This text was written by a winner of the 2024 call for feminist essays.
You are returning from a cool university to a comfortable apartment on a nice double-decker, the sun-gilded yellow leaves shine outside the window; there is a bag of delicious snacks you never dreamed of having for everyday meals on your shoulder; an expensive, delicious coffee with ‘fancy hipsters’ vibes in your hand; and your phone is a window to hell.
And there is a requiem for the dead in your ears.
And your heart is full of hatred, disappointment and bitter emptiness.
A foreign language and culture surround you and even if you can understand what people around you are saying, you will only partially understand them. And they will not understand you either. Your culture is ingrained in your bones, and it shows.
However, even with all that anger and desperation boiling inside, you will never wish for them to understand.
Because you are a human too. It is just that there is a gate to Hell inside of you, and that is not something any other person must ever experience.
I have always been different. I had no words to describe it, but I have always felt weird. In my twenty years, I have managed to redefine this ‘weird’ for myself so that it became a fundamental part of my identity — not only because queerness contradicts strict rules of society by definition, but also because I did not have a circle to call ‘my own’.
When you move to another oblast at seven, it feels like the world is ending. The children around you are different and you have no one to play with. Then you go to school, and one would think that it will be different, but there are already some friends from kindergarten, some neighbours, some acquaintances, so you are all alone by yourself again. During your ten years at school, you change almost beyond recognition. You cling onto the smallest opportunity to find any friends or love and by the time you reach your exams, the children around you have disappointed you completely. So you hope for new people at the university. And then, a month later, you are on a lockdown again. Then your parents force you to go abroad on your own for the first time because ‘family sticks together.’ But what kind of family are we talking about when your blood ties have been associated with emotional abuse and identity denial for what feels like eternity?
Family is a very complicated issue when you abandon it at fourteen. It is even more complicated since you still live with your parents, since you are underage and there are no means of adequate existence for you until you earn a suitable education. Therefore, even despite wanting to curse it all, you put on a mask of a ‘proper cis*gender girl, an excellent student who, (oh dear!) has chosen a male-dominated sphere and how difficult must it be!’ and endure disgusting conversations about ‘future husband’ at the family table.
In consequence, you find yourself even more isolated, two thousand kilometres away from your homeland, and it is the end of the world all over again because even your C1 will not help you overcome the cultural gap and the sheer amount of pain that lives inside you.
Escaping war is a peculiar experience. It varies in its trauma and complexity, but it is equally alienating. Perhaps, that is why I was almost comfortable settling in when my parents forced me to move to Poland and later to the UK. Even playing ‘family’ again was not that difficult. However, accepting the fact of leaving my country and my inability not to do so was. And even though you could say ‘I did not have the means to’ or some other excuse, the guilt for the decision that was forced on you does not vanish.
Therefore, you run away from that all-consuming guilt because ‘there are those who have it worse’ and try to integrate into a new country. You learn a new language and communication styles, local holidays and traditions, legal and unwritten laws, popular and elite culture, because all your previous experience is now almost irrelevant. You may have some skills and achievements, but who needs them when their value is at least halved by translation? No matter how hard you try to learn, you will never fully integrate into their society. Locals will always speak in code, and you will never learn it perfectly despite all the available tools and material to learn from. And that is how a person, ‘normal’ in their own country, finds themself weirded out in their country of emigration — just like a queer child realises they will never belong to the world of the ‘norm’.
I can not help thinking that when you grow up in an oppressed, traumatised society, it becomes difficult to grow up into something ‘abnormal’. A child adopts their fundamental ideals from their parents, after all. Therefore, the correct stereotypes of a Christian monogamous family consisting of a masculine man, a feminine woman and a couple of kids with all the consequent patriarchal stereotypes about gender roles are packed into a child’s head with the underlying ‘being as quiet as a mouse’ because ‘what will people think’. (People do not care unless you spoon-feed them hatred through the media, but that is another topic for a big conversation.)
But if you are lucky enough to buy a jackpot winning ticket to the ‘right’ environment among some marginalised groups in the genetic lottery, you may grow into something more human. Because ‘queer’ is also about deconstructing patriarchy, discriminatory systems and hierarchies in general. And yes, it starts with the ordinary: ‘What if I were a boy?’ However, you will pay for this at least with your mental health, because alienation and loneliness will accompany you for most of your experience. A minor retribution for the bouquet of hatred that any LGBTQ+ person receives for the fact of their existence.
Perhaps, this is precisely why I find it so strange to hear cries about ‘nationalism being incompatible with human rights’ or some kind of ‘traditional family’ bullshit. How can you, aware of the repression and genocide of the Ukrainian nation, so easily disregard the humanity of your fellow citizens? Do not you see how, by segregating into small groups, we lose our strength before our coloniser, a cursed bastard who has been feeding on the blood and brainpower of our ancestors? For me, the russian Empire and its other iterations are just another structure that discriminated against people based on their nationality and other identities. Where there is no diversity, there are no people capable of changing things, which is why Ukrainian feminists have always been nationalists at the same time. (They still are, in fact. Anyone who truly believes in human rights and freedoms in Ukraine cannot be a sincere fighter for human rights without being a nationalist. Even if the other way around does not always work.)
To be honest, it is harder to think and talk about this topic when you are in exile. The guilt of being safe and ‘taking care of your personal needs’ makes such questions difficult because you seem to have nothing to complain about, especially since you live in the ‘Gayrope’. What a great term, honestly, since the sheer hypocrisy of it is the very essence of propaganda against human rights. Ukrainian right-wing, russians, and other conservatives all use the same narratives, despite their distinct ideologies, history, and culture. Also, life is not that much easier. ‘The West’ may know more about queer terminology, but they hate and despise us all the same. That is why it hurts even more to hear such rhetoric from Ukrainians. It feels like there is something universally bad about people like me — ‘other’ people. This ‘other’ somehow turns out to be wrong. And this is how you become alone and ‘weird’.
After all, although the ‘West’ has begun to delve into critical gender theory, critical race theory, and other anti-colonialism, it still is just a start. Despite the fact that in the UK, I don’t have to explain to a doctor what queer, non-binary and other transgender identities are (unlike my friends in Ukraine), I still feel the weight of local gender stereotypes. Although the British queer community has already managed to build its culture out of a shared history of oppression, I will never be ‘one of them’. Just as I do not fully understand their experiences, they cannot fully comprehend mine. (My experiences of queerness are intertwined with my experiences of war and emigration too deeply for them to understand it conveniently. As long as you do not want to traumatise anyone else, you have to deal with death, war, and injustice carefully.) When you add the ideological differences and the need to shout about your nation at the top of your lungs, even a sense of unity through discrimination experiences does not help with alienation.
Nonetheless, the strangest thing about this whole emigrant bubble is spending time with people you normally would have avoided at any cost: mothers 10-20-30 years older and sometimes fathers, with corresponding ‘conservative’ views and stories, who were brought together solely by the shared country of emigration. Still, they are interesting to watch, because where else could you possibly hear such an exotic mix of three languages (I am so tired of listening to their russian), curses against politicians and businessmen, conspiracy theories about ‘where, when and how much of Ukraine someone has sold’; constant repetition of the story of ‘how we left’ and attempts to find a higher motivation for why they did so. They are also experiencing the trauma of emigration, however, for them it is a matter of ‘starting a new life in their forties’, not another requirement of assimilation and the loss of their newly found identity and solid ground. That is why they desperately flee from the loneliness of broken social ties by rapidly building new ones. It is strange to see people so different from you, even people who used to be generally hostile to you based on their homo-trans and god-knows-what-other phobic views, going through the experience of alienation that defined you as a person.
I am twenty now, and two thousand kilometres by plane and another five hundred by car no longer seem like the end of the world after two and a half years. Yet, alienation and loneliness always accompany me, even when I finally embrace my motherland. It took me two years to accept this truth. This feeling would most likely stay with me for the rest of my life because I felt like a tourist during my last visit home to Ukraine. And this is the most painful feeling I have ever experienced, even worse than my parents’ rejection of my queerness. So even when I come back (in five years at least, when I pay off the bloody student loan and find a permanent job, because I have stopped hoping for my parents’ support in my adult life since I have decided on my transition) I will have to relearn again, because ‘home’ has also become alien while I was at the damn university.
Native language, familiar benches, and the most delicious coffee: a simple latte with mint syrup (what luck!) from the nearest stall. Your favourite park sounds, tastes, and smells like home. It smells like youth, spent exploring the streets and abandoned buildings with cheap crackers and a can of Sprite in your backpack. You used to be sad here, escaping your parents who did not want to accept, but now… you are in pain. The streets, familiar to the smallest pothole, have changed beyond recognition. People speak and walk in a familiar yet so different way. Trees have grown in some places, died in others, and completely different flowers have been planted on familiar flowerbeds, and the main street is dotted with portraits of the Heroes who sacrificed their lives for you. The city lives without you, so when you look at it as if into an old friend’s face, it is hard to recognise it.
No matter how hard you try to understand and grasp everything, time will ruthlessly move forward, unstoppable.
Even so, I am sure I will have to live with the feeling of alienation for the rest of my life. Before the full-scale invasion, I still had hope for my circle, my queer people who could become my new family. But now? I feel like I will never have a place to call completely and utterly home, given how my language and worldview are changing. Because when I return to Ukraine, some habits will stay with me forever.
The views of the author do not necessarily reflect the position of the members of the organisation.