Some days are such mixed bags of the good, the amazing, the annoying and sheer exhaustion. I’ve been thinking a lot about the loss of agency, especially in professional context. Where it hurts me the most is not being able to express my own ideas, to constantly rely on others to pass them on up the hierarchy ladder. And never hearing the feedback directly.

I am also thinking about losing (and regaining) spiritual agency. It brings me back to the history of prayer and my mixed heritage of orthodox and protestant faith that makes me wary of any kind of spirituality, but also draws me to it. I remember becoming a protestant a month before I turned fourteen. In the summer of the same year, or the year before – this is where my memory becomes blurry – my father had a accident that landed him in a wheelchair and stranded him for many years in Western Europe, without status and relying on support of the strangers. I remember praying for him, using an orthodox prayer scroll, so it must have been a year before my protestant conversion. I remember the desperate prayers of my youth – these were the prayers of someone who knew pain and injustice, who didn’t dare to hope that good things will happen in the future. I remember making a few halfhearted attempts to pray for my father to walk again, but I never had this kind of faith and I still don’t. I also remember that although I considered myself russian-speaking at the time, my first Bible was in Ukrainian, like a foreshadowing of things to come.comecome.come

Bearing the name that I have, I cannot walk away from faith, no more than I can walk away from my round Slavic cheeks and rolling accent. Faith is part of my heritage, passed down from my two grandmothers, both of whom had the name Vira. One Vira died before I was born, the other one had icons of Jesus and Virgin Mary in her home. She dreamt to be a professional singer when she was young (she had a marvellous voice that none of her children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren inherited), instead she worked at a grocery store. She raised three boys. She fed birds and stray cats, she had all kinds of plans, indoor and on her tiny datcha plot. I may have written about her already and I will do it again, because remembering her opens me up. Her name was Vira and she was always a believer in a quiet and unassuming way that is typical for most Ukrainian women.