16.03.2024 / Home (свої)

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity and events. This is the first part of a two-part reflection called "Свої"—a Ukrainian word that means "ours" or "us." It designates "your own people"—those with whom you feel a bond and whom you keep investing in and working on to maintain that bond.

Tuesday morning I’m at Schiphol Airport, where the people-mover carts sing in the same frequency as the air raid sirens in Ukraine. To say that I miss them would be weird. It's not exactly them that I miss…

I hear Ukrainian even where it isn't.

The swirling intensity inside the terminal is unbelievable, it throws you, you must not be thrown, you must think through the fog, you must believe and trust and keep going. Let the old voices evaporate and make space for being available.

The day before I arrived in Poland. On the train from Chelm to Warsaw I sat across from a young, pregnant woman from Kharkiv. She was heading for Belgium to give birth. It's the first time she's left home in the past few years. "I'll give birth and then go back home with my baby," she says. "I'm going to the US to see my elderly Ukrainian grandmother," I say, to mark the strange symmetry of our respective westward journeys—one rushing to catch the end of a life, the other bearing a beginning. Then I learn that my sweet Babtsya Maria passed away on Sunday evening while I was on a train heading westward from Kyiv.

Death follows its own schedule.

***

Arriving in the US is both familiar and a glaring shock. The cracked roads and run-down shopping mall, which sparkled menacingly when it was built during my childhood, manifest a decay that was only a sense back then.

Kevin was worried about how I'd handle the culture shock. Three months is a long time. We met for burgers at the Irish pub in my Kyiv neighborhood on Thursday after I donated blood. Leaving 450 ml of myself in Ukraine, with hope that it might directly or indirectly help an injured Ukrainian soldier, made it easier to stomach being away for so long.

"I don't expect to have much time to get depressed about America," I say, and start listing off all the responsibilities that lie ahead on that side of the ocean.

What I really want is a rest. I want to sleep and to sleep until I wake up refreshed. Not to just get through the next day or the next leg of the journey or the next important conversation or meeting or public appearance. I am so fucking tired.

Kevin is tired too. His expression drifts off to somewhere far away when the conversation lulls. He's just come back from a tour of duty doing medical evacuations from the front.

***

Exhaustion is real. It's when the third espresso makes you sleepy. It's when your eyes automatically close the moment you don't need vision—when you're sitting on the toilet or talking on the phone. It's when you stop being able to put together coherent sentences, or when you lose track of what language you're speaking and you're streaming Ukrainian words at the European volunteers… until you understand why they're looking at you funny and laugh.

The Danish man who drove into Kyiv with the NAFO convoy last month said he did the entire 30+ hour trip solo. Driving non-stop from Tallinn is part of the adventure, but the volunteers usually drive in pairs, taking turns at the wheel and sleeping.

"Wow," I marvel. "How did you stay alert on the road?"

"Ginger shots. They taste awful but they do the trick."

He made it. And now there's a truck with a red flag with a slim white cross on its hood parked in the courtyard of the ancient Pechersk Monastery in Kyiv, waiting to be driven away by a lucky member of Ukraine's special operations forces.

These vehicles the European volunteers drive in each month are getting more expensive. They are in shorter supply after two years of war, while the need has not abated. Vehicles on the front are disposable. They're also targets.

When people abroad talk about "Ukraine fatigue" it's bullshit. Everyone in Ukraine and everyone fighting for Ukraine (to survive and to win the relentless war that russia has unleashed) has spent the past years learning how to keep working, thinking, fighting through exhaustion. When an incessant monologue occupies your mind and emotions swirl through your body but you lack the power to express their energy to the world outside, it doesn't mean that you give up.

Cleaning my apartment, washing the floor, scrubbing the bathtub or the toilet for that matter, is tantamount to a vacation.

Oh the lightness and bliss when for a moment you stubbornly forget about the war, washing the scarves that have been lying in the hamper for over a year and you scrub and you scrub and think about your personal appearance and remember a time when what you wore and where mattered and imagine that it still could.

We've been experimenting with ways to conjure adrenaline, learning to let go, recalibrating to refresh to go just a mite bit more. Exhaustion, simply put, is a limit, and limits can move.

Each of us been learning our own body's specific ways of manifesting exhaustion. What signs mark the onset of sickness and when it's worth stopping before it takes you completely. When it's better to disregard what the voices in your head are saying and heed only their fundamental message: it's time to rest. Finding the friends who will see past your awkward or aggressive words to the underlying need for human companionship.

We've each experienced our own crashes and breakdowns, when the limit's been crossed, when your humanity's been tested and you've fallen short. Rare are the courageous women who speak sincerely and dispassionately about their own experience of incapacity (Sasha, Lana, Vika), and their stories are a great source of support for those of us struggling to fulfill our responsibilities every day.

And each recovery, seemingly inconceivable, brings wondrous energy. How is it that I am still here—alive?

***

One Friday I get a message from my neighbor. A. is an engineer who works on airplane designs for a large international company. A couple months ago he was looking for a new job to be legally exempt from military service. He writes: "Come by this evening, I'm having a couple people over before I leave for basic training."

"You've signed up for the AFU?" I write to double-check.

"I'll be there," I respond, even though I have no free time. Our merry company of neighbors disbands at 5 the next morning. Nine hours without my computer, talking and laughing in the company of good friends—that is a vacation.

I slept only a few hours but the next day I'm elated. A. writes serendipitously just as I'm heading out the door to have breakfast with my old friends from the AFU. I invite him along. They make drones, he designs airplanes . . .

***

After two years we've gotten better at sensing when the sensation of tiredness is something with which you can negotiate. You can miraculously find an extra ounce of anger to fuel the brain to articulate a couple more sentences because a journalist from the evening news in your home state—who hasn't the slightest inkling of what russia's war in Ukraine really is—needs a sound bite, and it's your job to produce that one sentence that can reach those American listeners even though it's 1 AM in Kyiv and you've been up since early morning translating and have to wake up early the next morning to do the same.

For whatever reason, all those hundreds of millions of Americans can't talk to each other or persuade their fellow citizens, so you have to do it from Ukraine.

For whatever reason, all those hundreds of millions of Americans could not find among themselves two candidates for President of perhaps the most powerful nation on earth who are not over 75.

I call that a lack of imagination.

It's also a choice to focus on your own feelings, feeling tired, feeling helpless, which is the opposite of doing something—anything—to address the problem. It feels lousy and so you feel lousy and it IS lousy that we, hundreds of millions of Americans, are ready and willing to give up our country—your country, my country—to either DT or JB as if this were our fate.

Ukrainians are used to being caught in the lurch, unprepared and dealing with crises and disaster as they are happening. Yes, we should have known better and planned for russia's full-scale invasion. We should not have put so much hope in the power and promise of the West. We should have stepped up to fortify our country using our own resources and talents instead of thinking that our primary job was to charm the more powerful.

Why is it so tempting to spend your own vital energy on a dream of an imaginary world where what you want is in stock and available for delivery and the only thing you have to do is pay for it? Well, it's a mean trick that they told you the prices are all in dollars. The cost is your well-being, your life in all its richness and complexity, your vital power, your communities, your relationships to one another and to the world around you, your natural environment, your body and physical health, your mind and capacity to think, your friends and friendships…

The cost is your people. You send your young friends off to serve in the army with love and admiration, knowing full well they may come back in a box.

***

A week later the send-off is mine. This is the cycle of life—moving, events, changes. It can't stay stable and stagnant forever—the way I used to imagine it would when I was growing up in the American suburbs of the late 20th-century.

Saturday evening I invite an almost perfect assortment of my neighbors for an impromptu party, complete with pizza, whiskey, and broken glasses. Some of the women are a bit older than me, some brought their kids—bright, bilingual 20-somethings who speak Ukrainian on principle—and we talk about Donetsk, read Shevchenko to honor his birthday, and laugh insatiably.

As I'm herding everyone toward the door, my young friend suddenly asks if I wouldn't help him fundraise for a small organization that supplies drones, thermal vision devices and other equipment to AFU units. He's got a T-shirt signed by some of Ukraine's star battalions to offer as a reward for a large charitable donation. My practical mind starts spinning, it's 2 AM, but it's fitting to come back to what matters most right now.

The following morning the energetic residue in my kitchen reminds me of my Babtsya Maria and her Ukrainian immigrant community—that tight, boisterous, warm energy I had known growing up. These people had a forceful vitality that overpowered the cruelty of life they knew. It’s the energy I associate with a certain Ukrainian culture—a little bit rough, colorful, pungent, and cozy: своє.

That afternoon as I'm getting ready to leave my anxiety reminds me of February 24, 2022. It feels like everything is shifting on a fundamental level.

PS If you are interested in making a bid for the above-mentioned T-shirt, please send me a message. I’ll send you a photo and details about the “Peacekeeping Hedgehogs” organization.