To tumbleweed – having no habit of planning ahead; first, it lifts the burden of being tied to a place, then hangs a new one: uncertainty.
​
The Worrying Capacity – fretting only about what fits in your Bag of Worries [torbinka turbot] is a privilege. From now on, I am obliged to worry for everyone, for those I don’t know, to empathize with entire communities, all while reflecting on the moral legitimacy of my own safety.
​​
Mom’s Tongue Traitor – a unique experience of being raised by a hostile language, choosing to abandon your "mother tongue" upon realizing it’s not your mom’s, but the colonizer’s.
​
Ongoing Colonialism – colonial practices irl. Your language being presented as someone else’s dialect, and it’s no accident that books from a neighboring country flood the market, making up to 80% of the shelves. What a bizarre feeling, years later, to see your publishing market thriving even as rockets literally hit the print houses.
​
But why the suggested postcolonial strategy (hi, Timothy Snyder) of appropriating the colonizer’s language, “turning it into a resource for the colonized” ( following the Moroccan model) does not work in Ukrainian context? Well, the very framing of the question is problematic, since the empire and its expansionist agenda are still here. Russian language in Ukraine is not a postcolonial inheritance, but an ongoing project of destruction and denial of an entire nation’s existence. Russian can now only be
considered as claim. “Bilingualism” here becomes both a legacy of three centuries of russification and a justification for invasion. Decolonial practices in the era of postcolonialism signify deep reflection, whereas in the time of ongoing colonialism they become a form of resistance.
​
Memoscapes / Affective Collecting – saving mundane keepsakes for their emotional or personal significance.
​
Politics of forgetting – [a universal colonial practice involving deliberate strategies to suppress a group’s cultural memory and replace it with a dominant narrative and identity.]
E.g., Lesya Ukrainka—a prominent Ukrainian writer who tackled philosophical, feminist, and patriotic themes, dressed boldly, and resisted oppression and Russification—stuck with me from school as the one who had tuberculosis and died young.
​
Internalized Colonialism – [a condition in which a formerly colonized population consciously or unconsciously adopts, reproduces, or upholds the structures, norms, values, and hierarchies imposed by the colonizer, even after formal colonial rule has ended.]
​
Born in the east of an independent Ukraine at the turn of the century, thinking history was behind me, I first heard a peer speaking Ukrainian around the age of nine [Ukrainian is one of the earliest East Slavic languages with a rich cultural heritage. Its community has long been part of the European intellectual milieu, continuing traditions of modernism, avant‑garde, and beyond. However, it was systematically marginalized and forbidden during the Russian Empire, later the Soviet period, and up to the present.]. Children like me, carefully trained by colonial practices, would mock such peers, calling them “selyuky” [country bumpkin]—a term loaded with connotations of provincialism and backwardness—resulting in these children switching to Russian in the schoolyard.
​
“Slavic”, “Eastern European” – a label-attribute of cultural hegemony (case in point: the TikTok trend Slavic girl core), a popular way of tagging something in order to appear more relatable to a wider audience (voluntarily adopted not only by Russians), playing into stereotyping and the collapse of diversity into a single, conveniently Russian-shaped aesthetic. But flattery is not the most dangerous mechanism: when Russia labels something as “Slavic,” it becomes a tool to later claim everything “Slavic” as Russian. The word is now far from neutral and carries negative connotations, having become an instrument of manipulation. Its legitimate use is valid in far fewer situations than it is actually employed.
​
A matryoshka with Putin’s face in an “Osteuropäische” food stall. Here, you can grab Polish pierogi, Ukrainian varenyky, and Crimean Tatar chebureki; supposedly appreciating the culture. I didn’t come across a single "West European" restaurant on my way home — and not a hint of anything "Southern".
​
Interpassivity – [by Slavoj Žižek] refers to the phenomenon in which a subject delegates belief, enjoyment, or other forms of experience to an external “Other.”
Lately, information is easier to store than to process. My bookshelf expands. The intensification of this delegation of knowledge noticeably correlates with fatigue and the tendency to remain, whenever possible, in the comfort zone.
​
Language learning fatigue – I’ve jotted down “Die Plaque” twice in my dictionary today. Losing focus in German classes more often. It’s been six months since I started noting translations in a neutral form, steering clear of default masculine endings. Arming yourself with consistency is key when confronting frustration at a plateau in learning.
​
Exercising grief – facing sadness, even in small bites, or it will catch up and swallow you whole.