Dear Tania,

I have been crying and fucking

And reading, I have been reading. I have read Tania Myronyshena’s Letter #4: I want to cry and fuck again. In my own journal this week, instead of retelling the horrors you can read about in the news, I would like to give a shout-out to my fellow Ukrainian substacker Tania, whose writing hits too close to home in so many ways. So, allow me to offer a public letter in response to your letter, Tania. And - my condolences…

“I started to rethink my “resilience” and think what other forms it has.” - writes Tania, reflecting on the endless rationalization of pain and grief that we Ukrainians resort to when dealing with war. “The trap is that it’s very difficult to feel sorry for yourself because there is always someone in worse conditions and someone you are luckier than. It goes all the way to soldiers being killed by Russians at the front or civilians being killed by Russian weapons during mass attacks.”

Yes. I’ve been there.

It sure is harder and harder to count my blessings, to keep noticing that the walls are intact while the windows are blown out, or that I have running water while the gas is out.

I don’t think it’s about feeling sorry for oneself - it’s allowing the magnitude of one’s own grief or disruption or distress to co-exist with the equal or overwhelmingly more profound grief of others who are having it worse in one way or another.

I do it too, I try to count the damn blessings, I write them down to make them visible to the stupid brain, to put my blessings to a page, to make them more real, to define them, to - well - rationalize, or run some sort of cognitive-behavioral-therapy script on myself.

I run mental laps in my brain and jump up and down, cheering every single productive thought, encouraging every way in which I have remained kind to myself.

Now I understand survivor’s guilt, really understand it.

And I am always, always preparing and bracing for something harsh, for the next attack, the next betrayal, the next way in which my existence is offensive to someone by way of being Ukrainian or being queer or wanting too much or having too little.

It’s actually much more disarming and disruptive to encounter intimacy.

“I don’t really want intimacy in Ukraine” - Tania writes.

I get it.

Intimacy is tough because it’s hard to repeatedly expose oneself to new people, to formulate and communicate that undulating inner landscape.

Really, truly, the pace of things happening has outrun the pace of processing built into the human hardware/software. Making meaning of it all is harder, as seasons/events/missiles/drones/people/challenges change faster than my mind can comprehend.

Each extra drop overflows, each rejection or redirection risks derailing the whole shaky train of the ‘self’ rumbling along well-worn tracks.

No wonder we resort to artificial intelligence to outsource the cognitive load. The spiritual burden, the goddamned dharma, isn’t so easy to outsource though, and there’s no getting away from the real human need for intimacy still there somewhere - maybe warped a little, but there.

The inner landscape, incommunicable, still begs to be witnessed.

Intimacy is hard because it’s like opening Pandora’s box - risking complete overflow when attempting to carefully evict and expose only a piece of oneself at a time.

It’s also boring and mundane and hard, it’s a devil in the sheets and a devil in the details, and so maybe that’s why we keep distance and stay each in our own tracks.

“The therapist told me there are always two layers to every story: the bigger context and the personal one. There is the war, and then there is my story within it. The war shapes the conditions, but inside those conditions I still carry my own histories, wounds, insecurities, desires, and unresolved questions.”

Oh hell yes. War has sharpened any pre-existing pains.

My therapist has also been using this kind of metaphor, helping me make space for these many realities that don’t really cohabit well.

There is the complex tapestry of the world, and there’s the thread of war woven into it, along with the thin thread of my life. The tapestry is always bigger than the thread.

Or, there’s another metaphor - that I am just a rock, solid in the middle of the soft earth, ever-changing sky above me, seasons coming and going, glaciers trailing their paths over me, but I just sort of be that rock, I vibe. (Well, my therapist used much better words to convey this metaphor. Always appreciate her brilliance.)

In war, it feels like the horizon is narrowing, the sky is caving in (because it literally is caving in every week or so), and the thread of war stays unplucked from the tapestry. But when the metaphor of expansiveness works, it allows me to let go, enter a sort of dance with the elements, a sort of surfing of the waves as they emerge and fall in the vastness of space.

I have been crying and fucking again. My report on the other side of the crying and fucking: it hurts. I feel like an alien, a lonely and needy alien, out of place. It’s supposed to hurt in a war way, not in a personal way. But - There is the war, and then there is my story within it. And within this imperfect story, I’m just a 33-year old woman. A human, not a rock.

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