Created in a moment of personal and academic exhaustion, this self-portrait became a quiet gesture of self-remembrance. As I struggled to complete my thesis, the saying “Her şerde bir hayır vardır” (a Turkish version of “Every cloud has a silver lining”) offered me clarity and calm amidst uncertainty. What began as a way to reconnect with myself evolved into an experiment — a visual space where the themes of my research — Turkish/Ottoman identity in art — could merge with both my own visual language and the traditions of Western image-making.