13/10/2025
(warning: death and heavy content)
Because I know what life looks like without them.
I was reflecting recently on why joy is so important to me.
I grew up in the Soviet Union, and when it collapsed, the years that followed were dark and unstable. I didn’t know if we would have food to eat, let alone clothes to wear. Life felt unsafe, frightening, unpredictable.
My great-aunt, who had raised my father like a mother, carried wounds that ran deep. Her own father - my great-grandfather - was taken to Siberia as an enemy of the state by Stalin and vanished. That history branded our family. It stole opportunities, futures, dignity. She lived with bitterness, grief, and resentment, and whenever I visited, her stories were heavy with pain, sadness, and anger. Listening was hard - I felt her suffering and the weight of the past pressing into me.
When I was 16, I walked into her apartment and found her dead in her bed. She lived alone by then. Almost blind, hardly able to walk. The sorrow in that room was suffocating. I called the ambulance and my parents, and then I sat there for hours beside her body, waiting for help to come. I can still see it — the stillness of her face, and the cockroach crawling across it. That image has never left me. Even now, as I write this, I cry.
In that moment, I made a vow:
I will not let resentment eat me alive.
I will not stay trapped in the past.
I will not let bitterness define me.
And I chose a different path - one where I would try to alleviate suffering, and help life become more meaningful and worth living, for myself and for others. Because I know how unbearable life feels when pain is the only lens. I know the heaviness of trauma, the way grief can turn air into stone, the way hopelessness can empty out a person …
I became a psychologist not because I was untouched by pain, but because I was shaped by it. I know what it means to live in fear, to sit with despair, to feel like joy is impossible. And I also know the miracle of a moment of beauty, so many of them - a glimpse of sun playing on the sea after a long cold winter, the first fresh strawberries, spending time with people I love, feeling my body strong and able..
