Be yourself.

Let me share my personal frustration. Almost every book, every movie, every website about personal development and search for happiness (which already make me throw up) says Step one: be yourself. Apparently, that’s the quickest way of finding the desired harmony in life, and blah-blah-blah. There is one small problem, though. Nobody says what is Yourself.

The truth is, there is no such thing as Being yourself. This yourself-puzzle is made of your parents’ bringing up system; your nationality background; of the way people behaved around you when you were a teen and the way they behave around you now; of these TV show actors that you secretly worshiped; of these book characters that you were reading at night hiding from your parents under the blanket; of these family friends that you fell in love with; of your basketball couch who was extremely successful in your eyes; of this stranger in the subway who looked so decent and elegant that you thought “I should cross legs the same way when I sit, it looks very refined”.

Every single gesture of yours, not talking about the decisions you make every day, is  somebody else’s gesture that once matched with your preferences and principles (that actually were also grown up in you by your family and your community) so that you decided to borrow it. Every one of us is an amazing actor, playing his role spontaneously, thinking that it is himself, that it is what he actually is. But in fact, it’s what he wants to be because he finds it attractive in other people. She is extremely nice and cheerful person because she thinks that is what a woman should be, because that is what her beloved mother was or that is how Kate Middleton looks like. He is a charming asshole because that is what his uncle was (and all the women were crazy about him) or that is how Doctor House behaves and nobody fires him.

Our I was myself / I wasn’t myself, I had to pretend to be someone I wasn’t are based on what we find the most attractive in other people. We borrow features from each other adapting them till they become unconscious and call them myself. Meanwhile, the category Pretending includes features that we don’t like in others or we liked for a while but they are not fun anymore. However, this awesome mechanism helps us to avoid thinking too much of what is myself and what is that’s not me! and exploding our minds every time we need to make a step.

In short words enjoy your life and stop feeling obliged to be yourself! It’s a made up creature :)

Cinema, women and magic

What does it take to make a good movie? Talent, passion, creativity, strong personality? Well, it seems that gender also plays important role in American film industry.

 According to recent researches in 2013, women made up only 16% of all directors, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors. Only four female filmmakers have ever been nominated for an Academy Award for best director and Kathryn Bigelow is the only female director that has taken home an Oscar so far. Crazy, right?

Three brave and talented women from Minneapolis took a risk to show the world that cinema doesn’t have gender limitations. Cara Green Epstein, Maribeth Romslo and Mim Epstein made Dragonfly, a movie where screenwriter, directors, executive producers, three main characters, production designers, animator, and storyboard artist are all women.

“It wasn’t intentional, - says Maribeth. - Once we decided to make our ideas come true, we suddenly realized a really cool thing: we were three women at the helm of a feature film, something that almost never happens”.

Dragonfly is not about women. It’s about family, relations and some magic in our everyday life. It tells the story of one Minnesota family divided by divorce and illness. Young, but talented Abby Fry plays a little girl who struggles to understand her mom and herself while solving a mystery of the magical “dragonfly” mailbox.

Dragonfly is still at the stage of production, but its creators are very excited and passionate about it. They repeat after Kathryn Bigelow: “It’s irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don’t”. 

Exploring a woman.

One of the perks in working for news broadcasting is that you read tons of great articles from different media every day. Most of it is just to check if there is something big happening in your region or in the world. However, some articles truly catch your eye. And you start digging deeper.

I’m usually copying the links to the articles that looked interesting for me to my special “treasure file” to check it later more attentively. It turned out that all three stories that I picked during my first week of internship at the TV News are about women. Well, I guess, I really can’t avoid that topic in my writing….

These stories about women choosing their paths made me wondering what feelings and thoughts they had while taking certain directions in life. If I were them, why would I decide to become what they became? Would I understand them as a woman?

Instead of yelling about feminism while living myself in a world with a great number of options and without tough decisions, I’d rather try to understand those women who don’t have that luxury; to be able to help instead of blindly imposing my beliefs on them.

A 7-years-old girl in El Salvador ran away from home because nobody really cared about her and her uncle physically abused her every day. A 16-years-old member of the Mara Salvatrucha, or the MS13, one of the largest Salvadoran gangs, got arrested for having killed six children from the other street gang. Who do we sympathize more? The answer is obvious. However, it’s the same person. Article call these people “victims and perpetrators”.

What happened during these 9 years with the brave, little girl? Life happened. Her brother, who helped her when she ran away, was killed by the other street gang while she was raped by the age of 8.

The story doesn’t end there. In prison she participated in a creative writing program and now leaving the prison at her 21, she is looking for a different life. Did she really have a choice for her way in life? I’m not sure. Did she ever think about “choosing” some direction? When you just need to survive, I don’t think you ask such questions.

Another story about the meaning of life. 7,000 volunteer soldiers have joined the Women’s Protection Unit, or YPJ, which grew out of the wider Kurdish resistance movement. Most of these girls are at the age of 18-24. They wake up at 4 am; they sleep with their guns at arm’s length; they eat whatever food the locals donate. Meanwhile, they braid their hair, they pluck their eyebrows; they laugh and make a girls-like friendship. And sometimes they bury their sister-soldiers.

Don’t they want a normal life like dressing up, going out for dates, having children? People say war is guys’ business. However, these girls know that every day they safe people of their country, their neighbors and relatives. They know that they are more than just young, fragile girls – they are solders defending their land. They liberate hundreds of women and children strained in the mountains after ISIS attacked their village.

These girls had a choice of life paths, and they chose the one that seemed to be the most meaningful for them. The question “why do you do that?” is ridiculous for them.

Somewhere in South Korea there is a US Army garrison, surrounded by old shacks. There lived about 70 aging women who worked their whole life as “comfort women” for American soldiers. They are old and sick, and they don’t have any support from the government because they are “prostitutes”.

It’s not that kind of profession that people would respect, right? It’s not even a legal work, people would say. Nevertheless, in the 50es Korean government deeply dependent on the U.S. military was so confident about this “profession” that it formalized the camptowns as "special tourism districts" with legalized prostitution.

More than 20 000 women were persuaded that they are helping their country by sleeping with American soldiers. I always wondered what would make a woman sleep with strangers for money. Apparently, patriotism might be enough reason. And after you just can’t quit because that is all you know to do for work.

The saddest thing here is that a country these women donated their bodies for doesn’t really care about them. They became old and sick and everything that Korean government and Korean people remember about these women is a label “prostitute”. These women thought that made a right choice… 

Mologa. Russian Underwater World.

Once, long time ago, there was a town at Volga River. It was called Mologa and many people came here every year for brisk trade fairs and spectacular carnivals. But an evil water spirit got jealous and sent violent waves to erase a beautiful city from the Earth…

That’s how we can start a sad fairy-tale about Russian city Mologa. Or more precisely, about an eternal war between a merciless technical progress and a natural way of living.

Mologa was a well-known city in Russia since the 12th century. In 1321 there was organized a whole principality called Molozhskaya. Having a very convenient location (on the junction of two rivers – Volga and Mologa), this city became pretty quickly one of the most important Russian trade centers with the Asian countries.

As the time was going, there were built factories and banks, monasteries and churches (there was an impressive temple on the main square), libraries and cinema. What is even more important, there were 900 houses with 7 thousand people peacefully living in them.

Nevertheless, on the 14th of September, 1935 Soviet government decided to start building  Rybinsk Reservoir and Rybinsk hydroelectric plant. Mologa was destined to be flooded. 130 thousand people (including nearby villages) were forced to move to Rybinsk.

This painful process was prolonged for 4 years. Sure, people were said that it was necessary for the industry and transport; that it had to be done for the sake of their country. Personally, I’m just trying to imagine, how it feels to see your city where you grew up, where you worked, where you used to watch movies and read in the library, goes under water street by street, stone by stone.

Most of the houses were taken apart, moved to Rybinsk and assembled again. Others were just blown up as many churches. The Leushinsky monastery was left out though, and its walls stuck out right from the water till they were destroyed by ice and waves.

This August the water level dropped in the Rybinsk Reservoir, exposing the remains of what used to be a lively city. It also reveals old questions: was the result worth this sacrifice? Were there other ways, less radical, of solving the problem of the reservoir? 

P.S. More pictures on the topic here: http://www.pravmir.ru/mologa-gorod-utoplennik-kotoryiy-inogda-vozvrashhaetsya/ 

Ordinary story (from some Russian newspaper)

 The sea in August is warm and soft. And caressing like a mom. Sasha comes here, at the beach, early in the morning, as her doctor prescribed. She believes that somewhere there, overseas, there are beautiful countries and close-knit families.

At first, she was taken and then returned. Then taken again and returned again. Taken… and left in peace for now.

She is 15 now and she is ready to be returned again.

Sasha’s current mom is the third one in row, not counting the biological one. She is nice and a little tired. She adopted Sasha a year ago. As it often happens (nobody knows why), only in a few months after Sasha moved in with her new family her new mom got pregnant.

The baby was two months old when Sasha was sent to a children camp to spend the whole summer at the sea.

In the children camp Sasha felt sick and it turned out to be not the heat stroke, but pregnancy.

Her new mom is shocked but tries to defend a girl when the camp administration tells her about Sasha’s pregnancy on the phone. She says “can you imagine what a poor girl had to go through?” However, she refuses to take Sasha home till the end of summer.

Camp’s doctor Svetlana, a kind woman, takes Sasha to do all the tests and even let Sasha live in her house to give a girl some rest, physical and psychological.

Sasha accepts Svetlana’s help and tries to be nice. She is used to have some nice woman periodically appearing in her life. Till Sasha destroys everything herself. Like this time with her new mom: Sasha got pregnant and let her down.

Sasha’s third mom calls again, cries and asks Sasha to have an abortion. Sasha yells back that she will keep the baby. She just has a bad temper; everyone suffers from her.

Some kind people in Moscow look for a special center that works with pregnant teenagers for Sasha. These centers ask for a paper from a social department. Sasha’s new mom is afraid of losing Sasha and a child allowance if the social department would learn about the pregnancy.

… The sea in August is warm and soft. And caressing like a mom. Sasha comes here, at the beach, early in the morning, as the doctor prescribed. She believes that somewhere there, overseas, there are beautiful countries and close-knit families.

“I’ll have this baby”, Sasha whispers angrily and resolutely. “You will, Sasha, - responds Svetlana, - you won’t let him down”. It’s getting lighter, and the sea finally lets the sun rise into the sky. 

Math error

I like the Macedonian word for “together” – заедно. It literally means “as one”. It’s so much better than its English, French or Russian equivalents: “together”, “ensemble”, and “вместе”. None of them gives this great idea of two (or more) becoming one. One mind, one soul, one way. I’m not far away from you because you are inside me. Because I don’t know where you are and where I am anymore. We are the one. 

P.S. You know, Math has never been my strong point…

***

I was in America when my grandma died just a week before my birthday. I talked to her a couple of days before that and she asked me to call her on my birthday so she could wish me nice things. I couldn’t be at the funerals so I came to her village in summer. As always.

My family always visited her in summer because she lived two days by train and an additional hour by bus away from us. I recalled the usual excitement growing inside while the bus was getting closer to the village. She would always come outside at the gates to greet us, while I would run to hug her.

This “grandma’s south” always had specific, sunny smell and taste. I drowned into it this time too as soon as I got out of the train. Everything was the same: the bus left from the same place at the same time, fields and villages looked the same from the bus window, my grandma’s neighbor and best friend was sitting on the same bench waiting for the bus. That’s why it’s hard to believe that there is no grandma anymore. Her house still keeps the feeling of her presence even though there are no pictures of my grandpa on the walls and a huge pile of bookshelves up to the ceiling is empty (my dad sent the whole library to their house).

It’s hard to believe that me and her, we wouldn’t lie in bed next to each other and I wouldn’t tell her all about my “loved one”. She wouldn’t ask me “How much do you love him?” and wouldn’t tell me about grandpa who always stayed the one for her.

Last year I came alone because my dad and my sister came later. While waiting for the bus I decided to buy my grandma flowers. I have never brought her flowers before. I was so happy and proud of myself: finally I was a grown-up, I worked, and I could afford buying my grandma a huge bunch of lilies. She sat at the bus stop waiting for me, and I could barely see her behind my bouquet.

It all feels unnatural now: my sister standing at the stove and cooking instead of our grandma, me sitting in grandma’s favorite chair, my nephew excitedly reciting a poem that grandma couldn’t hear…

I don’t know how to name this post. What I know is that there is no point in being sad and depressed, even if at the moment you are not together with someone you love. It’s an infinite happiness to know that somewhere LIVES the person you love and who loves you. It means that there is always someone to share your feelings and thoughts with, someone to support you when life is hard, someone who is waiting for you. It means that there is always tomorrow.

Everything can be changed and fixed while the person is alive. After there is only grief left.