I am starting this week, like most weeks, in extremely vulnerable state. I do not doubt my capacity to show up authentically, neither do I deny the incredible privilege to meet and talk to some of the brightest people one could meet. What scares me is the lack of capacity to withstand the pressure of the system. What scares me is the apathy, the hustle and the “good enough.” what scares me most is the crushing lack of emotion and vulnerability in our internal meetings. When emotions are allowed to enter the room, they are weaponised. There is never a pure, unadulterated joy of being together, working together and creating together. There is never a celebration – not of some remarkable achievement, but of our everyday humanity. In short, there is a lack of love.

Today is out 11th anniversary of coming to Canada. This is the first anniversary without Echo. For many years, we used to take selfies on that day, marking the passage of time. First with Echo, then with Echo and the kids, on the balcony of our appartement, on the deck of our house. Today was rainy and we didn’t take a picture. Somehow, without Echo it no longer makes sense.

Echo was a birthday gift from my future mother in law just a few months before our wedding. I really wanted a cat and she really wanted to give me one and my husband always maintained the story that he was not consulted on the matter and that Echo was my cat, although, let’s acknowledge that he was the one who took the most care of him.

We drove to the in laws house to pick him up – he was locked in the bathroom to prevent trouble with other animals in the house. He was tiny, less than two months old, and throughly traumatised. He was howling on the back-seat throughout the two-hour drive back home. Later, we discovered that he was fine with long road-trips, as long as he could move around in the car and settle on someone’s lap.

There were several times when I was properly scared for him: once, when we were temporarily living in Chateau de la Pascalette and he was chased by the groundkeeper’s dog, second time when he had some sort of urinary infection and I had to leave him in the hospital overnight, the third time when we came back home to find the traces of a break-in and couldn’t find Echo for a very long time – he was hiding somewhere, when we found out he had diabetes, when he disappeared for many hours, twice, while we were in chalet. When he actually disappeared for good, I wasn’t scared. I didn’t plan it this way, but I felt that it was time. I was the last person who saw him, the one who caved in to his insistent, urgent meowling and opened the door for him to go outside. I a way, I am glad that it happened the way it did. And I am grateful that I have a date to remember him – not the date of his birth, which we do not know for sure, not the date of his death that seems ephemeral, but the anniversary of the day when we landed in Montreal, carrying a four-year old cat with us.

I am wondering if letting go of Echo is a foreshadowing of other things. I am asking myself of what and who and when I will have to let go and how I will know that I am ready. I have no answers to any of these questions.

My daughter told me tonight that she thought she saw Echo in the bathroom, where he used to wait for someone to give him to drink. She thinks it was his ghost. And I felt a strange, comforting presence on my walk tonight. It may be Echo or someone else. I don’t say that I believe in ghosts, but I do not say I don’t believe in them. I believe in invisible threads that connect us to a multitude of beings in our past, present and future. Sometimes these threads pull us through, sometimes they hold us back, sometimes they simply hold us.

I did my first 10K in months today. I wasn’t planning to, initially, but the weather was so nice, the lakes so peaceful and it felt good and easy just to be moving, hitting the ground with my feet, breathing in the forest.

The raven nest we noticed in the corner of the very ugly building of our local high school. There are always five or six ravens in and around the nest and it looks like they’re having a very busy family life.

What sustains me through these days and weeks and wandering, trying to figure out who I am and who I want to be next, with whom and how, are connections. My connections to other people and my connections to the living world. I’ve learned how to be with people without expecting anything beyond what we can give each other here and now. It’s the same as being with the world. The forest does not expect anything from me, neither do the birds, the orange sunsets or the silky young leaves. I witness their awakening and, in their own way, they witness mine. We are enough for each other. I am learning to do the same with people over cups of coffee and conversations over zoom. Just be there, be with, the rest will figure itself out, as it always does.

I am so tired, but I feel nothing but love. I fell held and surrounded by my communities. I’ve always marvelled at people who spent all their lives in the same place, who still had their childhood friends. I always wondered what it would feel like to be so connected, rooted and known. But it will never be me. Instead, I have many foster communities. I may not be native there, but I am still welcome and this too is enough.

I’ve spent most of the week in a sleepy and apathetic state. There is a lot of frustration and latent tension at work, mainly between MA and myself. I am certain that it is on both sides. The more she’s frustrated, the more she pushes into the safe, mechanical and productive and the more I resist. The call of the deep and the wild has never been so irresistible as when something keeps me from it.

Forest is definitely medicine. As soon as I am in proximity of it, I exhale my frustrations, get out of my head and into my body. I am here, I am alive, I am paying attention. So many things are happening at once, but their unfolding is soft and never brutal, it surprises me without overwhelming. The trees are now surrounded by the pale green halos of new leaves. The browns on the last year’s leaves soften. They look like a cradle for the young ferns. I saw the red trilliums I’ve been looking for as I was leaving the forest.

But the most beautiful and unexpected gifts was the song of a white-throated sparrow. Now that I am used to the cardinals and robins, that sparrow totally caught me off guard. The most beautiful song I’d heard. I played it to my daughter in the evening. She said it was si-si-sol.

It was raining all day – cold, grey, unpleasant rain and the day was just as bleak as the weather. I went to a bookshop to look for a gift for a child’s birthday and instead bought a book for myself. It felt like the right moment. It felt like long time coming.

I am following interconnected threads: the realisation that although I have left evangelical movement long time ago, I have never managed to shed off the evangelical lens. I keep approaching such fundamental themes as spirituality, body, sex, relationships from that narrow and binary point of view. For example, I have never read the Bible without considering it to be God’s word. I have always seen my body and my sexuality through the lens of the purity culture. Even worse, I see my body and my sexuality through the double lens of purity culture and body shaming. My friends and I were in our late twenties when we started breaking free from evangelicalism and experimenting with dating, relationships and sex. Yet, now I realize that we weren’t really free: even in our own eyes, we were not just experimenting, we were sinning.

In my late twenties, I was extremely inexperienced, even dim in everything that concerned sex, sexuality, sexual orientation and relationships. What’s worse, I couldn’t share this fact with anybody or seek guidance, because I was ashamed of my own naïveté – I was a decade too late. I realize now that all my early (in terms of experience, not age) sexual experiences were non-consensual and violated my boundaries. I have never had a chance to experience, explore, to ask myself what I like or to even admit the existence of my sensual side. I have definitely never had a chance to connect my sensuality to the other parts of my personality: my fierce intellect, my insatiable desire to learn, my love of hard work, my ambitions. It was last year during the Spring Café at the Edge of the World that the disconnect became impossible to ignore: I was stimulated intellectually, but when we were asked to engage in any kind of bodily experience I froze in fear. Dancing, grimacing, wearing accessories, putting on lipstick – everything felt terrifying. It is through unraveling the threads of possible religious and sexual trauma that I came to this point: I need to be able to face and understand the past and through this I need to create a possibility of a liberated future for myself.

I need therapy. Somatic therapy seems like a good choice, although I don’t fully understand what it means.

I need to shift the narrative about desire, sex, sensuality and purpose to the point when it’s no longer dominated by shame and puritanism.

I want to try something: for the next several weeks, at least, I will be asking myself: what brings me joy, what brings me pleasure and what I desire.

I will remember that just because things are the way they are now, they don’t have to stay this way. Other ways are possible.

Mondays are struggle, but Monday evenings are wonderful. Especially this Monday evening, because it comes with no obligations, no Damocles sword hanging over my head. No overtime work, no schoolwork, no tax declarations, no preparation for board elections. This Monday evening is wholesome: a run outside, a new book, a glass of wine, no regrets, no scratching old scabs, no soul searching, not tonight. Tonight is adrenaline free, just rest. I’ll think about everything else tomorrow.

My fast and furious week is thankfully coming to an end. I went for my first run of the year on MountBruno.

I read the Exvangelicals by Sarah McCummon. Reading this book for me is like peeling and scratching the scabs on a deep wound. It feels almost cathartic to read all those names that defined my adolescence and deluded me for so long, hearing them to be called out for who they are: Josh McDowell, Tim LaHaye, Joshua Harriss, The 700 Club, Superbook, creationist workshops, campus crusades. At some point, Sarah discusses how some of her exvangelical friends feel that they’ve been held back by decades because of their church upbringing. This is exactly how I’ve felt for years. I feel that I lost those 10+ years, that I was robbed of a chance to build friendships without the pressure of prozelitizing, to engage in intellectual life without the narrow and bigoted evangelical lens, to learn about relationships and sex without shame (your fault, Joshua Harriss!) Yes, evangelical movement gave me support after my father’s accident, it gave me friends and some truly exhilarating experiences, but mainly it has robbed me of an opportunity to explore, engage with the world to freely choose who I want to be and how. This is not something I will ever get back, but at least now I can face my trauma and hopefully one day heal.

Someone in the almost-empty bus must have been peeling oranges for breakfast, now I am floating in the tangy, citrusy smell. I am deeply grateful to this stranger for an unexpected olfactory treat. Also, thinking of maybe adding oranges to the grocery list.

I’m thinking about the recent flare-up of my impostor syndrome, how it came up on a week choke-full of events, complete with getting elected to a board and sending in my last assignment for the intercultural leadership course. How although everything feels like too much, I never feel like enough.

I am thinking about my generation. Not all of it, my generation of Ukrainians, specifically. When I entered the university, independent Ukraine was only five years old. I’m thinking of what it meant for a nation to become a country for the first time in its history and how many hopes were placed on us – the first generation that came of age in the independent country. I was among the first who obtained higher education in Ukrainian. We didn’t have textbooks yet and we refused to use the old Soviet textbooks printed in Russian and choke-full of communist propaganda. We had a student government. I was part of it, although I did not understand the significance at the moment. We felt free. We felt special.

I believe that my imposter syndrome has a lot to do with this expansive, overwhelming promise of my youth. With the time when we wanted to forget the past and erase the trauma and start from the blank page. Of course, the page was not blank, but we managed. We wrote something new and different on it. My imposter syndrome flares up to ask me if I’ve lived up to this promise. You could have been so much more, it says. I was never taught to be who I am, only to be more, always more. Maybe, that’s the problem.