The more I think, the more I feel not closer to the truth — but further from it.

Not because truth is frightening, but because it feels unreachable.

What once looked like reality now seems artificially assembled — from media, ethics, social expectations. At some point, I simply stopped understanding how I’m supposed to respond to any of it. It didn’t happen all at once. But I remember the day I felt it especially sharply.

I was sitting in a coffee shop I used to go to. This was in Bangkok. A familiar place, familiar sounds — the hiss of the milk steamer, someone chatting nearby, music from the speakers, and the heavy summer heat just outside the window. Everything was almost exactly the same as a year ago. I opened my phone and started scrolling. News, updates, opinions, memes. Everything moved as usual — but nothing inside me responded. It felt like I was reading about events on another planet.

I looked at the screen, at the people, at my cup — and felt nothing.
No urge to join in.
No irritation.
No curiosity.
Just a strange, flat indifference.

As if someone had placed a filter between me and the world — one that lets through the shapes, but not the meaning.

This morning I opened the news. A typical headline: “Drake withdrew his complaint against Spotify and UMG over the Kendrick Lamar dispute”

A year ago, I might’ve sent it to someone with a comment. Or at least reacted internally. Today — nothing. No irony. No frustration. Not even interest. Just a registered fact, passing through me without stirring anything.

I was never deeply immersed in pop culture. I observed it from the side — read articles, listened to albums, could keep up a conversation. But I never lived inside it. And yet, at some point, the news stopped being events. They started to feel like an automated feed. Everything became noise.

People discuss tweets, stories, reactions to reactions — and in that constant exchange, I began to lose my sense of where I was. I didn’t know what any of it was for.
Didn’t know what a “normal” reaction was supposed to look like.

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.
A real war. Bloody, senseless, almost impossible to believe — like the ones from childhood nightmares, where you’re aware of horror but can’t wake up. But it was happening.

I left.
Lost my country, my work, the structure of my life. I came face to face with reality in its most literal, heavy form.
No pretty covers.
No romanticized fatalism.
Everything became brutally direct.

People were dying.
People were silent.
Some searched for someone to blame.
Others searched for a way out.

I was just trying not to lose my mind. At the same time, I started to notice a shift in tone. The vocabulary had changed. Words that once felt open now sounded like verdicts. A certain tone emerged — sharp, all-knowing, intolerant of hesitation. The language of new ethics no longer served understanding. It became a tool for filtering: who’s in, who’s out.

Sometimes it felt like empathy was no longer the point — scrutiny was.
Your detachment became suspicious.
Your silence — compromising.
Your attempt to reflect — too slow.

I’m not against ethics. I’m not against change.

What I’m against is a tone that leaves no room to breathe. A world where there’s no space for doubt, for not knowing, for being unfinished. Where everything becomes binary: either you say the right thing, or you should’ve stayed silent. But a world that doesn’t allow people to be unsure — isn’t a world for the living. It’s a laboratory. It’s a kind of pressure that makes it exhausting just to be human. Language became sharp. Totalizing. Carrying the weight of automatic righteousness.

It didn’t matter who you were or what you believed — if you were Russian, you were already part of a certain narrative.
Even if you’d left.
Even if you were against it.
Even if you’d lost everything.

They stopped listening — but kept defining you. And that wears you down. You’re not defending yourself. You’re just slowly disappearing. I want to return to a state where reflection is still allowed. Where I don’t have to instantly take a side, publish an opinion, prove I’m one of the “good ones.” I just want to think. Not as a form of defense — but as a way to understand what’s happening. But the more I think, the more something inside me begins to unravel. I don’t find stability. Only scattered meanings that refuse to form a system. And there’s no dramatic rejection here. No philosophical thrill. Just fatigue. And maybe — a quiet hope that something might grow out of that fatigue. Not detachment, but a form of noticing. Something honest.
Not sharp.
Not performative.
Simply — human.

Right now, I exist as if between two realities: One is a constant stream of information demanding participation. The other — an inner silence, where there are no words, only breathing and glances. Sometimes, I write letters to myself from the future.
Not for motivation.
Not for discipline.

Just to remind myself that I existed.
That I felt.
That I made an attempt to understand.

Here’s one of those letters:

"You don’t have to hold it all together. You don’t have to respond. You don’t have to always know what to do. You have the right to be lost. To be tired. To step aside. That doesn’t make you bad. It doesn’t make you weak. It just means you’re alive.

And if you’re still thinking, it means you haven’t gone numb.
It means something in you still wants to make sense of the world — even if you no longer believe in sense itself. And that’s already enough."

These letters don’t solve anything. But sometimes, they help me stay in place — not to flee, not to go quiet, not to disappear. I think writing is a way not to vanish. Not so much expression, as inscription. A quiet act of remaining. A reminder that you exist. That there’s still someone in you who wants to call things by their names.
Even if no one’s listening.
Even if there’s no outcome.
Even if you’re uncertain about the language itself.

To write is to resist erasure.
Not loudly.
Not heroically.
Just — to be.

Even quietly.

I’m not trying to set myself apart from others. I don’t feel above anything — or outside it. If anything, I feel less and less defined with each passing day. I used to believe I could build myself out of ideas — pick beliefs, values, aesthetics — and find wholeness in that. Now it feels naive. As if every attempt to anchor myself collapses under the weight of new information, new contexts, new expectations. Sometimes I catch myself afraid to speak. Not because I have the “wrong” position — but because I’m no longer sure a position is what’s needed at all. To exist — that’s already a lot. To go quiet — that, too, is an action. To pay attention — is also a form of presence. And yet the world around me seems to demand words.
Faster.
Louder.
Sharper.

But what I miss is silence. A space where no explanation is needed. Where it’s okay not to know. Where you’re allowed to be in the middle of becoming. Where you can be a person — not a function. Not a citizen, not an activist, not an artist, not a migrant, not a language bearer. Just someone watching. More and more, I think what we’re missing — my generation, my scattered community — is not meaning, but ground.

We live in the air.
We move too fast.
We know too much.
We breathe too rarely.

It feels like we’re expected to react to everything, to understand everything, to take a stance on everything. And yet — no one seems to have a foundation strong enough to stand on when things fall apart. In exile, that absence of ground becomes especially sharp.

I live in Tbilisi — a city that welcomed me in one of the hardest moments of my life. And I’m grateful to it: for the air I can breathe, for the space where it’s okay to be confused, for the city noise that somehow still allows for silence. This place doesn’t demand explanations right away. It lets you simply exist. But even here — it’s not always easy.

On the walls, there are words:
“Good Russian — Dead Russian.”

And you don’t know whether you should feel guilty for speaking your native language.
You don’t know how to introduce yourself. Should you immediately say you left? That you’re against it? That you’re ashamed? Or just stay quiet? You don’t want to justify yourself — but staying silent hurts too. The body is the first to notice you’re no longer home. It behaves differently — tense, restrained, as if always waiting for a signal.

Its sleep patterns change.
Its pace of walking shifts.
Its trust in the space around it falters.

You don’t immediately understand why you feel drained just walking down the street.
Why you’re constantly alert.
Why your shoulders are always slightly raised.

In public, you find yourself avoiding phone calls with your family — because your native language now feels like a threat. You’re in a new place, but your gestures don’t fit. They don’t belong to the city. They carry no memory of how to be here. At first, you don’t know the rhythm of greetings. Where it’s okay to pause. How people cross the street. You have to relearn how to be a body. But this time — in a foreign language.

The city feels familiar — the streets, the way people move, the smell of smoke.
The same February wind.
The same park paths.
The same laughter.

But inside — everything’s off. As if the body doesn’t believe what it sees. You walk through the city, but you don’t enter it. It doesn’t reject you — but it doesn’t accept you either. You can’t relax. Not because it’s unsafe —  but because there’s no signal saying: you’re home.

There’s a tiny, constant tension vibrating in your chest.
Your shoulders are slightly raised.
Your breath is shallow.
Your movements feel watched — even when no one’s looking.

You eat the bread,  but it doesn’t smell the way you remember.
The water tastes different.
The morning begins with the same sun —
but the sun carries no memory.

A home is not geography.
It’s how a body lives in a space.

And right now — the body is simply enduring.

And what makes it even harder — is that people still see you through the same lens you tried to escape. I didn’t leave just because I couldn’t stay any longer. Not just to stay sane. I left because I didn’t want to be part of a regime that started a bloody war. Because I remain opposed — to killing, to repression, to the erosion of freedom and dignity. Because I didn’t want to stay silent and pretend everything was fine. I left because I didn’t want to be part of something evil — and because I wanted to keep the ability to be simply human.

Not a “good Russian.”
Not a convenient one.
Not one who fits the narrative.

Just myself. With doubt. With pain. With the feeling that I did what I believed was right.

But even now, in this new reality, it feels like I still have to prove something.

To explain.
To clarify.
To demonstrate my correctness.

To chase after trust — trust that slips away the moment someone sees my passport. I don’t want to prove my innocence.  Not because I don’t feel sorrow — but because sorrow shouldn’t need to be proven. It should be warm. Human. Without PR tone. It’s not about the right words.
It’s about honesty.
About pain.
About vulnerability.

But space for that kind of honesty is nearly gone. All that’s left — are positions.

I don’t know how to live “properly.”
I don’t know how to “speak appropriately,”
how to “behave correctly,”
how to be someone others can look at and say,
“Yes, he’s one of the good ones.”

I don’t want to be good. I want to be real. Even if that means being contradictory, tired, imperfect. Sometimes it feels like the only thing we can really do — is not to devalue each other’s experiences.

Not to build hierarchies of pain.
Not to demand perfection from one another.
Not to turn suffering into proof.

Just to be near.
Just to stay connected — even in silence.

That, for me, is the point of alignment. Not in knowing more, not in speaking louder, not in formulating things more perfectly — but in staying capable of not pushing people away. In keeping something within me that, despite all the confusion, instability, grief, and reflection — doesn’t want to disappear, doesn’t want to hide, doesn’t want to lash out.

It wants to stay.
To witness.
To listen.
To be there.

Sometimes it feels like we’ve all been pulled into a strange vortex of history — where the old mechanisms no longer work, and the new ones haven’t arrived yet. We hold on to memory, to language, to attempts at honesty — but we keep getting swept away. In the news, people speak in the language of fronts and sanctions. On social media — in the language of blame and filters.  In private conversations — more and more often, in silence. And in that atmosphere, any attempt to say “I’m here”feels like an act of resistance.

Resistance to what?

Maybe — to erasure.
Maybe — to indifference.
Maybe — to the habit of stepping back.

And I don’t want to step back anymore.
Even if my voice is quiet.
Even if it’s not perfectly shaped.
Even if I don’t always know what I want to say.

I just need to speak —
from this place,
from this life,
from this confusion
I no longer want to be ashamed of.

As an attempt not to cut myself off from the world, even if I can no longer be in tune with it. As a wish to stay connected — not as a media figure,  but as a living, vulnerable person
who still knows how to pay attention. And maybe that — is the beginning of something.

Not triumphant.
Not grand.

But honest.