by Mariya Mykhaylova, LCSW

REFLECTIONS OF A UKRAINIAN IMMIGRANT

My therapist says I should write. She is probably right. A week into the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin, I try to make sense of how to carry on with my life in the United States while my family members back in Odesa brace for terror and parts of my motherland become increasingly unrecognizable. 

I immigrated as a child, old enough to have many memories and feel deeply affected, and young enough to lose my accent and pass for a non-immigrant, White American much of the time. I have lost count of the number of times that someone asks me where I am from, I tell them my story, and they respond by telling me that I am American. Privilege and erasure — two sides of the same coin. 

Kyeyoung Park, a sociocultural anthropologist at UCLA, coined the term 1.5 generation to describe Korean Americans who immigrated as children and were not quite first- or second-generation. This concept captures something vital about the in-betweenness of straddling multiple cultures while fully belonging in neither. 

As a US citizen and an English and Russian bilingual (though I am shoring up my Ukrainian day-by-day now with my nightly news consumption), making sense of my multicultural identity is not a new endeavor for me. The task of processing a collective trauma while immersed in a collective that does not have the same relationship to the events, however, poses an uncharted challenge. 

A therapist myself, I find my work to be one of the few things that successfully grounds and distracts me. In 50-minute increments, I drop into the internal worlds of others and welcome the respite, unperturbed if the hour goes by with no mention of the war. 

Otherwise, I am preoccupied with the events. I experience patriotism for what feels like the first time. The war feels like the only thing that matters. While I can hold in complexity that most Americans are not engaging with this experience in the same way, a part of me feels dumbfounded that life is just going on for those around me. I also feel acutely aware that I am here and I am not in danger. In many ways, I am not so different from them — these Americans whose lives are carrying on. I feel lost, somewhere in between. A familiar place. A new place. The feelings shift, coming and going in waves. I think about grief. 

Looking out the window of my San Francisco apartment on Sunday, I see the Salesforce Tower in the distance, lit up in blue and yellow in support of Ukraine. I smile briefly, appreciating the gesture of solidarity. The next day, the tower is back to its normal state. This seemingly insignificant detail feels like a metaphor for what is next and what I am afraid of — that “standing with Ukraine” ends with virtue signaling, and fades into the background of collective consciousness. In some ways, this feels inevitable. It is very human to protect ourselves from anxiety and discomfort through forms of avoidance and dissociation. I understand it and I have engaged in it. In this instance, those defenses feel like a luxury I cannot access. 

Resilience in this case seems to be about weathering the dissonance between my experience and the experience of those around me, and finding the middle path between honoring and having self-compassion for my reality and making room for the subjective realities of others without judgment. While this is easier to say than to do, I hope it can be a framework that provides me with some structure, an intention I can come back to, again and again. 

Слава Україні! Героям слава!