My Story
Hello there, unknown reader. I’m writing this without knowing if anyone will ever actually read it. That alone makes this diary feel pretty personal. We live in a world that’s absolutely flooded with emotions, images, news, and information in general. But we tend to forget that everyone we run into online is still a real person. They just feel like profiles on a screen, right? We remind ourselves in a very formal way like “yeah, obviously that’s a human being,” but we rarely actually register that it’s a person with a full story behind them. And most works of art are basically built on exactly that — human stories, or interpretations of them. Now you’re about to read one of those stories. I was born in 1998 in a small town in Russia. I grew up in a one-room apartment with my mother and sister. I ended up being the only male in the family. My father left early on, and later died in an accident when I was six. I still remember that woody, pine-like smell of the coffin he was in. I didn’t cry, and from that moment I kind of understood I had stepped onto a path you can’t really prepare for. My childhood wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. I actually liked being on my own — the lack of personal space pushed me toward building my own little “world,” which you can probably still see traces of if you’re reading this. And I guess that’s where I learned that everything in life has two sides: the bad and the good. I wasn’t very social. Adults often called me overly serious, like “wow, what a serious little boy you have,” when I’d go somewhere with my mom. My mother swung between two extremes: helicopter parenting and complete randomness. On one hand, I could roam anywhere — I once went so far from home with friends that I had no idea how to get back. On the other hand, I wasn’t really allowed to make my own choices; everything was decided for me, from clothes to who was “a good friend” or “a bad one.” Not that it worked anyway — I mostly just ignored it. That’s probably where my obsession with independence and freedom came from. That’s also why I’m posting this on a relatively open, independent platform instead of Facebook or Telegram. The thing I remember most from childhood is those moments when I was alone at home in total silence. A quiet summer day, poplar trees outside the window, their rustling still feels like calm to me. Far away, you could hear cars on the highway, and on the horizon there was a forest. I didn’t know then that I’d end up going there a lot later in life. School times were fun. I did karate, I was pretty serious and honestly kind of hot-headed. Once I picked a fight with a kid who got offended because the teacher called me to the board instead of him. He went like, “why did you pick HIM and not me?” and I was like, “who are you calling HIM?” and challenged him to fight after school. For the record — I lost, because he was way bigger and stronger. I couldn’t really land any meaningful hits, got caught in a hold, and he almost choked me out. The classmates had to step in and break it up. To be continued…
