Some places are visited for their beauty. Others enter our lives because we are ready to transform. For me, Cappadocia was both. When I arrived at Mount Erciyes, the highest mountain in Central Anatolia and one of Cappadocia's great natural guardians, I was not only exploring one of Turkey's most striking landscapes. I was walking toward a version of myself that had been waiting far too long to emerge again.
I had chosen to take this journey completely alone, only a few months after ending a relationship that had left me emotionally fragmented. I did not travel to escape my reality. I traveled because I needed to hear myself again. As I walked across the volcanic land, wearing a red dress that billowed in the wind, I realized the landscape reflected exactly what was happening within me. The earth also knows how to be reborn, and I was learning how to do the same.
Mount Erciyes, rising more than 3,900 meters above sea level, helped shape the volcanic rock that formed Cappadocia's famous valleys millions of years ago. Everything visible in that landscape was born from fire, sculpted by the wind, and transformed by time. I could not help but feel that my own story had followed a similar process.
Breakups carry something of a volcano within them; first, they destroy what we once knew. Then they leave silence behind. And finally, when we allow ourselves to move through them, they create the ground from which a new version of ourselves can rise. As I continued walking through that vast landscape, I realized I no longer wanted to live in fear of taking up space.
For a long time, I had suppressed parts of my personality to sustain a relationship. I had softened my light, my sensuality, and my freedom of expression so I would not draw too much attention. It did not happen all at once. It was the accumulation of many small sacrifices that slowly pulled me away from who I truly was; that is why I chose to wear red that day. It was not simply an aesthetic decision; it was a symbol.
Red represents life, blood, creation, fire, and vital energy. In many spiritual traditions, it is also associated with the root chakra, the energy center connected to safety, the body, and the Earth. And that was exactly what I needed to reclaim: my roots. Every step across Mount Erciyes became a silent conversation with the woman I was beginning to find again.