The world is a storybook.
I choose to read it as a fairytale, and that's exactly how I'm writing my own chapter in it.
I'm Derya.
By day, I've spent years crafting stories for a living - strategic communications in government, marketing in the private sector. I understand how narratives work. How they shape the way people see the world, make decisions, feel about their lives.
But a few years ago, I turned that lens on my own life.
And everything changed.
I used to chase magic like it was hiding somewhere I hadn't been yet.
Every new city, every faraway destination - I was sure the next one would be the one that finally made me feel alive. Turkey. New Zealand. Portugal, UK, Peru, Egypt…thirty countries and counting. I was searching for something I couldn't name, and without it, I felt like I was failing at some essential part of being human.
Then I learned something that sounds simple but took me years to understand:
Magic isn't something you find. It's something you choose.
The moment I stopped needing magic and started wanting it, the scarcity dissolved. The chase became a practice. When everything becomes a want instead of a need - everything becomes deliciously as it should be.
This didn't happen overnight. It's still happening. Rewiring the default. Working through resistance.
Choosing the truth that serves my happiness, again and again, until the magic comes easier.
Why history. Why mythology.
When I walk through a city, I'm not looking for what makes it impressive. I'm looking for what makes it human.
A Celtic goddess who lost something she loved. A Roman soldier writing letters home. A Jane Austen heroine who made the same mistakes we still make today.
History and mythology aren't decorations I layer onto a place to make it feel grand. They're mirrors. They show me that the things I feel - the longing, the searching, the love, the pain, the hope - have been felt for thousands of years, in these exact streets, by people who were just as lost and just as alive as I am.
That's what makes a place magical to me. Not that it's extraordinary but that the ordinary has always been here.
Why writing.
I believe we are all writing a chapter in the human storybook. Every day, every choice - we're putting words on the page whether we realise it or not.
I choose to write mine as a fairytale.
Not because life is always easy or beautiful. But because the stories I read; the myths, the histories, the truths buried in the places I walk - remind me that I get to choose the narrative. I get to decide which wisdoms I carry forward. Which truths I want to engrave into my life.
Writing is how I do that. It's how I take what I've read in the world and make it mine.
And now.
I live in Amsterdam. I'm building a life here with my husband, two cats named Zeus and Sierra, and a flat filled with sunlight and fairylights. This is home.
And from here, I explore. Trains to Bath. Flights to Lisbon. Weekend wandering through cities I've never seen and cities I can't stop returning to. Every place I visit, I fall in love a little differently.
The crooked houses and candlelit canals of Amsterdam remind me every day that the world really is a storybook - if you choose to read it that way. I just happen to be writing my chapter from here.
She's Magic.
For those who want to come a little closer.
This is my intimate Substack where I share what it actually takes to choose magic every day.
A weekly letter from my real life to yours.