Here is the exercise I’ve met in one of the Telegram groups on psychological practices:
- Write a letter to your future self about the feelings and experiences you have today;
- Hide it in the pocket of your winter jacket or any other place you’ll find it once a year;
- When rereading the letter and recalling the events of that time, note the changes, thus emphasizing your role in them.
I wrote the letter and decided to publish it here.
Below is Part 1. You are welcome to check Part 2 telling about the May and June I had in Kyiv after the active phase of the war started.
_________________________________________________________________
Hi there,
I’m writing to you from 2022.
Remember that February 24 in Ukraine? You woke up when the alarm clock rang at 8.30, as always, planning to go to the office. Alek sat at the computer, with his face paler than usual:
– Bad news.
– What happened?
– Russia attacks.
Russia started bombing big cities: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa… People woke up from the sound of sirens and explosions, understanding everything immediately: Before that, we had been reading and hearing the warnings a la “Putin will come” for a few months, yet believing to the very last moment that this would not happen. And now, everyone was leaving home in a hurry.
There are traffic jams on the exits from Kyiv. The train stations are overcrowded. The president declares martial law in the country and says we will defend ourselves…
Later in March, you’ll wonder how it was possible to rush out of homes so quickly — and flee from the city at the first sirens. The fight-flight-freeze response to danger as it is:
Your first reaction back then was not to run but think,
Okay, what shall I do next? What about work? Open a laptop and check corporate emails and messengers: Shall I go to the office or stay at home? I need to go outside, withdraw money from ATMs, go to the supermarket, buy water and food… Gather all the documents and first aid kit in a backpack.
…The office was closed already. You take a day off, knowing that you won’t be able to work today. You write in chats that you are online and that you’ll work remotely tomorrow if the Internet is not lost. You call your sister in Kharkiv and your parents in the Luhansk region. Mom tells you not to cry; they are fine; it’s quiet outside, so don’t worry — it won’t take long anyway, a few days maximum.
At that time, no one thought and believed that Ukraine would resist for much longer than “a few days.”
…There are big crowds at ATMs. Everything is closed, stores and pharmacies don’t work, and some start nailing plywood to the windows. You go to the Silpo supermarket. There’s a crowd but no panic inside; there’s a stress in the air but no disorientation. More than that, people are trying to joke…
Back from the store, you throw all the documents, money, cards, medicines, and underwear into a backpack.
The sirens start yelling.
You can’t eat or drink anything.
You scroll through the news and start following just a few news channels so you won’t get confused by the flood of countless messages.
A news marathon begins on TV. You install an app on your phone so that you can contact others in case there is no mobile connection.
The sirens continue yelling. They scared you for the first couple of days: You took a backpack, a plaid, and a yoga mat — and went to the subway shelter every time you heard sirens. They were a lot of people in the subway. And animals. Many brought blankets, mattresses, mini-tables… People were going to stay there for a long time.
When Kyiv’s mayor announces a two-day curfew, you realize that you can’t sit underground for that long. You go back to your apartment. Sleeping seems scary for the first two or three days: You run to the bathroom every time you hear sirens (specialists say it’s the best place for hiding if there’re no mirrors or tiles on the walls), sometimes you cry, can’t eat, and force yourself to drink some water…
Your fingers are all thumbs. Everything stumbles.
You lose weight.
Can’t watch movies. Read books sometimes: They help block out the noise of your screaming soul for a while. And then…
March comes.
***
The enemy has realized that they aren’t able to invade us “in three days.” The world opens its eyes and gets surprised: Ukraine is fighting back and isn’t going to give up. European countries help with arms, imposing economic sanctions on Russia. Bombing and shelling continue, thousands of people get evacuated — Europe opens its borders to refugees — and your friends start carefully asking if you plan to leave the country.
Such questions are nerve-racking. (Later, psychologists explain why it’s better to avoid them in communication, even if you sincerely worry about a person and want to help.)
You reply that you don’t.
Remember those awkward feelings tearing you apart back then?
On the one hand, you see many (most!) your fellows go to European countries, trying to settle there and planning a new life. It’s an escape from the wounded country on fire that will need years, years, and years to heal. Distractions are terrible; thousands are dead; economics is fucked. And no one understands how to continue living here.
On the other hand, you see you’ll go nowhere: No friends, no relatives, no home abroad. You don’t want to leave your life and hide in camps for refugees, waiting for dwelling or other social care.
These are your March mood swings. The enemy is still trying to invade Kyiv; nearby towns of Bucha, Irpen, and Hostomel are already in ruins: In a few days, in early April, it will horrify the whole world to see what happened there all this time…
Kyiv is also under pinpoint bombings: Apartment blocks are hit, a large shopping mall is destroyed (Russian invaders decided it was a military facility), and the TV tower and part of the train station are wounded… The city continues to fortify its borders and gets prepared to defend: There are curfews, roadblocks and antitank hedgehogs are everywhere, men have taken arms and gone to area defense battalions, and people mostly stay indoors — they go out only to groceries, pharmacies (many are closed), or walking with their dogs.
The city has become harsher, undistracted, and imbued with a lingering expectation of “When is it all over?”
At the same time comes the awakening that this war will be long-term, taking months or even years. That makes it even worse:
There are a lot of bereavements and destruction; they don’t close the sky — we are all vulnerable from the air. The fear is they’ll sweep us away and flatten us to the ground, and, in fact, it’s already happening:
Mariupol is gone, cities in Luhansk and Donetsk regions are being flattened; Kharkiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy are under constant shelling. And this is not the end. You cannot accept this reality and understand how to live.
It seems like a movie scene; it can’t be real.
In late March, your sister and her family leave Kharkiv for Dnipro. Their home gets ruined: A rocket flew into the basement, the first floor collapsed, there was a fire on the seventh floor… The neighborhood continues to suffer from shelling. With all the windows and frames broken, the house is already in a critical condition, and no one knows how long it will hold.
The battle for Eastern Ukraine comes in April. Meanwhile, they invaded the South (Kherson, Berdiansk, Nova Kakhovka) and began to break through to Zaporizhzhia, shelling Odesa and Mykolaiv at the same time. The access to sea borders is already closed — enemies dispatch missiles from there. We sank their flagship, oil bases in Russian cities near Ukraine are on fire, and some provocations in Transnistria (Moldova) begin to accuse us. The level of Russian propaganda and their soldiers’ atrocities is just off the scale and beyond understanding for any more or less sane person.
***
There’s no understanding of how to live in the new reality. You don’t want to do what you did before; you force yourself to work; you give up sports and don’t want to do anything. Such condition has “covered” you in April: While March was on adrenaline, despite all the nightmares happening nearby, it looks like the aftermath starts catching you up now.
You understand that you need to do something, and it’s impossible to stay put, but nothing works out. Psychologists say it’s a mistake to force yourself to act: You should let yourself experience it the way your body asks. But time goes on, life goes on, and you blame yourself for not doing anything or not doing enough (when you should be doing more right now). There is the fear of missing out; there is the guilt that you are not that bad compared to thousands of people, and (at the same time) there is the guilt of staying here when everyone else is running away. Yeah, it sounds incomprehensible and contradictory, but that’s how it is.
You can’t relax or allow yourself to be joyful (or sad), thus excusing your self-indulgence.
***
You decide to get a Canada visa. It’s April 20 now, and you’re in the train going back to Kyiv from Bratislava, where you went to the embassy, handwriting this letter. By the time you’ll type it and publish it to the blog, more events will happen: You’ll get the visa and work permit, think about how to send a passport to Warsaw (visa application centers are closed in Ukraine now), and decide to go to Poland for passport submission in person. You don’t plan to leave Ukraine for Canada right here and now, but let it be an extra plan in the case of emergency:
No one knows what will happen here in a month, a week, or a day.
Ireland, Belgium, Slovenia, and Portugal are in your notes too. You hope you won’t need them, but nobody knows…
The full-scale war continues in Ukraine. Russians are going madder, willing to get a kind of victory by May 9, the day they believe they won the Eastern Front of World War II. April 24 was the Easter holiday here: We were afraid for the churches — those crazy bastards threatened to bomb them and, as always, claim they had nothing to do with it.
And the southeast of the country is now on fire…
April 30, 2022
I first published this on my website — WritingBreeze.com back in 2022. But now I see Medium as a better place for it: While my website is more about my professional endeavors, Medium looks like a journal where I can trust my thoughts and worries.
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Follow me on X (Twitter): @WritingBreeze
