So this post is also going to be a mess. Just a pile of my thoughts in no particular order. Traditionally: written during a power outage, and posted during another power outage a few hours later.
As I mentioned earlier, my days are mostly preoccupied with my mom, the rest of the time I just eat or sleep or sometimes paint/draw.
New Year holidays are the biggest holidays of the year in Ukraine. Most businesses stop for a whole week or even two. So since businesses were not consuming power the residential buildings got that power instead, and we had almost no outages the entire week. Well, except that day they bombed Ukraine. And now that the businesses are back to work, the outages are back too. Winter weather is making it worse too. Those people who do have power use electric space heaters thus overwhelming the system even more, and people like me who get power for 3 hours a day do not possess the luxury of «trying to save the power» s they ask because… how am I going to save it? Do I not turn my water boiler on? Or do I give up on my fridge because it’s not keeping the cold anyway? Or do I not run my laundry? Or do I not turn on my computer to try and do my work within those three hours? Basically, it’s bad and all-around upsetting.
I still mostly missed that week without power outages running around hospitals with mom, but that’s another story. I still got to spend (aka sleep) a few days home, and having power on constantly felt luxurious! Once again I get convinced that people get used to comfort quickly and the horrors of something bad get forgotten very easily.
This is one of the reasons I am writing this blog, too. I know that I will survive this war, I know that we will rebuild, we will restore our energy system, I know I will once again feel safe and comfortable in my home, and I will start thinking (and be told to) that whatever I went through wasn’t so bad. I am in a safe city, my city was never on the front line of this war. It’s been almost a year, and I haven’t personally seen a single destroyed building with my own eyes. Yes, there have been around half a dozen buildings damaged in Odesa, and I heard the explosions and smelled the smoke from the fires, but my usual routes do not go through those buildings, and going to a site of some tragedy where people lost their lives for the sole purpose to gawk at it felt disrespectful, so I didn’t. So yes, you could say that the worst things I have personally experienced are some loud bangs and some darkness. That is a compliment to our military administration and a testament to what an amazing job they have been doing keeping us safe, but also yes — you could say that I have seen nothing. What a treat for conspiracy theorists, huh? So I want to document how I feel and what I think living through these loud bangs and dark nights because I know a lot of my pain will subside, a lot of my wounds will heal, a lot of my memories will get locked inside my mind, and at one point I will feel like an imposter, like a privileged coddled civilian who is not even allowed to speak of the war while there are people who have experienced far worse. I know a time will come when I will speak of these days and I will think «Oh, maybe I am embellishing it, maybe I am dramatizing.» So I am speaking now, while this is not a past memory, but a present experience so the future me could lean on it and make sure her words are true.
You may not know this, but you have actually seen me cry many times. Many of these posts were written through weeping, with breaks for sobbing, with typos through the blur of tears. But these days I don’t even feel anything anymore when I cry. It turned into another bodily function for me. Something like sneezing. I am still in pain, I still sob, I still feel my heart bleed with more sores every time I see another person dead from this pure hatred directed at us all by our cancerous neighbors. But this pain is a background noise now. I feel it when I cry, I feel it when I laugh, I feel it when I complain about my current hardships, I feel it when I argue with someone about some stupid crap. I feel a wide range of emotions, and it is good, it means I am processing my trauma, it has not destroyed me (again, thank you to my soldiers for doing such a good job shielding me). But it all just happens through pain. This pain is not a world-shattering abyss Bucha was. Because now I already know. I know what they are doing, I know the length they’ll go to, I know the cruelty they’re capable of. I’ve seen the tied hands, the family flattened by a tank, the bucket of teeth, the torture chamber for children… Russian cruelty has lost the shock value, but it hasn’t lost the hurt value, the grief for lives that were so bright, so full of hope and urge to do good — lost. I cry while washing dishes, I cry while tying my shoes, I cry in line at the grocery store and I wipe my tears crossing the street so I don’t get hit by a car. But it’s just a norm now. It’s not an EVENT, it’s not «Oh no, this girl is crying, what happened!» It’s pretty obvious what happened, what IS happening.
To be completely honest with you, it may have something to do with the fact that I increased the dosage of the meds I’ve been taking to deal with the pressure of it all. But I also feel like it’s a combination of the two: the meds and my mind just blocking everything because we cannot afford to fall apart right now. My mom needs help, and I need to have the strength to take her to all the appointments and follow all the recommendations and do the rest of the things I have been doing all this time. My mind has always been very good at compartmentalizing, but sometimes it compartmentalizes so many things that I turn into a robot capable of performing its function and not capable of feeling or processing emotions, and if you ask me «how are you?» I genuinely wouldn’t know.
«How are you?» is such a loaded question now. If you have ever asked me that and I answered «fine» — I am sorry but I lied to you. These days I only answer that when I don’t want to burden people. To the people who don't need further explanation I now answer «not good» just as casually as I used to answer «fine». «Not good» is my new casual level.
I feel like for the rest of my life whenever I communicate with people from outside Ukraine I will have to carry the cards saying «Hi, I’m Ukrainian, I might start crying at random moments during our interaction, please don’t mind it, there is no need to comfort me or feel bad, you did not trigger me, I probably triggered myself by remembering something, just give me 5-30 seconds, and I’ll be back to normal, and it’ll just save everybody’s time if we pretend that awkward crying-break did not happen. I apologize for the awkwardness of it all.»
No matter how much I try to explain the Ukrainian experience to you here, I don’t think I’ll be able to because sometimes I do not register all of it myself. Like, recently I stumbled across a conversation on Twitter, where we discovered that most of us girls went through a similar process in the first days of the war figuring out plans for what we’re gonna do if russians occupy our city. Most of us were going to shave our hair and were picking out the ugliest clothes from our wardrobe to seem as unappealing as possible to avoid being raped. Some were trying to look like a boy. I was practicing walking with hunched shoulders and was very worried that I won’t be able to get away with wearing lots of layers of clothes to make myself «formless» if I find myself in occupation in summer. I remember deciding I’d still wear lots of layers to add the extra «crazy person» touch. I wore 3-5 layers of sweaters and felt very reluctant to take them off when spring came and the weather became warmer. Those layers were my shields, my protectors, but by that time I forgot why.
We were sharing, saving and carefully reading the articles about what to do after you get raped, and WHILE you are being raped. I remember those articles well, I read them many times carefully, trying to embed them into my memory in such a way they’ll pop into my memory… in «the moment»… One girl shared how she was glad that he had some extra packs of contraceptive pills and she decided to keep taking them specifically with the idea that this way if she got raped she wouldn’t at least get pregnant. Another girl — a young child of 15! — said that she was going to say that she was the youngest daughter in the family to protect her younger sister because she heard that Russians would always rape the youngest girl in the house.
And this is not an isolated experience, we all went through some type of that process. The girls I talked to and I are all safe thankfully, again, thank you to our brave defenders for keeping us this way. But there are lots of those who were not as lucky. In November, during the 9th month of the invasion, there were a lot of gleeful posts by russian WOMEN (for some reason???) who were celebrating the fact that those raped Ukrainians who had escaped to Poland could not get an abortion (as it is, unfortunately, illegal in Poland, but there were organizations that were helping such women to get the help they needed in other countries if they so chose), and that these raped girls would now be giving birth to «new russian soldiers». Is there even a deep enough level in hell for such people or will Satan have to dig?
So yeah, that was fun. Neither I nor any of the girls on that Twitter thread were physically harmed, but we all had an experience like that, we all had to go through that in our heads, imagine it pretty realistically and prepare ourselves mentally for a pretty real possibility of that happening in the nearest future. And then we put it away until somebody brought it up, and it unlocked those memories.
I don’t know how many more memories like that are locked into my head, I don’t know what else I forgot to mention, and I don’t know what word, sound, or smell will one day make me weep somewhere in a middle of a funny conversation, and how fake and ashamed I would feel for reacting that way. God knows whatever else I will have to survive, whatever horrors I will be shielded from and whatever horrors I will have to face. I am talking about a faraway future imagining myself a survivor licking her wounds, but the truth is — the war is yet far from over.