The first day of spring. The snow fell in the night and covered the ground to make it look like winter. It was honestly by noon.

Early in the morning, before my alarm clock, before the first light, I heard the first word: mama? Mmh, I replied. Je t’aime, he said. I spent the day believing this simple truth, that I am deeply loved.

It’s Spring Equinox, a moment of fragile balance. There was half of the moon in the sky today. An icy wind was blowing all days long. As the night fell, it brought new snow. This feels important.

It’s Tuesday, so I had to wake up early and drag myself out of bed before the first light. Still, I took a minute to ask my ancestors to give me guidance. It feels easier to believe these things in the moments between sleep and wakefulness. It felt like they listened.

Monday, I feel wiped out and ready to sleep by 6pm.

I used to look forward to mondays. I used to anticipate the thrill of returning to my work, of doing my work and doing it well. I remember it like from a different live, a different me.

I still love my work, but only those parts of it where I can be myself, where I feel safe to show my messy, creative, uncompromising humanity. I no longer feel safe most of the time.

I have to remind myself not to display any negative emotions. Any strong emotions, for that matter. Don’t show doubt, don’t show reluctance, don’t show disagreement, don’t show disappointment, don’t show that you’re exhausted and lonely. Don’t ever say again that you don’t feel like you belong. It’s better to hide something than say it and be misunderstood.

Because I don’t know how to hide my emotions selectively, I hide all of them. Joy, enthusiasm, burst of wild creativity, wonder, joy. Of all these, I miss joy so much. I have to remind myself to nod in agreement and smile. I don’t know if I am fooling anyone. Certainly, not myself.

The good thing about this, the really really really good thing is that I no longer see Monday as a return to reality. I am faking it for seven hours five days a week (I still produce a very good work, I just don’t love what I produce anymore). Beyond those seven hours, there is reality. There are my children, my dormant garden, my forest alive with mushrooms and mosses, my books, my friends, the voice of Margaret Renkl in my headphones.

I wish I could merge the two worlds. I wish I could brighten the grey canvas of my office with the ideas of Adrienne marée brown, Bayo Akomolafe, Blair Stonechild. I wish I could bring the intellectual awe, wonder and courage into my corporate seven hours, but I tried and I failed and I don’t believe anymore that I will succeed one day or that it’s worth trying.

So, I have a choice: I can either let the corporate seven hours extinguish my joy and my wildness, or I can protect it behind a wall, an armour or a mask. This is a hard choice, believe it or not. In my whole life, the only thing I’ve never been good at (besides singing and some sports) is being fake. But I will learn. I am a very good learner.

Tomorrow someone will inevitably ask me how my weekend was. It was ok, I will say, we stayed home.

At which point they will lose interest and leave alone, because it is a truth universally acknowledged that nothing interesting ever happens at home.

At home

Sunday starts with a rain so grey that we turn on the light. We make Sunday crêpes, as we do every Sunday, I call my parents, we play, we make lasagna. I usually hate to have people in the kitchen when I cook, but today I make an exception. I bask in their warm presence, in their delightful anticipation of our future meal. I even let them sprinkle cheese on top.

Then the sun comes out and children run off to see their friends up the street and I decide to go for a walk.

In the forest

The geese are performing some kind of ballet or a musical: there are dozens of them up in the air, they circle, crisscross, change ranks, pair up. They accompany their aerial dance with long cries.

Not a single flower is out yet, but the mosses are luminous green, the fungi are sprouting from every tree stump and fallen log and the stones are painted green and silver with lichens. It’s amazing how once you know that everything alive, you start noticing that everything is alive, more than noticing – you start feeling it. And once you start feeling the life in everything, you start opening up to it, letting it pour into you. And you no longer look for a moment of breathtaking beauty, a catharsis, because you feel every moment. As Richard Wagamese said, The center of the universe is everywhere.

On my way home I notice some old trees, I assume maples, with wet patches on their bark. I touch one wet patch and lick my hand. It tastes sweet.

No petty sorrows of this week can compare with a sheer awe of feeling your child tear away from your supportive hand and seeing him pedal away. Of knowing that this is the first time, the first of many many many many many times. Ride on, baby! Mama is so proud.

Coming out of this long, painful, exhausting, humiliating and alienating week, I have realized something.

None of my ancestors have had a privilege of living in a world favourable to their thriving. Every single one of my female ancestors have at some point made the vow to survive.

My great-grandmother on my mother’s side must have made this vow when she was deported with her family, with her young children from her land all the way to the Far East of russia. She must have made this vow when her youngest daughter was born in that cold, foreign and unwelcoming land, where they lived in trenches and huts. She made this vow when they made their way back – two years of travel by foot, by train, by horse-pulled carriage back to the place of their ancestors.

My grandmother on my father’s side must have made this vow when she, the only child who survived the genocidal famine, moved from the village to the capital. She must have made this vow when she traded her dreams of being a singer for a low-skilled job that allowed her to feed her family.

My grandmother on my mother’s side must have made this vow when she was forcibly transported to the nazi germany to work on the rope factory, then on the farm as a de-facto slave. She must have made this vow when she raised her daughter (daughters?), while trying to shield him from their abusive alcoholic father.

My mother must have made this vow when she lost her mother at the age of 16 to cancer. She must have made this vow when she traded her dreams to go to university for a job that allowed her to feed herself. She must have made this vow when my father had his accident at the age of 37 and she had to scramble between low-paying, precarious and degrading jobs to keep me fed, clothed and at school.

None of my ancestors have had a privilege to realize their dreams. Their survival was their triumph.

I am the first of my family to have made it to university, to three universities, as if I had to do one for each of them. I am the first to be able to choose the career I want. I am the first to be able to move freely in the world, to go and to live in a different country without boundaries, limitations and humiliation. I am the first to have privilege to speak freely and without fear, even the first to speak the language I want. I AM my ancestors’ dream, the one they never even imagined possible. All their love, all their courage, all this survival in just one woman’s body.

I, too, may not have the luxury to live and grow in the systems that were made for my thriving. I may not always feel that I can breathe freely, that I can say what I want to say, to be understood, to be accepted unconditionally. But just like them, I make a vow to survive. I will survive for my ancestors, I will survive for my daughter, I will survive for my kin connected to me by choice if not by blood. I am living in the world that is reaping at all the seams, I am raising my children through the snowless winters and summers hot and pungent with wildfires, I am nurturing my friendship in the systems that punish authenticity. I am surviving. This is what women do, everywhere, all the time.

I will build the walls that I need to build to protect myself. I will only speak my truth to those who I can truly trust. I will divert my attention to the spaces and relationships that make me bloom. I will not offer more that I can give, will no longer rob myself of time, rest, joy and fulfilment to change the systems I cannot change. These systems are probably doomed, one way or another, and it is sad to think that we are probably doomed with them.

But for now, I will give my love and attention to the ones who need and deserve it: children, parents, gardens, ancestors, books, friends, birds, forest, strangers who are kin. I will detach myself things that hurt me: office politics, social media, being right, going an extra mile, bringing authenticity where it isn’t wanted. From now on I will put my survival first. Because my survival is not just mine, it is not selfish, it is tending to my ancestors dreams, it is giving my children the childhood they need, it is protecting my wild overgrown garden. My ancestors have survived and so will I.

This was a bad, hard, exhausting week, just like those weeks of past December. I thought the bad days were over, I thought I was over them – they returned with vengeance.

Nobody warned me that this spiritual awakening or whatever this is would be so painful. Except for, of course they did. Jonah and the whale, all those saints and Leonard Cohen. Anne Lamott: when everything is ugly it’s because something beautiful is being born. The birth is not beautiful in a politically correct sense – you did it twice, how come you don’t remember?

Remember, your son was born with his face turned up – a stargazer, they said. Apparently, it wasn’t “normal”. They were worried. They were about dozen in the room, while you were screaming with pain and effort, bloody, naked, vulnerable and fierce. They were worried, but weren’t showing it. They were professional, you – everything but. Then your son appeared, stubbornly staring up. He started screaming even before he was fully out and they disappeared. You didn’t see them leaving.

Birth is never beautiful, except it always is. You didn’t trust yourself then, you don’t now, you can trust the life force within you. Something is always being born.

I am staring out of the window of the bus, trying connect the treads. The impossibility to keep on functioning in the corporate culture that divorces me from my humanity, that has no use for the best parts of me: passion, depth, creativity, joy and imagination. None of these belong in the grey office walls. They don’t match the carpet or the muted tones, the politically correct, the hushed, the dead end swallowing all change. I don’t match. I have to hush myself, but I don’t know how, I never knew. Both hushing myself and speaking my truth hurts. The culture I work in does not acknowledge the ebbs and flows of human psyche and I don’t know how to flatline.

The second thread: the necessity to find a spiritual practice. I am volatile and intense, impulsive and difficult, even with myself. Especially with myself. Back in the day when I was practicing, the practice grounded me. It didn’t save me from solitude or doubt, but it grounded me. It provided an infrastructure of love and discipline. I don’t think I could go back to my orthodox faith, even less to the Protestant one, but I need a practice.

I am staring at the landscape, disfigured by humans. Asphalted roads are snaking between rectangular boxes of identical stores. We’re passing a mall. The trees are few and isolated. They don’t look sick or sickly, just out of place. I can relate. I feel myself like a tree in an outdoor mall. I know that I belong. I am natural, rooted in the Earth, rooted in reciprocity, I feel my roots growing every day. But the landscape around me is bewildering. I am so separated from other trees, I barely see them. Instead, I am figuring out who I am in the midst of concrete and aluminium boxes, filled with fluorescent light and all kinds of stuff taken from the earth and transformed through the chain of human and other than human suffering into something unrecognised, unnecessary, totally superfluous.

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.

The best thing about today was the abundance of stars I saw when I was walking back home from my dance class. And the dance class itself – it makes my otherwise painful Tuesdays tolerable. Today was one of the days that made me questioning whether I have a PTSD, am neurodivergent or slowly falling into depression. There is a happy, creative, functional, sensitive me at and around home and with people outside of my work, and there is me in the office – snappy, isolated, depressed, overwhelmed and discouraged. Twice already, I’ve been lulled by a promise that I would be able to change the workplace – to bring in my vision of equity, liberation and healing, the wisdom I have learned from others. Both times, I’ve been left collecting the broken pieces. The system wants the appearance of change, but resists change. Both times I have paid too high a price for too little a change. I am still paying with my mental and physical change.

So, now, having said that, let me formulate a wish: I want to heal, to really heal. To finally breathe without waiting when the next wave comes and brings me down. I want my next workplace to be truly liberatory. I want to be where I am wanted, where I can thrive, where I don’t constantly have to explain myself, to break down my thoughts and translate them into dead corporate language. I want to draw in colour and outside the lines. I want to be where words like magic and poetry and rewilding and rest truly mean something.

In my multicultural family, I am the only person able to speak multiple languages. Every member of my family inhabits a particular culture and language – their own comfort zone. This leaves me as the only person who navigates between other’s people’s cultural and linguistic comfort zones – changing language to suit their preference, looking for relevant cultural references, constantly translating and explaining. The rare holidays with my mother, my husband and kids are lovely, but I am always given the role of the translator – not only from language to language, but between the habits, expectations and preferences. It is exhausting, especially for an introvert who just wants to be left alone with her thoughts, preferably somewhere on a mountain with a view.

I feel the same exhaustion at work. I feel like I am constantly translating. Not only from English to French, but from the language of the heart, creativity and spontaneity to the one of Excels, hierarchies and corporate BS. And what’s worse, I have to translate back. I should never lead people on, let them believe that I represent an organization for which I work, because I do not. I am an outlier, a deviant. If I were to give some fantastic beast avatar to myself, I wouldn’t be a unicorn – I’d be a dragon.