I’m reading Milan Kundera right now, and this quote put into one sentence the essence of the struggle of the past 12 years of my life, since I moved to New York from Moscow:

“Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.”

Being physically away from the safety net of family and community didn’t scare me even a bit when I moved thousand of miles away from it. If anything, it ignited new life in me. However, the language part tormented me.

Like the main character’s mother, who immigrated to the US in the bloom of her youth in one popular but now mostly forgotten millennial tv show, I too was mortified to even answer the phone during my first years in the US. I knew that most likely neither I nor the person on the other end would understand each other, and the possibility filled me with shame and embarrassment.

Now imagine attending a senior year debate in my Comparative Politics class, where I not only had to participate but constantly prove that I, with my heavily accented English, was worthy of being in the same room as people whose place of birth had automatically given them the right to speak out in that classroom and actively reap the benefits of the Western educational system.

I’m not saying it was one of the hardest things a person can endure, but it definitely erased the concept of a comfort zone from my reality for a few years and filled me with daily tsunamis of anxiety every time the internal participation calculator in my head yelled: TIME TO PARTICIPATE!!!!

Today, I dream in English. The monkey brain inside my head speaks English too. I write exclusively in English, and when I try to do so in Russian, the result is so stilted and stylistically clumsy that I sometimes stare at it wondering whether it was me or a toddler monkey working on it just moments ago.

And Russian used to come effortlessly to me. I had always been good at intuitively grasping its, to put it mildly, complicated rules of grammar without ever spending more than four minutes studying it. In school, I could easily produce lengthy essays on Raskolnikov’s psyche after having read maybe 15 percent of the book. And yet, after spending essentially my entire adult life speaking, reading, and eventually thinking almost exclusively in English, I somehow lost that ease.

I can’t even debate politics with my grandma in Russian anymore. I lack the structure, the vocabulary, the moral reinforcement I can so easily supply my reasoning with when I argue with someone else (mostly myself) about the exact same thing in English.

So in my own life, I learned to walk without Kundera’s net to later discover that I could no longer even rely on it.

And that’s why, on days like this, simply out of nowhere, my mind travels a hundred miles imagining what it would be like had I been born here in the US.

I think of some of my dearest native-English-speaking friends and the casual conversations we have in my kitchen, and the ease with which they play with words in their mother tongue. Their sentences seem to perform three or four graceful pirouettes before effortlessly arriving at their logical conclusion, occasionally writing a little poetry along the way.

Sometimes I catch myself listening to them talk about flip-flops and then seamlessly turn them into a rich political object, and I’m struck not by the intellectual connection itself but by the linguistic precision with which they give it form. The abundance of words at their disposal, the instinctive command of a mother tongue. It’s like watching ballet where everything magnificently falls into place, and for a moment you stand completely paralyzed there, suspended in pure splendor.

And while I listen, the me inside of me is shouting: Yes!!!! I’ve been thinking about this exact thing! The thought has already been there, with many more stemming from it like branches. But I couldn’t give it the instant language it required. Or I thought I could but as I started expressing it, I heard myself fall short.

Writing is different for me. Writing gives me something I don’t have in real life — time. I can sit with a thought and try out different versions of it until I find the one that most closely resembles what I was trying to say in the first place. I can research what has been said about it before, reach for the exact phrasing I had somewhere in my mind, look up synonyms to avoid redundancy, and replace the trivial words I oftentimes default to when I speak.

In writing, I have the time to search for the language my thoughts require. In conversation, the thought and the words have to arrive at the same time.

I think when I imagine having been born and raised here, I’m not imagining a different life, different opportunities, or a different mind.

I’m imagining the possibility of having the right words, with all their intellectual weight, nuance, and range in my immediate arsenal. The possibility that for once the distance between the thought and the words disappears.

The show centers around cab drivers who take my husband and his crew to places that bring them joy or occupy a special place in their hearts, such as restaurants, clubhouses, mosques, casinos, soccer tournaments… the list can go on and on. The world is their oyster, at least for the duration of the meter, which is kept running for the entirety of the day to make sure the cabbies are still able to earn their bread while taking time off to do what they truly love.

In this season’s finale, Kareem went to Syria and spent two full days with a local cabbie, Bashar.

Bashar was born and raised in the Damascus neighborhood of Jobar, which sustained some of the heaviest destruction over the course of the nearly 14-year-long Syrian civil war. He later moved to Dubai with his family and worked for FedEx to escape the hostilities. In 2019, Bashar and his family moved back to Damascus, enduring another five years of the prolonged conflict while he took on a job as a cabbie.

In the episode, Bashar invites Kareem to his favorite coffee shop, and when they arrive on the side of a highway, Kareem, visibly perplexed, genuinely asks him where the coffee shop is. Bashar, pointing at a little truck parked on the side of the road, converted into a makeshift tiny bodega with an old man working as a barista, says that’s it, adding that it is his favorite because they offer over 20 sorts of instant coffee. Kareem, not satisfied by this explanation, keeps pressing to find out the real reason Bashar has frequented this exact shop for decades.

Although he’s not as greedy as his namesake, Bashar al-Assad, Bashar the cabbie insists the place holds a very special memory, one he’s not willing to share. One must assume it has something to do with love, because love has obviously served as Bashar’s lighthouse through the dark waters his life, and the lives of millions of Syrians, was thrown into by war.

Caught up in Bashar’s affection for the city, Kareem tells him, “I love you, Bashar,” as they approach Assad’s former presidential palace, sitting high above Damascus. Dusk is settling in, and Bashar is once again talking about how much he loves this city. Below them, Damascus is immersing into evening with its tangled streets, minarets, satellite dishes and ancient buildings resembling a constellation accidentally spilled beneath the mountains. Looking at it from where Assad once did, I can’t help but think of him standing above the same city, watching bombs fall on it.

Bashar’s love for Damascus and his country is undeniable and all-absorbing. He gets genuinely upset when, after taking Kareem into one of his favorite restaurants to try Syrian foul and falafel, Kareem pronounces that Egyptian foul tastes better. Bashar, who smiles 95% of the time and could lend some of his charisma and handsomeness to George Clooney, visibly changes color after hearing it, his face turning grey and dusty just like some of the buildings of the old town they’re dining in. The love he has for his country is pure and overpowering. He loves it wholeheartedly and takes every flaw it has as an opportunity for it to grow, and to grow with it.

Regardless of all the pain inflicted on the city and its residents, at least through the cinema screen, Damascus often looked more alive than New York does on its good days. As proof of this, Kareem told me he actually took up smoking cigarettes while in Syria, an act known to be committed by otherwise nonsmokers almost exclusively when they feel the most alive and, for a second let go, carefully chewing every bite of a moment that is still in time, at least then and there.

The next day, Bashar drives Kareem to Jobar, the neighborhood that now preserves the ruins of his old house and the homes of countless other people. Jobar was one of the most devastated neighborhoods of Damascus after years of fighting and bombardment, much of it by Assad’s government forces. According to a UN satellite assessment, approximately 93 percent of Jobar’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed by the end of 2017.

When Kareem told me about his trip to Jobar, I was clearly incapable of realizing what he had actually seen there. Stretches of the neighborhood have been reduced to concrete skeletons, pale grey squares that used to be someone’s kitchen, living room, nursery, an ancient synagogue, cafés and small stores. The destruction is so complete that Jobar looks less like a neighborhood bombed by missiles than one struck by a magnitude 9 earthquake. “There’s not even a toilet left,” Kareem remarks a trivial detail that captures the totality of the destruction.

“It is a town of ghosts,” Bashar replies.

And yet, in the middle of the ruins of what used to be a living neighborhood, Kareem notices a single bright green tree blooming with beautiful pink flowers, stemming through the hollowed-out roof of one of the buildings, and points it out to Bashar. The cabbie says life always finds a way to prevail and rebuild itself.

Bashar is Christian, as were roughly 10 percent of Syrians before the war. Naturally, he invites Kareem to pay a visit to an old church. Sitting on the benches of the Chapel of Saint Ananias, surrounded by the icons written by people who trusted in God’s existence nearly 2,000 years ago, Kareem asks if Bashar believes in God himself.

Usually the strongly opinionated man that Bashar is, he takes a rather lengthy pause, accented even more by the sudden weight on his typically light and welcoming face.

He says he is not sure anymore. After seeing with his own eyes a one-year-old child being killed by a missile, he simply doesn’t know if God is actually there. Because if He existed, why would that missile have to land directly on this one-year-old’s body, Bashar asks.

Still, he goes to church. He brings a foreigner to church so that foreigner can show it to millions more foreigners around the world. I think he does it because he’s purely in love with that church and every other church his native city houses. He knows love is flawed, and there’s no true love without loving these flaws as well.

Bashar, for obvious reasons, wasn’t able to come to the US to watch his episode on the big screen like we did at Anthology Film Archives. Instead, he recorded a message that was played for the audience at the end of the episode. Sitting in a brightly lit room and speaking into his phone’s front-facing camera, Bashar said the message was for the Americans watching.

I won’t lie, I expected some heavy words of frustration and regret to pour out. But instead, Bashar remained Bashar through it all. He said he wanted Americans and other foreigners to come to Damascus and see the beauty of his city.

“It is safe now,” says the man who has every reason to blame foreign governments, as well as his former one, of course, for the world that left him without a home and for the pain his people have lived through since long before 2011.

And yet, he invited us to come see it. To fall in love with it. And to come back again.

Exiting the theater, I felt the episode had both destroyed me and brought me back to life. For the last two months, I had been stuck in a limbo, unable to really write or say or move, fully obliterated by the beauty of summer and all the pleasantries of life that I, by pure luck, get to possess.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the ruins of Jobar, or the children caught on camera who had grown up with war and were now finally playing basketball outside without their parents wondering whether a bomb might fall on them. Seeing so much life persist among equally immeasurable destruction shook something loose in me.

The episode gave me a desire to create again, to write, hence this post. And I think that is one of the things Bashar showed us: that even in the midst of destruction, the desire to live and create must survive.

Watch full episode on YouTube!

Still, I managed to gather some inspiration for this post, which has been boiling in my veins ever since I realized I did not, in fact, have to bow down to them around the age of 27 (ikik, late). It came to me a few days ago while I was listening to a podcast in the shower.

The episode was about a biologist who had recently passed away but will likely be remembered for generations because of his two cents on global population control, an idea that generated panic among world leaders and inspired national policies aimed at curtailing growing populations.

The biologist in question dropped a bomb on everyone in the late 1960s when he published a book arguing that the world’s growing population would exhaust finite natural resources within the next one or two decades, leading humanity straight into global famine. As it obviously turned out, the man was wrong, yet the shadow his work created inspired many coercive population control policies throughout the world, most famously China’s One-Child Policy in 1980.

I am intentionally omitting the biologist’s name because of what I’m about to say next. Listening to the podcast about this crazy idea-driven man, who overlooked so many details and variables that would have rendered his theory obsolete had they been properly considered at the time, I suddenly thought of the lawyer I had recently worked with who happened to share the same last name as the population-bomb guy.

I fired that lawyer two weeks ago because of the complete lack of professionalism and care he had for me or my case. He was working on a very important contract for me and ended up holding the final version hostage until I agreed to pay him additional money for working on it longer than initially expected. To be clear, the delay stemmed from my inability to reach him for weeks at a time to receive any updates on the draft.

When he insisted I pay him more money, my immediate thought was that only a man would have the audacity to make such a request. And then, I started thinking about a phenomenon I’ve been noticing more and more over time: women generally do more honest, devoted, and simply better work than men do.

Now, please do not read this as a man-hating piece. I am inherently against the idea of holding a grudge against a category of people, only against individuals from the category based on their actions. But it does feel like a given, at least in my own life experience, that women tend to be more empathetic, responsible, better adapted, and simply more professional than men are.

The instances where men failed completely at simple tasks involving their direct professional responsibilities and simply being decent human beings and women stood up instead could not be counted on my ten fingers. Even such simple things as offering a seat to an elderly or pregnant person, in my observations, were most likely to happen if the seat was already occupied by a woman. I was pregnant for nearly ten months and genuinely looked like I was carrying triplets, and never once was I offered a seat by a man during my daily commutes from Brooklyn to the UN and back. It was always women (older women) and never a guy.

And that got me thinking: when two are given the exact same task and the woman approaches it more thoroughly and professionally, is she simply overcompensating for being a woman?

I believe women are socialized into this role so early and so profoundly that by adulthood it begins to look natural. Overcompensating becomes indistinguishable from personality. I think this is also why many beautiful women appear quieter than people expect them to be. Contrary to the stereotype, it is often not shallowness that makes them reserved but the opposite. They are aware of how visible they already are and instinctively try not to occupy even more space, leaving pauses in conversations for others to fill.

Women are probably doing something similar professionally.

None of this makes women morally superior to men, if anything, it is probably the opposite, especially when so many of us fantasize about experiencing the kind of psychological freedom that allows for mediocrity, unpreparedness, and triviality, and still moving through the world with complete certainty that we own the entire thing.

I think confidence on its own is one of the greatest luxuries on earth. And overcompensating is what we learn to do in exchange for access to it.

For those unfamiliar with it, Kareem hails a cab and says to the driver the phrase that went viral after the first episode appeared on TikTok back in 2022: “Take me to your favorite place and keep the meter running.” The cabbies, usually New Yorkers (though Kareem also travels to other countries and cities, with episodes shot in London, Miami, and Cairo) take him wherever their hearts desire, whether that’s a Ethiopian restaurant, a Russian banya, a helicopter ride, salsa dancing (spoiler), or a mosque. Kareem hangs out with them and at the end of each episode pays according to the meter and thanks the drivers for their time and wisdom they reveal in lengthy conversations with a tip.

The new season of the show just premiered on YouTube and is made up of longer episodes, created with the intention that you sit down on the couch with your close ones and watch it the way you would any other streaming show. Every Wednesday, Kareem and his team release a new episode.

We gathered for the premiere at Metrograph, where two theaters filled with friends, family, people who made the show happen, and supporters watched the first two episodes and ended up laughing and crying at the same time.

As I watched the show on the big screen and saw the reaction it produced in the theater, I couldn’t help but notice a specific thing that, I think, made it so relatable.

Yes, it is about cabbies who, as we all know, are the invisible force keeping NYC and so many other cities moving. But honestly, how many taxi drivers do you personally know? More importantly, how many have you ever actually had the chance to hang out with?

Personally, zero. And I’d bet the overwhelming majority of my friends know zero cabbies as well.

Their lives are shaded from the typical eye, making them move through the city as something that has always inevitably been there, but whose inner workings you never really think about. Like water in the pipes (for most of us).

But watching them open up about their incredible and vibrant lives filled with relocations, heartbreaks, great love stories, losses, illnesses, victories big and small, life-altering moments, and things as simple as the love of music, art, soccer, and just hanging out with your friends doing nothing, you can’t help but see yourself somewhere inside their stories and their many dense volumes and chapters. Sometimes I watched it and saw my Russian mother’s impossible logic play out in front of me through the mouth of a cabbie from Cuba. Kareem saw those same similarities in each one of them and, most of the time, he was searching for his baba, who passed away a long time ago.

At the end of the first episode of season two, Kareem describes this search for baba as an inevitable part of figuring out what kind of baba he wants to be for our daughter, who is currently the same age Kareem was in the family archive videos he inserted into the episode. (Another spoiler: Sufi makes a cameo too).

The show also made me think about something I discovered late in my twenties and haven’t been able to shake ever since, almost every time a stranger opens up to me. The thing is, every one of us is a universe of our own, with a livable planet at the center where most of the action happens, such as family, work, daily life. Around it orbit countless smaller and bigger planets that hold our other selves, often shaped by hobbies, secrets, alter egos, desires, and private obsessions. Then there are stars, and those are the people around us. The brightest ones are the people who shape us or the people we love most. The falling stars are the brief encounters, the passersby.

It is very easy to see yourself as such a universe, but it doesn’t come naturally to view every person around you that way too. We often only see the body and neglect the idea that there are a soul and brain inside it, something far vaster and more complex. So watching the cabbies in Kareem’s show tell their stories and take him to the places that warm their hearts reminded me once again of existence itself, and of the diversity and vibrancy of the universes, aka people, we sometimes neglect to even notice.

Another thing I kept thinking while watching the show is that it feels like an antidote to the reality we are currently living in, while simultaneously being part of that very same reality. It is very easy right now to focus on (and we absolutely should keep focusing on) the injustices, cruelty, barbarism, and decline of critical thought, intelligence, and decency unfolding around us. The working class, the invisible, the poor are constantly being forced to shrink themselves, erase themselves, and accept less, all so the people who grabbed power can continue occupying, intimidating, robbing, and growing larger and more untouchable, like a cancer left untreated for too long.

Kareem’s show, in its own way, resists that system. He hangs out with cabbies while they are still clocking hours and getting paid real money for their time, plus lunch or dinner and sometimes a football match. He demonstrates what might be the simplest viable form of resistance to injustice, which is basic humanity.

Watching ordinary people still get to hang out, relax, play, laugh, and exist as something beyond labor machines loading and unloading passengers and bags at the airport feels like a breath of fresh air we forgot we even needed. Witnessing simple joys — people talking about happiness, love, children, parents, books, what matters to them and what they had to leave behind — feels invigorating and hopeful at a time when we are constantly told to stay quiet and accept that suffering and working sixteen hours a day just to afford taking your kids to a lake for Memorial Day weekend is somehow normal.

This morning, I told Kareem that I noticed everything he touches somehow gets done in the most perfect way possible. I told him he has that sort of golden touch some people possess, though nobody quite knows what the secret behind it is. He answered that he simply doesn’t understand why something should be done at all if it isn’t done perfectly.

And I think the show he and his team created is one of those rare things made from the very beginning with the intention of being perfect, and actually becoming it.

After all, as I already said a few times before, the entire Metrograph was laughing and crying at the same time, watching complete strangers tell stories that felt like pages from their own diaries.

And, repeating myself again, that is exactly what Kareem does best.

My personal story with smoking, like many millennials’, dates back to my teenage years, when we’d gather with classmates after school in the stairwells of Moscow’s brutalist apartment complexes (that’s how it was done in Eastern Europe) and smoke cheap cigarettes kindly sold to us by the plump lady at the bodega ten feet away from the school entrance.

Sometimes we smoked between classes in the school bathroom, not because we had any real nicotine cravings to satisfy, but for the thrill of it all. I think we were just very bored and got addicted to the feeling of walking recklessly close to the edge of the roof and somehow miraculously never misstepping or getting caught.

I kept smoking here and there after moving to New York, right up until the virus rocked our world and locked us all inside our apartments, forcing many to look inward. I remember the exact moment I realized I needed to start taking care of my body and that being a hot mess was eventually going to stop being cute and become sloppy as I approached my thirties.

It was sometime in April 2020 around 4 am. I was lying on the couch with a glass of red wine in one hand and a sloppily DIY’d chocolate cake in the other, watching some random bad movie. On screen, the main character, played by Emrata, as divine as she could possibly be, went on a jog first thing in the morning.

“What the hell,” I thought to myself.

The next morning, I went on my first ever run.

I also stopped drinking wine or any other alcohol shortly after, quit smoking occasional cigarettes (replacing them with gross Juul), and kept on running.

Looking back on that night, I think Emrata somewhat saved me.

I took my last Juul drag the moment I saw two stripes on the pregnancy test. My vaping addiction had gotten so overpowering that I postponed taking the test because I was scared of having to stop vaping.

Vaping allowed for an escape from hard and complex yet short-lived situations. When I was not vaping, I had to sit through them and face them completely unarmed until they pass. Vaping produced a sweet distraction, a brief moment of comfort that would eventually be followed by other distractions until the uncertainty passed.

When I rid my hands and mouth of the gross little stick and started facing difficult moments psychologically nude, I began seeing new doorways and became somewhat less afraid of reality.

Not to quote Pema Chödrön in this essay on vaping, but I have to here, because she wrote so clearly about the discomfort of resisting distraction and remaining present with yourself instead:

“If we can look at and see the wildness of emotion, we can not only begin to befriend and soften toward ourselves, but we can also begin to befriend all human beings and indeed all living beings. By becoming aware of how we do this silly thing again and again because we don’t want to dwell in the uncertainty and awkwardness and pain of not knowing, we begin to develop true compassion for ourselves and everyone else, because we see what happens and how we react when things fall apart.”

I only vaped once after quitting, when I hit my anxiety ceiling mixed with maternal guilt while being in a foreign country far away from my kid and unable to fix the way I felt by at least physically being close to her. Looking back now, I probably should’ve just FaceTimed her or taken a solitary walk and ridden the anxiety wave out long enough to learn that the next time it comes, it will also pass.

But I have to admit I did smoke several cigarettes after completely quitting and converting to a healthy lifestyle, and each one of them felt festive. They were all lit during happy occasions, small celebrations of life and abundance, and not in a desperate attempt to blur reality or escape it.

Cigarettes, for all their flaws are still the objects of the time when we used to honor rituals. You had to step outside for them, interrupt your evening for them. We shared them with friends, relatives, lovers, colleagues, enemies, strangers. Each one could easily tell its own story.

Vapes blurred all of that into one simplified consumerist gesture. A little stick inhaled absentmindedly while answering emails, riding a train, watching a show, optimizing your own life till it is no longer yours but a contribution to the beige culture of nothingness.

I think in our attempts to quit things, most of us spend years negotiating with ourselves. Some days we go for the run, sometimes we buy the vape, sometimes we stand outside a restaurant sharing a cigarette with someone we love because being alive feels both overwhelming and beautiful. People are rarely as disciplined or evolved as we claim to be. Most of the time, we are just improvising our way through discomfort while trying not to completely self-destruct in the meantime.

Yet, there is something beautiful in learning not to immediately numb every difficult feeling the second it appears. Not with cigarettes, not with vapes, not with any other distraction we reach for to provide ourselves with a soft landing. There is something really really great about facing difficult moments open and quite literally empty-handed. Not because discomfort makes us superior or morally indestructible, but because a lot of feelings that seem unbearable in one moment become very much survivable 20 minutes later.

The inspiration for this post was kindly gifted to me by my beautiful husband, who is widely known among our friends, family and beyond, as the generator of ideas. But when it comes to navigating the many household decisions involving my daughter and me, he prefers the passenger seat, even though he knows I don’t really know how to drive.

So a couple of days ago, in what seemed to be his seventh attempt to find out, he asked me what I wanted to do and get for Mother’s Day. Little did he know that not only do I have no idea how to answer either of those questions, but I can also tell him with profound certainty that almost no mother wants to be asked to even think about these things or, God forbid, plan them all out.

As I couldn’t give him a clear or consistent answer and instead started involuntarily assembling lists in my head of what I enjoy and what I detest, I thought of Sei Shōnagon, a Japanese court lady known, among other things, for her little lists of what she found elegant, beautiful, irritating, and even repulsive, which she collected in a diary titled The Pillow Book. Think Dream Baby Press but in the late 10th and early 11th centuries.

For example, Shōnagon found shaved ice mixed with liana syrup and served in a new silver bowl quite elegant to look at. Putting on scented silks made her heart beat faster.

By contrast, she found it distressing when a guest arrived and kept talking, forcing one to sit there unable to leave or attend to one’s work. She also wrote that there is nothing more embarrassing than a man reciting his mediocre poetry and then telling you how much praise it received.

Revisiting Shōnagon and entertaining my husband’s question made me think of all the lists mothers probably carry around in their heads, arranged into similarly titled categories. For lack of a better idea for this post, I’m putting mine below to give other people (aka my two subscribers) and my husband a better sense of what can feel like chicken soup for a mother’s soul and what she might need to be protected from by all means.

Things this (!!) mother finds irritating, hateful or embarrassing:

• when someone I barely know punishes me by telling me their entire life story in exhausting detail, completely disregarding my time or ability to entertain it

• when someone tries to parent my child while I’m standing right there

• pumping and dumping

• pumping

• being asked what I want to do/eat/watch while dealing with a crying or yelling baby/ toddler

• multiple unread messages containing entire essays from someone who clearly had a stimulant kick or way too much free time during their lunch break

• snot all over a child’s face

• adults blowing their nose in other people’s vicinity

• crumbs left on a table or floor by someone who just ate there and somehow didn’t think to wipe them away afterward

• people playing deafening music or speaking too loudly in the morning

• drama seekers who don’t know when to stop chasing the thrill of a fight

• guests visiting you for a few hours and overstaying past the kid’s bedtime

• vulgarities delivered without any wit, irony, or wisdom behind them

Things this mother finds beautiful / inspiring:

• a 90-minute foot massage

• an early night in

• being called a milf

• very high-quality, sturdy knives and cutting boards

• firm handshakes

• freshly changed bed linen after a long hot shower on that early night in

• not being asked to make a single decision for half a day

• a fantastic read

• a spontaneous, unplanned hangout with friends, with or without kids

• a train ride by myself

• when my decisions are not questioned by others

• observing and interacting with nature

• a long car ride as a passenger because it’s one of the few times I can sit down in peace and reply to all my texts and emails

• baby animals

• ginormous but irresistibly chic bags

• a commute where everything arrives and leaves on time

On a side note, completely unrelated to the nature of this post but very much related to the holiday, I think motherhood turns you into a collector of very small observations about life. I always say that Sufi’s arrival made me notice life, or notice things about life, in a way I hadn’t before. The only other thing that has ever had a similar effect on me is reading a really really great book.

P.S. As of 9:26 this morning, Kareem outdid himself with his gift by giving me an almost exact copy of a very beloved tennis bracelet my grandma gave me when Sufi was born that I recently lost due to my stupidity and recklessness <333

The years are always somewhere between 2008 and 2014, though one might stretch that feeling all the way to early 2022. The people posting call it the golden era for my country and the people living in it, the happiest stretch of time, when, for the last time, things felt intact. It’s not a specific generation’s nostalgia of people aging and reminiscing about their youth. It’s something that seems to unite nearly everyone in my country of origin, regardless of age or social status: those who disagree, and who miss what has been taken away, most likely forever.

In the videos, I see groups of young people on brutalist-style balconies, singing Soviet rock from the ’80s and ’90s, passing around cigarettes and wine bottles, waiting for dawn which always represented a promise rather than just another morning. It is me and my friends.

I see families sitting at compact kitchen tables covered with oilcloth, in front of tiny TV sets hanging awkwardly and offensively on walls with bubbling wallpaper, making extremely inappropriate but painfully funny jokes over chaepitie aka midday tea. I see strangers, tourists and locals, during a major international football competition my former country hosted in 2018, running with open arms into each other like they’d known one another forever, hugging, dancing, erasing the distances between languages for a few brief nights.

We weren’t whole back then, not even close. We were wrong and we were wronged many times. The country was still carrying the debris of its many past lives, still visibly and inertly shaped by everything it had survived and done to others in the 20th century. But there was a sense, maybe a little too naive, but very persistent—that we were moving somewhere better. That life was becoming lighter, more open, more accessible, more possible. And that we were moving there together.

And then one morning, not without warning, it was all gone. After the day it became impossible to pretend we hadn’t crossed into something else, things began to change fast, with the country almost immediately proceeding to raise a new generation of children on the beliefs modern schools there are now required to dictate.

Now, can you undo this kind of nurturing, when an entire generation is being raised on a single doctrine that casts anything else as extremist? I’m not an expert, but something in me says it won’t be possible without tremendous bravery; the kind it takes to step outside a belief system formed over decades that keeps you safely within the inner circle of us vs. them. We all know capable, intelligent, educated, well-positioned adults in our own circles who still can’t move past calling a similar matter “complicated.”

According to multiple sources online, over a million people (predominantly young, capable, bright individuals, with or without resources) have left my country since then. Up to 850,000 of them still haven’t returned, and likely never will. A good 60% of my own friends have left, with no plans to come back at all or until things return to some version of normal, the default of those 2008–2014-ish years.

They’re at the point in their lives where they’re putting down roots, assimilating into lands no one in their lineage has ever stepped foot on, offering their ideas and energy to states that have kindly taken them in. They’re having children who, at best, will speak our language with a slight accent, and at worst, will lack its depth and instinct altogether.

Will they ever have those nights on the balconies, bursting their lungs to the sounds of Kino, feeling that invisible force that made us feel like different beads on the same thread? I don’t know, as I myself am writing this essay in English. I just hope they find something that comes close.

Now, obviously, no one physically bars us (in most people’s cases) from going back. We are free to, and somewhat encouraged to, return, not without a mild to medium level of intimidation at customs for having left in the first place, of course. Less lucky ones can find themselves crossing from an airplane into detention for not being careful enough in expressing their thoughts online, at work, or through art.

It’s not Palestine. It is not Sudan or Ukraine. The scale, the violence, the stakes are different for those wishing to return. But there is still a sense of occupation, of active hostilities, of something so personal, so intimate being overtaken, repurposed, and made unrecognizable. Not just land, but memory. Language. The past we shared that those videos, fortunately, captured.

I am not stateless; I still have my country-of-origin passport and a resident status in the land where I have put down my roots. But at times I do feel stateless, not belonging to anything in particular, constantly assimilating, being asked to shrink and shift my ideas. And I cannot, and will not, in the foreseeable future, be able to cross the border into what once was home, even for a short visit.

And I don’t know what to do with that yet, except to keep asking myself: what does it mean to belong to something you can’t stand behind anymore? What can I keep, and what do I let go of, when the place that formed me becomes something I cannot defend?

Or maybe the harder question is simpler and it is, whether I am allowed to miss it at all.

To finish this essay, I want to cite a song by Monetochka, a popular singer who left the country shortly before being placed on the list of “foreign agents” for speaking out, and who would most likely face very serious criminal consequences if she dared to return. She wrote this song in exile, and it speaks directly to the kind of nostalgia I described earlier, for a time that now feels irretrievably gone.

It is in Russian, so the closest translation would be:

And whichever ticket I buy now,
there’s nothing left that’s mine, and no one left who’s mine.
There’s no one there to meet me with a sign in their hand,
and now they sing there in another language.

It’s so impossible it’s useless to dream—
all the locks are open, but the main one is sealed.
And I don’t even feel sorry, I don’t want to, but still—
I just hope I don’t forget my fading dream along the way.

Performing recently in Vilnius, Lithuania, Monetochka changed the ending to:

I know it will all come true—the seal will break,
and I’ll go visit my grandmother again.
I’ll see all my friends and put on a concert—
it will happen one day, in a happy ending.

I want to believe she’s right.

The only reason I gave it to her was a single passage in which Iman Mersal put into words what I had always felt but never managed to express so eloquently about the tormenting thing that lives inside a mother’s heart:

“The mother who feels no guilt toward her children is a woman whom an angel visited as she gave birth, splitting open her heart and extracting the black speck that is the root of all evil, liberating her from her former identity and cleansing her of nihilism and ambition alike, as was done to the prophets to equip them for their divinely appointed task.”

I wanted her to read it before her son arrives because I wish someone had handed it to me when I was pregnant; someone to advocate on my behalf and quiet the monkey brain of a new mother in me flailing between what’s best for her child and what still makes her feel like herself.

Guilt has been my most persistent roommate since I became Sufi’s mother a little over two years ago.

By all external measures, and according to the people who know me best, I am a deeply present and affectionate parent, often completely consumed by my child when we’re together. But I would be lying if I told you I’m not, at times, profoundly bored playing with my toddler. I think any mother who still feels she has unfinished business with the world beyond the nursery would be lying too.

And in those exact moments, when I catch myself watching the clock, calculating how long until a nanny arrives or it’s finally nap time so I can re-enter the adult world, I feel it: a heavy, immediate guilt for wanting that escape at all.

The contradiction is simple and impossible: I love motherhood with all cells in me, and I love myself almost as much.

I love reading, writing, painting, working on occasional projects, walking aimlessly in the city, riding the train, calmly planning things out, talking to friends, running errands and doing around another 30 things alone. I love moving through the world with my own thoughts as the only narrator. I know, intellectually, that mothers are allowed (and even encouraged) to exist outside their children.

But there is always this stubborn taste of guilt that never fully dissolves, poisoning every independent endeavor a mother plans.

And because of that, I don’t believe the mothers online who very loudly insist they feel none of it, who claim they are able to depart into something close to nirvana during their “me time.” Either they’re performing a version of freedom that plays well on the internet, or they’ve managed to sever something I’m not convinced should be severed at all.

Trying to untangle the knots of my guilt, I often find myself returning to my own mother.

She is a stoic Soviet woman whose youth and early motherhood unfolded during the brutal moral and economic decline that followed the collapse of the USSR. She has, quite literally, seen it all: from jealous men pointing guns at her stomach to clearing needles off playgrounds with her shoes before letting me run free in our small Siberian town.

She was deeply loved from the moment she was born, yet no one ever taught her to tend to her own feelings. No one told her it was acceptable to feel a wide spectrum of emotions, let alone to sit with them long enough to understand where they came from or how to resolve them, especially when the world outside felt dangerous, untrustworthy, and on the verge of collapse.

Because of that, she (and millions of women and men of her generation) learned to deny themselves any visible weakness. In doing so, they also deprived themselves of the language and tools to process what they felt at all.

So when she became a mother at 22 (and almost immediately a single one), she closed the door on herself entirely. She accepted, without negotiation, that her life, along with the desires and ambitions she had once known, was over. She put everything on the line, firmly believing that I, her baby, was the only thing in the world that mattered.

And she expected that to be the path for me, at least for the first three years of my daughter’s life. And, for what it’s worth, I agreed with her while I was pregnant, still in love with the idea, or rather, the ideal of motherhood my imagination had constructed.

Reality, as it often does, did not cooperate.

When my daughter arrived, especially during those first nine months, my life looked nothing like the almost theatrical performances I had rehearsed for us in my head: the baby and me lying on colorful blankets in green parks all day, me rereading books from school while she napped for hours, and bringing her along to coffee runs and dinners, effortlessly strapped to me in a chic and very uncomfortable carrier.

Instead, early motherhood turned out to be exhausting, isolating, all-consuming. It demanded more from me than any other full-time job ever had. I had read other mothers say it before, but I’ll repeat it anyway: there were no clock-out hours, no weekends, no sick days. It required me to show up with everything I had while, internally, I often felt like a paper plane.

But after some time, and a lot of adjustment, things began to shift.

As soon as the baby started sleeping through the night, fell into a predictable nap schedule, and relied less on me with the introduction of solids, I began to catch glimpses of my old life again.

I could go to the movies without calculating how much breastmilk was left at home or when I’d have to pump next to avoid feeling like I was carrying sharp, painful rocks in my chest. I could go on longer runs, sit in a café and write for hours, meet an old friend for coffee and a walk. I could even escape for a short trip to the beach.

I became ravenous for those small, independent sparks of time, and I started seizing every opportunity to have one. And, almost immediately, I started feeling guilty.

Rumi wrote:

Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought.
Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.

I read lines like these and wonder what it would take to believe them. Sometimes, I think it might take being a man.

Because from where I stand, the door doesn’t feel wide open. Or maybe it is open. Yet stepping through it requires leaving something behind that I’m not willing to abandon.

My mother showed me, by example, that everything, including herself, has to fade away when a baby arrives. Because she never traced the roots of that belief, never questioned it, it grew into something overpowering, almost tyrannical in her mind. She never learned how to think otherwise, so she mostly complied, giving up any viable form of resistance.

And so, I (and I strongly believe most mothers today) pay for resisting that script with guilt. We pay for allowing ourselves not to disappear, for refusing to erase ourselves.

And the guilt does not go away. Not with self-care, not with advice from other mothers, not with affirmations, not with carefully scheduled time alone, not with any of the language we’ve built (mostly online) to make it feel manageable.

It doesn’t dissolve. It doesn’t get resolved. It simply learns how to sit next to you more quietly some days, more loudly on others.

So often, you end up in the place Lynne Ramsay captured so precisely in Die My Love, when the protagonist, played by Jennifer Lawrence, in the thick of early motherhood, admits:
“I’m stuck between wanting to do something and not wanting to do anything at all.”

Guilt follows you. It follows you to work, to the playground, to the train, to dinner with friends, into the rare, short hours you carefully carve out for yourself. It is there when you stay, and it stays there when you leave.

And maybe the only useful thing to know before you become a mother is not how to get rid of it but that it will be there

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Although I care about the planet’s compromised ecosystems and how mass-market production exploits already vulneable economies, I’d be shamelessly lying if I said my preference for used clothes comes purely from environmental or economic altruism.

Buying vintage feels like collecting family heirlooms, things I hope to pass down to my daughter one day. I rarely buy basic vintage pieces (that’s what buying new is for). I look for something singular: a garment whose uniqueness comes either from an irregular design no longer in production, or from the fabric itself that has to be natural, durable, made to last. I have pieces shaped by such artistry and imagination that I take pride in simply owning them. They are never too expensive, but not too cheap either, usually falling somewhere within the same price range as what “quality” mass market asks for today.

From time to time, I allow myself to splurge on what I call “serious” pieces, such as coats, suits, blazers and trousers, but never for my everyday life in Brooklyn. I want my vintage pieces to last at least a generation, the way they lasted for their previous owners, so they can one day belong to my now-toddler. I also want them to say something about me — not someone who settles for public favor, basic safety, or trends dictated by TikTok, but someone drawn to rarity, distinctiveness, and a personal stamp inherited from those who came before.

When I come into possession of a beaded purse with an intricate pattern, or a pair of refined earrings that feel as though they came straight out of the Victorian era, I sometimes feel something close to sadness. I think about the possibility that their owner had no one to pass them down to, or had to sell them out of necessity. It feels like looking at what was once a glorious empire at the height of its decadence: its beautiful monuments and architectural giants still standing strong and glowing, while legitimacy slips and civic virtue quietly dissolves.

Buying vintage brings me back to childhood, to standing on a step stool in front of my grandmother’s open wardrobe. I was a tiny human, looking up at rows of garments hanging like jellyfish, their long forms reaching toward me, almost teasing. I would try to make anything fit, genuinely believing I could walk out to the playground in sequined stilettos and chain belts I was drowning in. I loved imagining my future life in those pieces, touching them, smelling them, inhabiting them before I was ready.

Observing people in vintage and thrift stores is also its own kind of entertainment for me. Sometimes it feels like watching a whimsical intimate movie, something in the spirit of The Science of Sleep or Moonrise Kingdom. The other day, I stopped at one of my favorite stores in Sarasota and found myself browsing alongside a young couple, clearly on their third or fourth date. They were looking through pieces together, playing a game naming all animals they can think of in alphabetical order, taking turns. They were so refreshingly free of the usual brain rot, simply having a conversation that even a modern rom-com no longer seem able to produce. They felt like a vintage store themselves: a grandmother’s closet in a sea of white T-shirts worn together with wash jeans, Instagram trends, ASOS, athleisure, and an encroaching beige nothingness.

Visiting a vintage shop feels like reading a book. It makes me notice life. Grandmothers come in with their pouches, brooches, and hats and all the things they probably wore when they were my age. Going to a mass-market store feels more like doomscrolling. It is clean, briefly satisfying, and leaves me empty and dulled.

My grandmother and mother got rid of so many of those precious, one-of-a-kind pieces—tailored for them, made from the highest quality fabrics, often sourced overseas. My grandmother once owned a small department store in a Siberian town and always had first access to the most interesting, rare garments, pieces with character and edge. Over the years, through moves and circumstances, they were all given away.

I like to think they didn’t disappear. That somewhere, someone else’s daughter or son is wearing them now with taste, with care, treating them as the heirlooms they have always been.

Is it just instinct to soften the pain, preserve the sweetness, to arrange our memories the way Jeremy Bentham would suggest, maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering? Or is there something more romantic at play, something that resists optimization altogether?

I remember returning once to a brownstone in Flatbush I had occupied for two weeks with two friends and a former romantic partner, on my very first visit to New York. It was my first and never serious relationship, originating in an eighth-grade courtship that lasted longer than it should have. And yet, at the time, it mattered. It mattered enough for us to fight endlessly about the most absurd, obscure things, things only 18-year-olds locked in a dysfunctional romance could find worth unraveling over.

The tension didn’t spare the trip. It didn’t spare our friends or that house, sometimes escalating into day-long silent treatments, into us leaving and going our separate ways with no plan, no explanation.

I still feel apologetic to the friends who traveled with us and had to witness all of it. But who hasn’t been young, passionate, and a little toxic at some point? And if someone hasn’t, I’m not sure I’d want to be stuck in a small, tense space with them.

Years later, after I moved to New York for college, feeling newly alive, alert to the possibilities of a different life, I decided to go back. On one of those most pleasant September Saturday nights the city sometimes offers, instead of dinner or drinks with friends, I took the train from my dorm in Brooklyn Heights to that house in Flatbush for no real reason at all.

I didn’t have the exact address, but I didn’t need it. I remembered the train exit, the turns, the small sequence of movements that led me there in 2012. I stood in front of the dark house that seemed unoccupied for no more than three minutes, just long enough to feel slightly suspicious in the eyes of imagined neighbors, and then I left.

When I got back and told my friend where I’d been, she asked why I would go there in the first place. I remember my answer exactly. I said: “I guess sometimes we like to hurt ourselves for no particular reason.”

But that wasn’t true. I didn’t feel hurt standing there. Not even a trace of nostalgia. What I felt, though I didn’t admit it then, was something closer to relief, even a quiet kind of exhilaration. I was no longer that heartbroken, directionless teenager. I was someone else: a young woman who had chosen to start over in a foreign country, to build a life, to see if this place could one day become something like home.

Maybe returning to a place of past hurt isn’t about the place at all, but about witnessing yourself in it, no longer undone. And maybe avoiding the places of former happiness is less about superstition and more about protecting something fragile, like an unwillingness to watch it shift, age, or disappear.

It doesn’t feel mechanical. It feels like proof that we’re not just trying to optimize our lives but to understand them, to feel their full weight, even when it contradicts us.

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