I am taking a lot of meds right now, half of them - sedatives to make my mind quiet, another half - to fight the drowsiness from the first half. Some of them are prescribed, and some of them are self-medicating. But they're keeping me in that sweet spot where I am not going insane from the horror that is my life and can still function, work, and sleep.
For the past few weeks the major vibe on our social media was "Yes, you can be happy about our soldiers' progress de-occupying our territories, but no, you can't forget at what cost we are getting this progress". The first thing I do every morning I wake up is cry. Because now we get 1 or 2 air raid alerts a day in Odesa, which means I can mostly sleep through the night in my own bed, and every time I wake up on my own, not awoken by explosions or sirens, I know that somebody died to make it happen, somebody was cold all night in trenches on guard, somebody had a sleepless night of shelling, somebody was out on a tactical mission.
It shouldn't be like that, the price for my peaceful sleep shouldn't be that high. Every morning I wake up, I open my eyes, I remember where I am and what is happening in my homeland, I start crying, I dress up crying, I brush my teeth crying, I make coffee crying, then I have breakfast, I watch some news segments on youtube and I cry.
There was this blessed period of euphoria when we all were over the moon about our army's advancement. As Zelensky said, "We used to look up and look for a blue sky, now we look up and look for a Ukrainian flag". So many blue and yellow flags were raised over the cities that had spent months in occupation, so many happy tears, so many families reunited, the stories about liberated Ukrainians trying to feed our soldiers immediately upon meeting them (Ukrainians gonna Ukraine), the stories of surviving occupation, refusing to collaborate, finding creative ways to push back. Like that lady in Izum who managed to run her shop only accepting Ukrainian hryvnia and refusing to take ruzzian rubles.
Then the mass graves, the torture chambers, the stories of soldiers who radio-contacted their battalion to say goodbye because they were wounded in battle and they knew the battalion won't get there fast enough to rescue them. The shelling of our infrastructure, the joyful whooping of ruzzian civilians (who have to break their own laws and use VPNs to access Twitter and other social media to harass us over there). And I'm back to feeling like my blood turns into black thick goo because it's just pure hatred coursing through my veins.
Have you ever felt all the emotions at once? Have you ever felt intoxicatingly happy (over liberated territories), and devastatingly depressed (over terrorism, tortures, murder, genocide), grateful (because there are so many people willing to protect you, support you, go out of their way to help you), and angry (because they had allowed it to happen in the first place, they allowed this terrorist to stay in power for decades, they did not send the weapons fast enough to PREVENT such horrors as Izum massacre)? Because this is how we feel. They are not even switching from one to another quickly, you just feel them all simultaneously. Every emotion at once, all of them contradicting each other, and there is nothing you can do about it, and you don't know what to do with that and how to sort it all out. You can't imagine how draining it is. You just want to scream and claw at your own skin, and you scream because your body can't decide if it wants to cry or laugh, and you feel like your brain is going up in sparks from all the short circuits in it.
So I swallow my handful of pills, I wash it down with coffee and tears, and I carry on with my day.