After listening to an amazing TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about the danger of a single story, I started thinking about my story and of course, as it has been happening for the past year, I'm reflecting back on what events at home mean to me as a person and as a Ukrainian through the language debate.
Writing this piece in English is most comfortable to me after using it for the past four years to express my thoughts as an undergraduate student at DePauw.
When I am thinking of writing my reflections in Russian, I just get too emotional. Not because I hate Russian. It’s the opposite - I have been using this language since my childhood for most of my daily communication because people in my hometown mostly speak Russian. It’s the language I am most comfortable speaking. When I speak my feelings through Russian, I feel them the most. Expressing myself in English helps me to distance myself from emotions and use logic over feelings. I feel like I need that distance to make sense of what have happened in the past and explain part of what is going on in Ukraine through a lense of a Ukrainian person, not a Western media outlet journalist.
