There are moments when the world becomes too loud — not with voices, but with something sharper that lives in the air, in the walls, in the space between breaths. I remember learning how to disappear into small places. Under a bed, where the floor is close, and the body understands something the mind cannot name yet. Fear does not ask for permission. It arrives, and everything inside you rearranges itself around it. And still — even there, something remains untouched. Something quiet. Something watching.

I remember the sound of rockets. I remember the exact feeling of my body freezing before my thoughts could form. The first days were the hardest of all — when you don’t yet understand what is happening. It was a full-scale military invasion of my country.

I think I have always lived close to that place where chaos and beauty touch each other so gently that you almost don’t notice the moment they become the same thing. My life has been a series of inner collapses and quiet rebuilds. As a child, I did not know words for it. So I used my hands. I would sit for hours, surrounded by small pieces of plasticine, turning them into everything I could see — food, objects, faces, characters, fragments of a world I was trying to understand. There was never enough space to keep it all. But that never stopped me. Creation was not about keeping. It was about breathing. I made so much that there was nowhere left to put it. And it was almost funny how my mother tried to stop me.

  My mother was always there. Not in a perfect way — but in a real one. She gave me everything she could, even when “everything” was not much in material terms. Attention. Presence. A kind of quiet loyalty that doesn’t ask for recognition. She saw something in me before I knew how to see it myself, and she protected that space as much as she could. Some of the best years of my life exist inside the time we shared. Not because everything was easy, but because it was real — and because there was love, even when it didn’t always look like it.

  Now, everything around me is different — but something in me continues the same movement. Only the shapes have become softer. Flowers. Not the idea of flowers — but their quiet precision. The way they hold form without effort. I don’t feel like I create them. I feel like I listen. I am drawn to flowers because they are already complete. I don’t need to invent beauty — I only need to recognize it.

  Silence became my language. Not as an escape — but as a place where I can finally arrive. I need it the way the body needs water. Not occasionally. Constantly. I learned how to build it around me, even where it didn’t naturally exist — between people, between walls, inside shared spaces. I learned how to ask for less noise and more presence. How to stay close to someone without filling the space between us with words.

  There is something deeply calming in simple, repetitive movements. Water touching plants. Rain. Hands moving slowly. I wash the dishes after dinner with someone I love. There is love in my life. The quiet rhythm of a surface becoming clean again, reflecting light. It became a ritual. When the outside is ordered, the inside softens.

  I have known instability. Not the kind that is visible to everyone, but the kind that lives quietly inside the body. The kind that makes you disappear even when you are still here. There was a moment when everything I was building slipped through my hands. Not with noise. Just… gone. At one point, I lost my shop because I could not hold myself together. And yet — I am still here. Not the same. But present.

  I have been supported by people who did not have to help me, and yet they did. My dear friends helped me stay afloat. There were hands, far away across the ocean, that reached toward me when I needed something real. Support that had weight. Care that had form. It taught me something important: distance does not erase connection.

  I am not always moving forward in visible ways. Sometimes I lie still for days. But even then, there is a quiet direction inside me. Not urgent. Not demanding. Just… present. Even in stillness, I do not feel completely lost.     There is always a small thread I can return to.

If I had to say what my life is about, I think it would sound like this: I am learning how to remain soft in a world that often sharpens everything. I am learning how to create space where there is none. And I am learning that freedom is not always outside — sometimes it is something you build very carefully inside yourself. Freedom, for me, is not a place. It is a state I return to again and again.

If you are here, reading this, maybe — for a moment — you felt something quiet open inside. Something familiar. Something that does not need a name. We don’t have to be close to recognize each other. Sometimes it is enough to exist in the same kind of silence. I believe we can feel each other without words, even at a distance.