You're the first to say that. "I sympathize with you.

I wouldn't want to be in your place in these countries. When I was flying to the seminar, the shelling just started on Monday. It's still calmer at home," you said. My jaw dropped. Among the thousand words heard during this terrible period, it was the first time.
I compare myself in Ukraine this summer and myself in Finland. In Ukraine, it is scary, disturbing, but at the same time surprisingly calm - there you are a part of one big whole. There you share hours of anxiety with your friends, sitting in shelters.
And when you leave Ukraine, you become a fragment of that, a foreign body in their foreign normality. "How are you?" - asks the kindergarten teacher. "It's bad," I say. "But I won't talk about it." I'm afraid to open this pandora's box.
That's how you go to all meetings, negotiations, events as a kind of freak with a schizophrenic split: outwardly cheerful and sociable, inside - torn and confused. When they wish you a good day, you think - how the hell is it, when the night in Ukraine passed under the sign of air alarms, and the morning began with them. When in your thoughts, like a rosary, you go through the names of loved ones whom you want to hear, but you don't dare to write, because at that moment the person may not be too stupid "how are you?" and the battery in the phone must be protected. When your sister writes to you that something is flying over them. A friend's family is near Kherson. And your relatives and dear people are scattered all over Ukraine. And your cousin is in the Armed Forces. But at the same time you have to behave normally. And to answer the question why you, whore, can't sit at the same table with Russians - on a panel or in the organization of an event. Over and over again!
When you hear a car start up at a construction site, and that sound in a few seconds is painfully reminiscent of an air siren. And from this, everything shrinks inside. You understand how spoiled you are.
If someone wants to write in the first impulse - so go back, who's stopping you? Stop! I will return - only after finishing the projects planned for this period, which I lead at the Ukrainian Association in Finland. Because the battle is also going on abroad, and here we are gnawing away the space for Ukraine, which so recently in their imagination was "Russian-sized".
But there are people who cannot return quickly. For various reasons. Sometimes people they know in Ukraine say "you don't understand". You don't need that. It hurts a lot. They understand everything. And we have one terrible big pain for everyone.

Photo - https://t.me/dvish_alive

Natalia Dmytrenko