refusing to die in a world that keeps handing you your own coffin.

[...] there’s no room to fall when the ground has already been taken from you.

Last episode of Halef left me a feeling that is hard to shake. It made me feel, even for a fraction, the helplessness Yıldız must have carried inside her every single day.

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watch the video here.

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As Lagneau used to say: I have no other support than my absolute despair.

Yıldız has been humiliated over and over again, stripped of her dignity, turned into a pawn in other people’s power games, and yet she doesn’t collapse. She stands, trembling but upright. Because what else can she do? There’s no room to fall when the ground has already been taken from you.

In the last episode, she was not seducing him. She was bargaining with existence.

And that’s the part people miss when they rush to call her “shameless,” or “desperate,” or “pathetic.” They don’t understand that this is what despair looks like when you’ve been told all your life that your body is your only form of leverage. When a woman has been denied every form of autonomy (education, economic independence, social mobility) she learns to weaponize the only currency she’s been permitted “to own”: herself.

Andrea Dworkin wrote, “Some women understand that within the system they live in, they cannot take possession of their own bodies but they can consent to their private appropriation by men. In this way, they try to raise their value: through cooperation, and through conformity. Theirs is a quiet despair.”

That’s exactly what Yıldız is doing, cooperating with her own erasure in the desperate hope that it might spare her worse violence.

She doesn’t offer herself to Serhat because she believes love can save her. She does it because, in her world, men are the gatekeepers of every form of safety. Her father’s home is a battlefield, not a refuge. Her marriage, already stripped of affection, is at least a technical form of shelter, a name that protects her from being devoured by the patriarchy in its rawest form. She is trying to cling to the last thread of safety that hasn’t snapped yet.

“She wanted to be loved not for her fragility, but for the fury it took to keep breathing” (Anne Sexton)

And yet, people watch her and judge her as if she had a thousand other choices. As if education, freedom, or escape were simply doors she could walk through if she wanted it enough. But that’s not how oppression works.

Oppression builds walls that feel like air: invisible, everywhere, impossible to name unless you’ve walked into them yourself.

Simone de Beauvoir said, “When one lives in a prison without bars, the worst thing is that one is not even aware of the screens that hide the horizon.”

Yıldız doesn’t even know what kind of freedom she’s being denied. She hasn’t seen the horizon. Her life has been constructed inside an invisible architecture of control, a system that taught her early that her worth is relational, not inherent. That she exists through men, never beside them. That love, protection, and existence are things to be earned through compliance.

So when she offers herself, crying, shaking, that’s not submission. That’s survival. That’s a woman saying: If this is the only language men listen to, then I will speak it, even if it kills me.

And isn’t that the most harrowing form of courage? The courage of those who have no choice but to survive through the very systems that destroy them?

That’s the paradox of women like Yıldız. They don’t break the cage, they learn to breathe inside it.

Andrea Dworkin wrote, “[…] From her father’s house to her husband’s, and finally to a grave that may not even belong to her, a woman submits to the authority of men in order to obtain a minimum of protection from male violence. She conforms to patriarchal values to secure whatever degree of safety she can. Sometimes this conformity is lethargic, in which case men’s demands encircle her slowly, like a siege laid upon a living burial. She becomes, in life, already a corpse.”

I think often of Dworkin’s idea of the “living burial.” The image of women whose lives are slow deaths, suffocating under the weight of expectations they didn’t choose. “Men’s demands encircle her slowly,” Dworkin says, “like a siege laid upon a living burial.” That’s Yıldız.

Buried, but breathing. Humiliated, but enduring. Still moving, still trying, still clawing at the little space left to her inside that grave.

What is more subversive than refusing to die in a world that keeps handing you your own coffin?

Simone De Beauvoir wrote, “But when one lives in a prison without bars, the worst thing is that one is not even aware of the screens that hide the horizon. […] Of the things that eluded me, I did not even glimpse their existence.”

Simone de Beauvoir would have seen her for what she is: a woman aware enough to feel her cage, but not yet powerful enough to escape it.

The awareness alone is agony. To see your own despair and have no means to transcend it… that’s what Beauvoir called “absolute despair.”

When she says she doesn’t want to go back home, she’s not being dramatic, she’s telling us what every woman in her position knows: that returning home means erasure. It means being swallowed again by the structure that first buried her alive.

Her desperation is not about Serhat alone, it’s about the world he represents.
He’s both her only exit and the guard at the gate.

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Every insult thrown at her (“Why doesn’t she just study? Why doesn’t she leave him?”) is a recycled version of the same sentence that’s haunted women for centuries: “If she suffers, it must be her fault.”

But suffering doesn’t need justification. Sometimes pain is just the byproduct of existing as a woman in a system that was never built for you to exist freely.

There are countless women breathing through their own burials, clinging to a light they’ve never seen but still believe in.

And to them, to you, I say this: may you outlive the cage. May you not only breathe inside it, but one day step out, even if your legs shake. May you never apologize for wanting warmth, for wanting more, for wanting to live.

Sometimes survival looks ugly. Sometimes it looks like begging, crying, reaching for the wrong hands. But it’s still survival.

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with love,

nessa.