"As though I were living with an exceptionally wealthy man, whom I don't love"
On May 17th WE MEET IN MARIJAMPOLĖ! I'll be there, my men's exhibition will be there, my Lithuanian army will be there, my German brigade will be there. And will you be there?
Why MINE? Because it's YOURS too!
Have you noticed that I claim things as “mine” particularly often? My army, my regiment, mine, mine, mine. And I do this consciously, and I constantly teach you to do the same. Why? Having learned this with exceptional firmness at the Ukrainian front, I understood very clearly: what is mine, I want to defend, protect, and nurture. With what is yours, you automatically build a different connection, than when speaking in generalities.
At some point, long ago, I interviewed a psychologist from Ukraine who left Ukraine at the start of the war but, living far from her homeland, was living in genuine torment. The woman tells, how throughout that time she worked on that topic with her own psychologist, who was, incidentally, from Lithuania. "She is my supervisor, my psychologist. In the first year it was especially hard for me; I was desperately sad and cried constantly, during every session with the psychologist I would just cry for the first twenty minutes. No matter where, as soon as I heard any Ukrainian music, I'd cry again; well, somewhere there were rallies, I'd hear slogans, people singing, music - I'd immediately start crying. My mother had even brought me a small handful of soil from Ukraine, which I put under my pillow and slept with it like that for three months,” woman shows me that small handful of native soil, saying that only after that, did it ease up for her a little.
“I stopped crying, but some kind of aggression rose in me, anger at everything foreign, everything non-Ukrainian. It was a kind of emotional sublimation, when I cannot be angry at the war, because I'm not living through it, because I'm living abroad, where everything is fine”.
“The constant comparison of Ukraine with other countries, rejection, anger, that turned into a refusal to adapt, to adjust." The woman calmly describes the stages she had to go through living far from Ukraine. “It is very hard to trace, to understand, where it comes from, and even when you understand it, it doesn't change much; the situation doesn't resolve itself, it hangs in the air. I genuinely knew that I would return, in my case it was only a question of how long I would live outside Ukraine. There was not even a question, of whether I would return or not. Of course, living abroad, I even learned local languages, for instance, living in both Latvia and Croatia, I learned some of those languages, well, some everyday phrases, so that I could communicate, still understanding, all the while, that I truly would return to Ukraine”.
The psychologist says, that at that time she had a few metaphors, that helped her. “The first metaphor, while living in Croatia, was that it was as if I were living with an exceptionally, exceptionally wealthy man, whom I don't love. Well, he's like this: rich, everything is very good for me with him, we travel together to all kinds of resorts. But at the same time everything is very bad for me with him, because somewhere I have a husband, whom I love, but cannot be with.
And the second metaphor was about a tree. As if I were a tree, that was taken from the forest, dug up, and transplanted somewhere where palm trees grow. Where everything is different, where the climate is completely different.
But in reality, I kept being asked: so, what are you complaining about, everything is just fine for you? And the answer is: BECAUSE THIS IS COMPLETELY THE WRONG ENVIRONMENT FOR THAT TREE”
I thank the Media Support Fund for supporting the post series “War in Ukraine: The Gap Between the Military and Society”