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🕑 Added 2025-06-15 14:50:25 +0000 UTCSometimes I feel like I’m always complaining here.
I sit down to write a post — and freeze. I start typing something heavy, then delete it and think: “Come on, Julia, share something joyful. Write something light, warm, pink, fluffy, rainbow-sweet… something that’ll make everyone melt.” And I sit there, and sit, and sit — trying to squeeze something “pleasant” out of myself — and it just doesn’t come. Not because there’s no beauty in my life. There is. A lot of it, actually. But I don’t know how to share it. Or maybe I’m just afraid.
Just now, I had a sharp flashback. Stories I’ve heard my whole life — from my parents and grandparents — about life in the Soviet Union:
How my great-great-grandmother was dispossessed and kicked out of her home, how she survived the winter hiding in a haystack.
How the women in my family married whoever came first, just to protect their families from having everything taken away — because a married woman’s dowry (land, cattle, clothing, money) could save the household.
How they gathered rotten cherries fallen from the trees, because the authorities would come and collect everything fresh as a “tax.”
I used to think we were just poor. Especially because my grandma always said they had one pair of boots for five kids, and took turns walking to the next village for school. But no — it wasn’t just poverty. It was the regime.
My family has always been hardworking. They had land. They could have had abundance. But everything was taken from them. I don’t know why or how, but recently I’ve been feeling that ancestral thread so strongly. The pain feels alive. As if I was there too.
So what does that have to do with “sharing nice things”? Well — imagine you tell your neighbor your pear tree had a crazy harvest this year. Or your chickens are laying record eggs. Or your pig just gave birth to seven piglets. Next thing you know — the state shows up and takes most of it. And sometimes it wasn’t a neighbor — it was your own sibling who’d say something, and it would happen anyway. People were so afraid of the government — and of each other — that they stopped speaking their joy out loud. Because joy could be taken away.
I know I live in a different time. I can share my happiness. But I still have to push through something, every single time I try to let myself shine. It’s like I still hear the old voices: “Keep your head down and you’ll go far.” “Better a bird in the hand than two in the bush.” (At least “he beats you ‘cause he loves you” is just a horrible joke in my world — but for my grandmothers, it was real. ( And for the record, in russia there’s still no law against domestic violence... just saying..... It’s the 21st century )
What I’m trying to say is:
These fears, these inherited wounds — they live in us. Passed on through family, school, culture, the state… and deeper still, in our blood. Our task is to meet them, feel them, heal them. And ( for me) to learn how to share the good things too. At least once a month, maybe 🕊️ ( it’s can be my task)
P.S. Since I’m already speaking about my ancestors… The women on my mother’s side never married for love. Many of them endured abuse — from husbands or in-laws. But with me — the pattern ends 🤍
Comments
Antoni
Hello again, Julia! I fully understand and agree with what you say and deeply feel. I didn't live in the Soviet Union (although as a young man I visited and lived for a while in its satellite countries—Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc.), but I did experience firsthand under a terrible pro-Nazi military dictatorship, where the fears were the same, where our language and customs were prohibited, where it was better to remain silent and submissive, where when they arrested, tortured, and sometimes killed a neighbor or acquaintance, the recurring phrase was "there must be something." done"!!! I lived in hiding, I went hungry, I ate my guts and drank my tears. I lived through torture, persecution and exile. My parents were honest people, very hard-working but poor for having been "enemies" as "Catalans". Machismo, supremacism, the cruelest fascism after the devastating civil war following Franco's coup (with the indifference of Europe and the world in general), gratuitous injustice, etc. left their mark on all of us who lived through it (I never knew one of my grandparents because he died after being captured and tortured in the war), and this mark must not disappear, we are the living memory of something tragic that happened and we cannot allow ourselves to forget it! Obviously there is something castrating about this, something like a stabbing wound that lasts and that reappears from time to time and hurts us... but I prefer this a thousand times over to forgetting. I am the fruit of all my pasts and the pasts of my loved ones.... I am one of the witnesses, still alive, of the terror and horror they experienced... and not forgetting this is part of my heritage, and I will never renounce it. Julia, all of this doesn't diminish us; on the contrary, it elevates us and turns us into witnesses and living memories! Thank you so much for sharing something so intimate, difficult, and painful, yet at the same time so beautiful and important!
Giacomo
Sad story, I'm sorry for your family. (this is another stunning set, pic no.8 is my favourite one❤️)
