Who am I? Well, that’s a question I’ve been trying to figure out for years, and I’m starting to think the answer is just ‘a person with a lot of unanswered LinkedIn requests.’ But in all seriousness, the question of identity is one that has puzzled philosophers, psychologists, and teenagers for centuries. And yet, despite all the navel-gazing and self-reflection, I’m still not entirely sure who I am. So, in this post, I’ll attempt to introduce myself, and maybe – just maybe – discover a thing or two about myself in the process.
Born in the complex region, my first birthday gift was a book. Books defined major turning points of my life. I was terrified reading Escape From Freedom by Fromm - it was awe-inspiring and terrifying to see the patterns from the book manifest in the real world. It was the tipping point at which I realised I want to see more of the world. I moved to Egypt where I made a living in a watersport center.
The watersport center in Egypt was a far cry from the cold, snowy winters of Russia, and it was there that I discovered a new sense of freedom and adventure. I spent my days teaching how to windsurf and my nights exploring human connection, diverse cultures and different perspectives on the same exact problems all human beings face. It was a time of adventure for me, as lived in bliss skimming the cream of existence - having more work than I could handle and traveling was easy. Influenced by fellow spiritual seekers I dove into Hatha Yoga tradition, and I began to realize the world isn’t as it seems: the world is made of stories of the past we tell ourselves in the present, but not all the stories are made equal. This is how I encountered the problem of demarcation and the falsifiability theory by Karl Popper.
Soon the world’s trouble started to manifest. First, a series of social upheavals destabilized the country and then in 2014 with a terrorist attack on a Russian airplane the country lost all of its tourism for a few years and I had to continue my journey and I discovered Vietnam.
This helped me linger for a while longer, only in 2019 I felt a crisis: a series of failed attempts at relationships lead me to look inward and reexamine myself. This lead to a series of discoveries that marked not only a major shift in my life, but the one that coincided with a great change in the world - the COVID pandemic. First I discovered and took YouTube courses on Jungian Psychology from University of Toronto. This helped me shed a few beliefs that were useless and outright harmful (and pick up maybe more harmful ones). The takeaway from the course was a healthy dose the world-savior complex, which gave my life meaning and purpose on one hand but left me alienated from my parents, friends and colleagues - most living unexamined lives, or “doing God’s work to earn a living” as the purpose of their lives. In time I found ways to connect, and reconnecting with my parents is the most difficult part of healing: they still live as if in the past, although hopefully we learned to live and let live.
Having the sense of responsibility and deeper understanding of the chaos-dragon ever chasing us gave me motivation for self-improvement. The recommended reading for the course included Chaos by James Gleick, which marked a wondrous shift in my understanding of computer science: I can use computers to predict the future! And I used to think programming was boring. I took online courses, got certified and my last season in Vietnam I turned down the offer to manage a kite-surfing center in favor of staying freelance and going back to school! My partner kindly didn’t hold a grudge against my decision and introduced me to one of the kiteboarding students: “I am from France, I got PhD and now I teach Deep Learning in Singapore” - this was before anyone outside academia and game developers heard of AI. So I started looking into it with fascination. The sense of overwhelming synchronicity came when at the end of the season I came back to my homeland, feeling uncertain as to where my road leads me, only to receive the notice for self-isolation from the authorities. Before the notice expired, global lockdown hit everyone and I was stranded in my parents basement with all the time in the world to grow skills and knowledge.
These changes, although invisible each and every moment, accumulated and addressed the character development issues that lead me to this road in the first place. In 2021 I met a wonderful woman and we fell in love. This wasn’t meant to last: as we approached the relationship crisis of fading infatuation and getting to know each other for real, a series of personal and global crises shook us beyond what we could bear. In February 2022, as the tragic events unfolded, we were living in a tiny apartment in Moscow - me, looking for a job, and my fiancee, who confided in me she suffered a failed suicide attempt not long ago. The events shook our mental health, we separated.
Six months after we, mobilization was ordered - mandatory military service for males. I could not stand the thought of having to fight in the killing, being part Ukrainian myself and having spent my childhood summers almost exactly on the border I am still confused and lost as to how this awful state of the world came to be in. I gathered my belongings and found myself in Minsk(Belarus), then Turkie and then Egypt.
Believe it or not, breaking up had actually some positive influence on myself. Having lost the connection that kept me social I felt alienated, lonely and desperate. Desperation pushed me out of the comfort zone, and forced me to seek community online marking solidification of the technologist identity. Staying socially isolated took a significant toll on my mental health, but connection to a global community of lifelong learners and innovators helped me get through. I found footing and became a content creator, conflict resolution practitioner, developer advocate and a member of several non-profit organisations for Open Source and Social Impact.
Emergent from this narrative are some words I can use to describe myself. I am a nomad: I am confident I spent less time in my birthplace than majority of people. I am a metamagician, although I am not sure what exactly does it mean, maybe something like a slop diver. I want to call myself a spiritual person, so I practice spirituality as a member of the viridan-collective.