🌈 My home country, Turkey, has always been blessed by women of great intelligence, intellect and talent but there is one that will forever remain my favorite: #AyselGurel. ‘When I was young, a woman could do nothing in Turkey... except if she was crazy... That’s how I came up with the idea of acting crazy in order to live my life as a free woman in that small town. That way, whatever I did, they would just say oh well, she is crazy. I wouldn’t be considered a danger to society. The society which was a synonym for patriarchy. I left my unfaithful husband with my two daughters and experienced extreme poverty. I was so poor I would dress up and go visit my neighbors precisely around dinner time so that they would invite us to stay for dinner. They never knew, and I never sat at a table without an invite. Years later I started writing: a pen, a paper. I didn’t wait for any inspiration because I was the inspiration. Songs about women whom I wished I could be in another lives... Songs about child brides in Turkey, about femicides... Songs about life and death... I wrote over two thousand songs. A woman who is lucky enough to live free of men and alone... Well, she has a lot of free time to read, learn and write. I wasn’t born lucky but I made myself be. And I worked every single day until I hit 80.’ Aysel remains the most influential poet of Turkey even after her death and is still considered a role model for Ataturk’s Women.