Preface

I want to tell my story.

At times it is tragic, at times comical, but I believe it has a happy ending.

I am thirty-six and my husband has died. For all fifteen years of our marriage, I feared this would happen. He was the centre of my life for so many years that only after losing him did I bitterly realise: I never truly wanted to find myself. I dreamed of living my life until old age just as I had lived it - as the wife of someone who draws all eyes to himself. I wanted to avoid doing anything grand and important, to remain unnoticed, bright, and brave, so as not to fall into the beams of attention, discussion, and inevitable judgement.

We loved each other. We rarely argued, made up quickly, communicated without words, shared all joys and sorrows equally, laughed a lot, travelled, and were a great team.

God loves me very much. He has caused me pain, but He has given me a chance to awaken. There is no one else to hide behind, I cannot sit in a corner with a book and quietly slip away from this party.

I have a daughter. She is three, she is terribly funny, and I do not want to think about what would have happened to me if she were not here. She is my salvation, but perhaps sooner or later, instead of my husband, I would have begun to hide behind her and my lonely motherhood. Fortunately, on that seemingly unremarkable penultimate day of summer, I happened to enter the Apeiron chats.

Like many others, I came to the Apeiron school after the war began. But first, Alexey Arestovich led me to God. I remember that summer day in 2022 well: I was binge-watching all his videos that could be found publicly, and in one of them, he was discussing a debate about universals. The information about who the Realists are turned my worldview upside down. But then Alexey, illustrating the concept of "nothingness", pointed to a marker in his hand and said:

— To say that something does not exist, one must point a finger at that something. An unexisting God cannot be conceived.

Click. There was one world around me and within me, and it became entirely different.

Later it changed again and again; psychological death - in some sense, the routine of an Apeironite. But all that began to happen to me after I responded in one of the Apeiron chats to an invitation to participate in Ignatian spiritual practices shows that the previous rebirths were merely a warm-up.

Initially, the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola were for me a hope to untangle my confused inner life, to learn to focus on a chosen subject, and to calm my eternal anxiety, even just a little. I could not know that these practices would gift me a friendship I had not dared to dream of, a completely new me, personal relationships with God, and the discovery of the very meaning of my life.

I decided to keep this blog a month into my practice. I am restoring my meditations from notes in my notebook and correspondences. I want to gather them into one coherent narrative, and this is necessary primarily for myself. I want to capture all that has so profoundly and irreversibly changed my life.

I want to tell my story.