Hello to all the angels on this Earth,

I am just a girl as I know it with this smile, with these eyes, these lips with this body.

I am not a decorative doll behind the display window of a store.

I will not change according to others’ wishes.

Just as I want, I will make my life and take it seriously. I will become an example for others because of my virtues.

Remember that before others’ opinions you had your own goals.

Learn to laugh regardless of circumstances. Prove in your life that you are strong enough. 

Learn for the sake of obtaining things that you have not had so far, that you need to be someone who you have not yet been.

Stand up. You are the most powerful creature on Earth.

You, you, you are one so be like the one whom others wish to emulate.

If you really stand up and take a step towards attaining your goals, nothing will be a barrier in your way.

You only live once. Live like you want. Don’t forget that in the worst conditions of life, there is God who always hears your voice.

Look into the future.

Smile. Take a deep breath.

You are very beautiful.

You deserve the best.

Don’t leave yourself in the hands of others.

I always looked somehow different from other people, and it affected my experience. I have rather weird skin and I have a disability, which is obvious. I grew up in a small town where I always had a feeling that I was different. It was hard for me to understand how I can live with all that. I moved to a big city due to some reasons. I was about 20 years old when I started to engage in activism. I already knew about feminism at that time, body positivity and understood that I am not a hetero person, so I created a blog with the purpose of educating people on these topics. Then I realized that I was bisexual and began, among other things, to talk about queer. 

All that was about seven years ago, when the state was not yet pushing as hard as it does now. I mean there was already a law related to homosexual propaganda, but I didn’t see any threat from my blog or reading something on this topic and collaborating with local feminist initiatives and LGBT organizations. I was openly saying I was a feminist and that I was an intersectional feminist. My social circle consisted mainly of queer women and queer people. Mostly women who participated in protest rallies and were not only active online, unlike me. The last three years have become harder. The government has become much more active in pressuring both queer organizations and feminists. They began initiating administrative cases against my friends and I started to worry. In addition, the level of homophobia and transphobia was increasing, and it was supported by the state. Also it was just that time when I realized myself as a non-binary person. That pressure was accepted as the norm. I mean all activists experience it, right? It’s a kind of your problem so you deal with it. So I started thinking about leaving, but I have neither money nor connections abroad. In addition my English is poor to go to study. I lived my life just the way it was - I went more into creative activity and something even started to get better in it. 

[When] the war began it was a complete shock for me, for my friends and the whole environment. It happened that a week before my friend left and I was looking after her pets, so the first week after the war I was not at home. I was really in shock and I had to increase the dose of neuroleptics, which reduce anxiety. I was on the phone with my friends all the time. We are all in the opposition, and we were all in shock, so these conversations were some sort of support for us to somehow deal with the situation. 

My friends organized [a feminist rally] and I realized that I wanted to go out with them too. However, they do not remove ice from the sidewalks properly in our city and there was still ice everywhere on sidewalks. So I thought that it would not be safe for me and my legs to go out and it won't end up well. In the best case scenario, there will be a fine, at the worst case it will end up with a harsh detention. I won’t be able to run away from the cops. Right on the second day of the war, I was already writing posts in my blog that this is a war, that I am against the war. It was even before the fake news law was adopted and people were somehow more active expressing their position. Right before the protest rally, my close friends were detained on a trumped-up mining case and I was not feeling safe anymore. My friends were immediately charged with criminal offenses, they were detained in the police department for two days, and I understood that there was a high probability that they could come for me too, even though I have not participated in any protesting actions in person before. Those were difficult days for me when I had to figure out where to spend the night, outside of my home, but at the same without putting anyone at risk. Right that time we were also trying to find lawyers for our friends online and also try to understand how much longer they might spend in investigative isolation, not even in the detention center. In our online chat, the organization of the previously announced rallies continued. They detained my other friends too and they also needed basic information and lawyers. It was both scary and not. Everything felt strange under my medication – I was not able to objectively assess risks and determine whether they would come for me or not. It was necessary to avoid communication with the cops, find some ways to live, but every day some kind of fucked up was happening. Probably it was my medication that actually helped me to survive that time. The possibility of me going to jail was increasing more and more every day, because they started talking about the law on fake news, and I was actively spreading information about the war. And mentally I was feeling very much under pressure. Every day you wake up and you hope it will get better. Every day I wake up, open my eyes and I already know that once I take the phone, 2 minutes later there's going to be some hell of a shit. And every day it only got worse and worse and worse. I was becoming more useless every day as an activist, as a person who can help other people in some way. It took all my strength to keep my mind and thoughts in order. I decided to leave.

I wrote to various organizations. Some answered me, some still haven’t. I think that what really helps is some kind of horizontal support from people to people, because organizations are very large and not agile. This really works and helps a lot and also provides mental support, too. Despite the fact that a lot of old friends did not help me, I got a lot of new acquaintances. I am still in touch with these people and I can discuss this experience with them. An unknown, at that time, girl from England collected money for me and bought me a ticket. I was packing out and had to give away most of my things, and also resolve the financial issues because at that moment everything was already blocked. In parallel, I still continued to speak and write, because it was not right to be silent. I went to live with a friend and we supported each other, read the news together, yelled and took care of each other. I kind of had to move around the city a lot, from my girlfriend's apartment to my apartment. I took the subway. I rode the bus and people lived, absolutely, as usual. And at that moment, I seemed to have lost some sense of my Homeland. I mean I really wanted to stand in the middle of the subway car and say, “why the fuck are you pretending that nothing is happening? Fucking fucked up is happening!” I want to get out of that society who behaves as usual in a situation of war. What kind of people are you? I don't want to live in this anymore. And when I chose where exactly I would fly, I chose a country where I could do volunteering, and my friend had already moved there. I told him, we are buying a ticket on such and such a date, your task is to find us an apartment by this date. I became convinced that moving would help me be more efficient in helping other people. And it would help psychologically, because when you have no fear that someone will come for you, it really changes your life for the better. At home, I could no longer sleep at night, because if the  police came to knock down the door, they would come at 6-7 in the morning, so I waited for this time and already knew that they would not come for me, I fell asleep. I'm learning to live with the idea that my whole life can fit in one backpack. 

This is still something complicated to understand, not in a good sense of it. But I realized also that a large number of things are conventionally decorative, they seemed very important and necessary to me, in fact they are not really needed or used. Now I am still in a critical mental situation. I like the apartment we rented, but the priorities have changed so much. I used to need a nice apartment with white walls and Ikea furniture, I want to arrange my ceramics and embroidery there, make everything cozy. Now our priorities are not too expensive, we will not be kicked out, great - there is something to sleep on, we take it. And it all makes me feel broken.  

I have a feeling that my life right now is a very strange comedy. But thank God I have my medication and a psychologist. We're having a lot of conversations right now. He asks me to find more things that support me and give me power and make me feel good. He supported my decision to return to the things that make me happy, so now I'm learning to knit. And to be honest, I really like watching horror movies, I heal my emotions and fears through them. I like volunteering. It is important to say that I chose an organization that helps queer people. It seems to me that not enough attention is being paid to queer people right now, and many of them have their own specific needs.

I feel pretty good here, I do the work I know how to do and I know that my work helps people. I also realized that when I'm not very busy, I may fall into derealization. My brain starts thinking, "you are in another country, your country is the aggressor, the war has been going on for the third month, it doesn't stop. Now you're going to open the door to the courier, because this week you don't have the strength to cook, and you have to say "hello" to him in his language instead. You've been living for two months now and you only know two words." I caught myself thinking that I was opening the door and I saw my hands, and the feeling that those were not my hands, but some kind of computer character’s. That's how I feel when I start thinking about it. In the future, I will look at this as just a big change in my life. But now I can’t take it all, it is too complicated to my brain to realize it all. My event horizon is three days ahead. I can't imagine what happens in a month. Most likely it will be the same, but maybe [not]. As a personality and an activist, I just don't think beyond two or three days, just not to get crazy, to be honest. In the city where I lived, I managed to build a comfortable space for myself. I realized that I was feeling comfortable doing activism, I like it. I was taking pictures. I see connections between feminism, body positivity and queer through physicality and photography. My art is connected with activism, in principle. For me, this cannot be separated, and it is a big part of the identification that I lost due to depression and burnout, which was just returning to the moment when the war began. I should mention that we have a lot of privileges, and many people here speak my language. I have no problems with the language barrier here, I feel in a more privileged position here. I understand that I don't want to be separated from the local community, I would like to assimilate. But at the same time, I am ashamed of my white privileges, which are here, and which I consciously and unconsciously use. But I understand that while depressed, I don't have the strength to learn the language and assimilate.

A few years ago, when I already had depression, but I hadn't treated it yet, I really wanted to die. I feel very offended that for the first time in my life, when I really wanted to live, [that was taken from me.] I don't like it, I still don't want to die, because the medication works. When I have bad days, and when I don't understand what to do, I tell myself and others, friends, neighbours, that you cannot die [...], and then we'll figure it out. This thought helps me a lot.

I would like to end by saying that even when it seems that no one will take and hold your hand,which could be true, you still have yourself – just walk. There will be some people to help you. The main thing is to be open and not be afraid to ask for help. And after you accept help, it's good to continue this path of goodness further.