggest you read New York Trilogy if you haven’t already read this classic piece, the storytelling and the plots are as captivating as they can get!
I also newly started on the book that was long-awaiting to be picked in my bookshelf, The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. I bought this book as I was impacted by the story of the two psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, their relationship and cooperation with each other, and their big contributions to the field of psychology.
This duo is fairly known in the psychology realm and we studied their theories in our psychology classes as well.
But I only became aware of their story after reading a New Yorker article about them written by Cass Susstein and Richard Thaler who also co-wrote the book “Nudge” which won them the Nobel Prize in economics.
The New Yorker article they wrote talked about the two legendary psychologists and the book Undoing Project, and lead me to buy the book out of curiosity.
I’m sure it will be a great read as Micheal Lewis is also said to be a great writer.
I also love to read magazines. Even if I have digital subscriptions to some magazines and also read from free resources, I always liked the feeling of reading a print magazine, that’s why I occasionally purchase them.
I’m especially driven to read travel magazines in the summer, that’s why I bought 3 different travel magazines last week :) I love to discover new places to make a trip to and dream about my future travels by reading travel magazines.
This was it for this week! I hope you enjoyed reading, if you did, please don’t hesitate to leave a like or a comment, that would brighten up my day! Thank you for reading thus far and take care!