Rise from the Ashes

In My Story, Uncategorized by Sayna Behkar

Before starting to explain my journey, I want to briefly introduce myself. I’m Sayna Behkar, growing up in a small family in the city of Tabriz in Iran. My mother is a painter, and my father and sister are dentists. So, I guess it’s not really hard to estimate how the combination of art and dentistry carved out my personality and who I am today.

When I was an eight years old little girl, I started learning Piano. At that time, for me, learning piano was nothing but memorizing a bunch of theoretical structures, notes, and practicing them as much as one could. I also remember how my teacher tried to make me more passionate about Piano and bought me different little gifts to motivate me more for practice. Yes, I continued learning Piano but I hadn’t understood what it really meant for me and my soul until the day I, myself, felt that I wanted to go and sit in front of that piano, close my eyes, and play what I want, in a way that I want, without any one or any teacher around. But before that day came, at the age of 14, I got really tired of it and stopped playing because I didn’t even know what I was trying for.

When I was 16, I took a look at the people and the world around me and realized that it wasn’t actually the fairytale of my imagination in which I was living. Trust, love, value, friendship and time wasn’t something to freely give to anyone you see, meet, or even you think you know. To be honest, I didn’t have any idea of what to do with all those feelings. I just had myself and my piano to hide behind and let it dive deep into my soul to heal all those broken pieces. So, that was when I restarted practicing Piano by myself.

At that time, it was a little bit scary and hard for me to comprehend this fact of life, but shortly after that I felt something in my heart that pushed me to myself and made me believe that I already had a powerful soul inside myself that could guide me to the best and never leave me in the lurch. That was a turning point for me when I firmly promised myself to do as much as I can to be that best version of myself and believed that I was on my own to create a big future and great life for myself.

Soon afterwards, I got admission from Ankara University in the field of dentistry and moved to Ankara. Shortly after this interesting change, my journey turned into something even more unexpected.

After finishing my first semester, the spread of COVID-19 infection started to increase uncontrollably all over the world. I had been in a student dormitory until when the virus shut down the world and the situation forced me to stay in a hotel, managed by that dormitory’s manager, for more than 6 months. Everything was in order in the first months, but 3 month later, locking down in a small room, loneliness, stress, uncertainty of the situation, and healthcare issues all conspire to make me feel at my wits’ end. All my friends in Ankara were back to their hometown and country. I even remembered the day that I was walking outside alone, thinking of catching someone in the middle of the road to be able to have face to face communication because all I did was video-calling with my family and friends in Iran.

Before moving to Turkey, I had learned some techniques of oil painting from my mother. So, at that time, I was thinking of doing some work related to my field and art, as well. I did some research on the Internet and first I got ideas from various websites. After sharing my new works on social media, I got so much attention worldwide and did some further works based on my own designs and patterns. Mostly, I tried to choose some complicated patterns which might take my time as long as possible because the days were too long to survive. So, I spare more than 5 hours of the day for painting and that was the only way to escape from daily stress and quarantines. And after a while I started a business with my paintings and sold them out all over the world for dental clinics, dentists, doctors, and students.

And YES! Every cloud has a silver lining. Quarantine, and Covid-19 paved the way for me to start my own job while studying , and painting was actually my only remedy for enduring all the difficulties that I faced.