We look at one another with the expectation of being who we are supposed to be, of being better. We are more likely to talk about strength, resilience, success, and self-actualization than about shame, loneliness, exhaustion, confusion, or the need for support. Yet when I revisit my own writing, I see a common thread running…
I once wrote about the illusion of invisibility. This time, I want to write about the illusion of visibility. Look at This With Me A few days ago, I saw a rainbow. A huge, beautiful one. My son and I spent our walk home running around and taking pictures of it. A man was walking…
Despite having extensive experience — including six years of living and working abroad in the UAE — I still haven’t managed to find a job in Sweden after almost three years. I’m never inactive: I study, work remotely for a Ukrainian organization, volunteer, and endlessly refine my CV. But at some point I became curious…
I am African. Everything that might make me look Latina is just a love for potatoes. It so happened that I was born a white Ukrainian woman, and my destiny with Ukraine is intertwined like a braid, but I understand my origin very well. In fact, our origin. Because if you remove labels like “race,”…
I’m often asked how I manage to get everything done. Damn if I actually do — I barely get anything done, but I do so many different things — this is perhaps what creates the illusion. People like me, Barbara Sher called “scanners” — those whose curiosity stretches across many things. The problem for scanners…
The child is 8, and they have started spending time with peers on their own, so for us this is another stage of adjustment, adaptation, and new challenges. It’s sometimes sad, sometimes funny 🙂 Separation is the process of gradual emotional and physical detachment of a child from their parents, natural and necessary for developing…
A friend recently asked me how I manage to maintain a “Montessori style” in the toy world my son and I share. It made me realize that, from his very first toys until now, we’ve actually managed to keep things minimal and orderly. We don’t have the problem of toys being left scattered around —…
The other day I asked my seven-year-old son: what do you call people who hate other races? The correct answer was “racists,” but he asked, “White?” I laughed, because, as they say, “out of the mouths of babes.” His answer captured patterns in the adult world more accurately than we’re comfortable admitting. Racism as a…
People tend to fall into quick-hatred. The anger accumulated in everyday life — at small everyday irritations, at everything that slips beyond our control — seeks an outlet, and the media narrative often offers a target for it. There everything is explained clearly: there is good, there is evil, evil attacks good and must be…
For a university course on intercultural communication, I recently wrote an essay on Hannah Arendt and the controversy surrounding her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Hannah and her concept of the “banality of evil” fascinated me long before I studied her in depth, and later I became captivated by the idea of using this example to…
