Hi ✌🏽

Warsaw is so unbearably hot right now that my cats and I are surviving purely out of stubbornness.

Yesterday Shishka had surgery on her tooth. I was terrified, but everything went well. Today she’s already acting like herself again. A week of medication and liquid food is ahead of us. The timing couldn’t have been worse with this weather, but knowing she won’t have to live with that pain anymore makes everything else feel secondary.

The surgery, tests, and medication came to about $250. Right now, every unexpected expense echoes a little louder than it normally would.

By July 16, I still need to save another $700 for my upper braces. So my days have become wonderfully repetitive: paintings, reels, posts, and then back to paintings again. Recently I also created content for a brand that never paid me. It’s strange how the smallest disappointments are often the ones that disturb your balance the most.

And my reels have almost stopped getting views. It’s funny how quickly the human mind turns algorithms into philosophy. A few numbers go down, and suddenly you start wondering whether life itself is trying to tell you something

The truth is, numbers never speak.

We’re the ones desperately trying to hear a message in them.

Maybe one of the most dangerous habits is searching for meaning in outcomes instead of in the act of moving forward. Do that for long enough, and sooner or later you begin measuring your own worth by things that were never capable of defining it.

Yesterday we had the sixth mееting of the book club that I organize. Sometimes it still amazes me that people choose to spend an evening simply reading, thinking, and talking together. In a world obsessed with speed, attention has become one of the rarest forms of generosity.

This time we discussed The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

When I first read it, I thought it was only a novel about depression because I recognized so much of myself in Esther’s thoughts.

But after our discussion, I realized it is just as much about a woman’s place in society. About what happens when the life you’ve been taught to want no longer feels like your own. When the old answers stop making sense, but you haven’t found your own yet. I think that space between certainty and identity is where anxiety quietly begins to grow.

My own experience unfolded in a similar way. It wasn’t one dramatic event that broke me. It was an endless chain of questions. Who am I? Why am I choosing this life? Which desires are actually mine, and which ones have simply been handed to me? Questions like these rarely destroy you all at once. They do it slowly, almost invisibly.

To me, that’s what makes depression so frightening. Not only the pain itself, but the way it slowly erodes your trust in your own mind. One day you realize you’ve stopped believing not only in the future, but in your own perception of reality.

That’s why I think this book is still profoundly relevant. It’s about depression, yes. It’s about the position of women in society, certainly. But more than anything, it’s about the universal struggle to become yourself after discovering that someone else has been writing your story all along.

If you decide to read it, I’d actually recommend starting with Sylvia Plath’s biography. She was a poet, and The Bell Jar was the only novel she ever wrote. Knowing her life changes the way you read every page.

The older I get, the less I trust people who have answers to everything. And the more I trust those who are willing to keep asking questions, even when they know some of them may never be answered.