Roots and Routes: Freddie Mercury Kind of Pretending

Life makes us revisit a certain question from time to time: where's the line between having personas and just faking it?

I had a heartfelt discussion this week with a former client. We've been fellow travelers on a shared mission—making a difference. As we talked about new ventures, I told him, ‘I can’t care about money right now—if I achieve my mission, the money will follow.’ And I knew he understood. That’s exactly how we built our past success. After we hung up, I found myself thinking about money.

Like many Turks, I grew up in a home where financial stability came and went. Now, as I approach 40, I realize that in Turkey, stability is almost a utopia—not just financially, but in many aspects of life. There were times we had plenty, times we had to be careful, and times we had no idea what to do next. This inconsistency shaped my relationship with money in an unusual way. Unlike most, I never cared mainly about money—not because I had too much or too little, but because its unpredictability made me emotionally detach from it. It became like inconsistent parents or unreliable lovers—after a while, you disconnect to avoid the frustration. Yet, this very detachment also gave me the courage to start my own business and part of our success relies on the fact it was and is always more about achievement rather than the money.

Even though I was conscious of this detachment, my first job showed me something important: earning a salary wasn’t for me. It felt too predictable and restrictive. I liked the idea of making more, but I was also willing to take the risk of making nothing for a while. And lately, I’ve noticed something else—our relationship with money almost mirrors our relationship with love. Both are deeply tied to a sense of safety and stability. What you gain or lose depends on the risks you take. But it’s not just about risk appetite. It’s something deeper than that.

Acting vs. Being Yourself

No one is the same person everywhere. You act differently at work, with your lover, or around your children. That’s normal. But what happens when, instead of adapting, you start acting—playing a role that isn’t really you? Where does that come from?

I didn’t choose a corporate career because it felt like I had to be acting. I wanted to be myself. And in that sense, I succeeded to a degree. But I wish I could say the same about love. In love, I have failed to be myself far too many times.

What Happens When You Deny Your Heart?

For those familiar with yoga, I guess you already figured out Roots and Routes is a journey of upward energy, starting from Kundalini. For those who aren’t, I’ll explain it in a simpler way: your heart is energetically where everything below (your instincts, your raw power) and everything above (your higher self, your vision) meet. It’s the center of everything.

When your heart is blocked, you get stuck in life. Your survival instincts (root chakra), your ability to connect and create (sacral chakra), and your confidence in your own presence (solar plexus chakra) won’t find expression. If your heart is closed, you won’t be able to speak your truth, listen to others, see opportunities, or build a vision.

No matter what you achieve, something will always feel off. You’ll either feel empty despite having everything, or you’ll suffer from a lack of things because you wasted your potential.

Trauma: The Art of Not Feeling

When someone has a severe physical injury, the body goes into shock to prevent them from feeling pain. The same thing happens with emotional wounds. When a feeling becomes unbearable, the mind shuts it off.

This is useful temporarily, but if it becomes permanent, you lose the ability to truly feel and block your vitality.

That’s why trauma is everywhere—because every life has their own emotional hits—and why people like Gabor Maté won’t stop talking about it. It’s one of the most overlooked but widespread issues in the world. Living with unresolved trauma is like smoking every day. You think you’re fine—after all, plenty of people smoke, and who doesn’t have trauma anyway—until one day, you realize you’re not fine at all.

Health: What You Don’t Release, You Carry

This year, through what’s been happening with my health and the health of people around me, I learned something important—something that science backs.

What you don’t deal with in your 30s or 40s starts showing up as manageable issues—high blood sugar, high cholesterol, tension in the body. If you keep ignoring them, you’re planting the seeds for much more serious diseases in your 50s and 60s. I agree that “the body keeps the score”

Refusing to see your pain manifests as illness. Confronting it lightens the heart. Expressing pain brings relief. Accepting it lays the foundation for liberation. That was my biggest lesson last year.

I Had to Invite Freud into This Conversation

Freud calls it repetition compulsion. I call it: what you refuse to see makes you blind to what’s right in front of you.

Anything that keeps repeating in your life, in a unwanted way, is actually begging you to recognize the root cause of your suffering.

Not every soldier who returns from war develops trauma. The difference? Research shows the soldiers who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are the ones who had emotional trauma in their childhood.

To put it simply for the ones suffering from Actor’s Syndrome: Who or what broke your heart as a child, turning you into an actor?

The Weight We Carry

We misjudge people all the time.

Maybe the quiet one is screaming inside.

Maybe the one who always runs away desperately wants to stay but doesn’t know how.

Maybe the unbothered one is simply too exhausted from caring too much.

Do we have to accept people acting toward us? No, it’s their personal work.

Do we have to recognize the ways in which we are acting? Absolutely.

Going back to Personas vs. Faking a Life

The mental clarity needed to create a meaningful life builds from the bottom up.

Going back to the question I asked in the beginning: where is the line between having personas and faking a life?

If you act from a conscious place, it’s a persona.

If you act from an unconscious place, life will reflect that back to you—through more illusions, and repetitive situations that don’t make sense.

Finding Our Self-Love

I learned something from my yoga teacher, Marina, that I’ll never forget. And I felt like I had to share this perspective, for anyone else who might need it.

We love ourselves from two different places: the sacral and the heart. It was an A-HA moment!

The sacral is raw, strong, and primitive.

The heart is advanced, expansive, and powerful.

If you feel the need to spoil yourself with nice things, or chasing simple pleasures, just to connect with your self-love, you’re living in low consciousness.

True self-love is self acceptance in every circumstance—so that you don’t have to act or pretend again.

It’s one of those things that is easier said than done, but then it’s a new life.