This is an explanation of why I could not host any events for almost two years now, and why my social life was minimal.
Some of you know that the war for me and people from Donetsk and Ukraine started in 2014. I was in the US at that time, so it impacted me only with the loss of almost all of my real estate inheritance and practically nowhere to return and with the horror of knowing what was happening to the people I knew from my childhood.
In February 2022 the big invasion started and during this horror, I realized that I had not properly processed even the previous war years. On the evening of the 23rd LA time, major Ukrainian cities were bombed and I watched it practically in real time on non-censored networks. I've seen people thrown out of the windows to beg for death without limbs on the roads. I heard about soldiers exploding themselves on the bridges to stop never-ending columns of heavy military machinery moving toward cities. I saw russian tanks smashing private cars with people in them. I saw the exodus of millions of children, elderly, and women, stripped of everyone and everything. I saw russians executing civilians. I saw piles of half-burnt girls left after sadistic rapes. I saw black stumps instead of forests and orchards.
I knew something about wars before, but I understood only recently what my grandmother meant by "anything but war." Oh dear, people, you too probably have no idea what happens to your brain when you realize this all is happening in your lifetime to people you grew up with. And that is just from observing it from another continent. In my case, it felt like my head was split in half, that everything I was doing was over, and was ready to kill and die.
After the first several shocks and desperate calls, I just cried and shouted for a day, alone, till exhaustion. I could not drive. On the next day, I was painting my rage. Next week, I tried to participate in a call campaign to regular Russian people to explain what was happening, and then I almost collapsed in the office of my professor, who then notified the college health department and another professor who spoke Russian. He happened to be from St. Petersburg and refused to talk to me. One of the counselors who worked for the college was from Lithuania and I finally agreed to talk with her.
(Sorry, it is still hard to write about this, I will continue step by step).
