Things
It's a sad knowledge that my skill of letting go of everything and starting over from scratch appears useful.
I bought my own apartment when I was 25. Before that, I moved frequently: by turning 12, I had lived in 4 different apartments in various parts of our town, and never had a room of my own. Things didn't improve much after I moved to Kyiv for university: before I finally got my small studio at 25, I had lived in 5 more places. So, when I renovated my very first place, I moved in and began having things—as in, I allowed myself to.
I started buying books I wanted to keep, not just to read and pass on. I bought paintings, posters, tea and coffee sets, and plants. I traveled a lot and brought back concert tickets, dried flowers, small sculptures, champagne glasses, and mugs. I brought a thick camel wool rug from Egypt and a huge coconut that fell right next to me in Malaysia. Friends gave me gifts and postcards, and I made craft pieces.
The studio was tiny, and it didn’t take long to overclutter it. It wasn’t cozy or nice; it was impossible to clean or organize. But I didn’t know what to do. Those things were meaningful to me; they were tied to memories and people. I struggled for another year or two until I felt like the things were suffocating me. I wasn't happy in my home. I tried building more storage, but it didn’t help, so one day, I just threw everything away.
It was like an explosion inside me. I just couldn’t handle all those things, and I couldn't decide what should go or stay because I couldn’t rank or evaluate my memories, the people, or the situations those things represented.
It was difficult. Since then, I have asked people not to send me postcards with meaningful signatures, and I rarely ask for signatures in books. I know they might become an emotional burden later.
When I turned 32, even with the clutter gone, the studio felt too small. I wanted a place where I could cook, enjoy food, have friends over, and spend my days working comfortably. So I decided to rent. Since then (plus getting together and separating later with my daughter's father), I’ve moved six more times within Kyiv and lived for over six months in three different countries. And when I was preparing to settle down and buy a bigger apartment for my daughter and me, the full-scale invasion happened.
It turned out, I had developed the perfect skills for being a refugee. I had spent nearly my entire life practicing leaving things behind and getting rid of almost everything. Every time I moved—since I was four—something didn’t fit, or there was no space, or it was too heavy or too old, or it got lost or broken in the chaos.
This weekend, I attended a Ukrainian film festival and saw a collection of short films. I was surprised and touched: one film was based on a Facebook post I made during the summer of 2022. At that time, my friends were packing up my apartment in Kyiv because, after six months of full-scale war, I had decided not to take my daughter back to the war zone, and it didn’t make sense to continue paying rent.
It was a sad post. I reread it. It was a farewell ode to my collections of leaves and dried plants, my daughter’s first photo albums, and the two-meter-high avocado tree I had grown from seed after eating an avocado for breakfast on a happy day in Thessaloniki. It was a goodbye to my threads, hooks, wires for knitting, unfinished embroideries, funny hats, socks with eyes I had knitted for my daughter, Christmas ornaments, decorations, and the mask and snorkel that had traveled with me across many islands and coasts.
On the way home, I reflected on the fact that since that day in July 2022, I’ve moved three more times. Does it hurt me or just shape me? Does it limit me, or does it help me focus on what truly matters—things that aren’t really things? I’m not sure. I also thought about what it’s like to grow up safely in the same house and live there until you start your own family, perhaps staying there again. It felt like having strong, secure roots but also like accumulating traumas. It was probably both, but I’ll never know what that feels like.
As I consider moving again (long story short: we don’t like the area, there are no good schools nearby for my daughter, and all our friends and my mother live far away—I didn’t think about that when renting because I didn’t expect my daughter would start school in the UK, but now it seems she will), I reflect on the things we've accumulated during these 2.5 years living in London. Plants, paintings, books, vases, candlesticks, furniture, framed photos, throw blankets, a chess set. Now that it’s not just me, but also my daughter, who has grown attached to these things and finds comfort in familiar surroundings, sudden changes feel more wrong than ever. What feels even worse is knowing that my skill of letting go of everything and starting over from scratch appears useful. Seeing what’s happening with liberal democracies, tolerance, law, freedom, and climate, I can't help but think that skill might come in handy for her, too.