Dear wanderer,

The last month has been truly terrible and tragic for many people, including people I know in person; hence it was a tough month for me. Physically, I’m safe as much as I can be, but psychologically, there’s something to reflect upon…

Early morning. Sun has just risen and sneaks through the blinds. I wake up, lethargic and dizzy, and go to the kitchen to empty a glass. The plan is to write – a morning routine, a short route into a state of mourning over unedited drafts. I sit at the table with a cup of coffee or tea or more water, open my laptop and immediately see my friends sharing news. My homeland country has invaded its neighbour. Thus my reality coagulates into a triplet of emotions and feelings, the power of which in a comparable volume I have never and never encountered. Shock. Terror. Shame.

See, I have trained myself to ignore the news, or rather I have trained myself to think I can ignore the news, or rather I thought news can ignore me and we both can mutually agree on ignoring without even temporarily igniting the interest or a glimpse of it towards each another. I’m not speaking about ignoring in a sense of not watching or not reading it – I rarely do that – but in a sense of living a normal life, not paying attention, not thinking when you stumble upon breaking news about yet another important and unprecedented distant event. I left my country three years ago and it took a big effort to abstract my mind from a countless flow of grim and depressive garbage still following me, and transfix to the idea I should care less about what is happening there on a low level. Important news will find me. I don’t have to check them myself. It’s not cheerful anyway. Nothing positive, nothing good – these things either don’t get enough attention or perhaps don’t have enough chance to occur. Perhaps, both. No politics either – there is no politics in Russia; such nebulous substance struggles to exist in authoritarian regimes. No politics in its democratic sense, only the normal Russian course of events (exceptions only prove the rule): people are being oppressed and repressed, nuts being tightened up, economy languishing; corruption, censorship, propaganda, proxy-wars. But now, a real war… A war, aggression, a direct invasion is something my consciousness cannot ignore. It devours all my attention, all my thoughts, all my emotions and feelings – everything. I start shaking. I can’t do anything. I can only message my friends, family, read the news and run myself to dismay on a continuous treadmill of doom and dread.

Now, people are dying and suffering, cities are being destroyed, the present and the future are collapsing, the world wrecking; all because of a criminal organisation called “government” ruled by the old bald bunker rat with imperial ambitions who decided he can do whatever he wants with no consequences.

We can’t believe it’s happening. We, both me and my wife, have breakfast and go outside. Fresh air. The weather is contrastingly sunny. A fine day to hang oneself, as my famous fictional namesake would say.

…

The following days are a melange of scrolling, pain, and more shame stirred with anger.

Scrolling because the course of actions is as unpredictable as the war was considered by the vast majority of competent analysts and experts (yes).

I unfollow all the news media, follow them back, delete Twitter, install it back.

News websites appear in the “Frequently used” panel.

I subscribe to a couple of newsletters, journalists, Telegram channels; check events live, refreshing the page. A doooomscroller Jedi I am now. Or a Sith.

Likes under tweets about dead people.

Patreon page gathering donations to buy tanks.

Elon Musk challenges Putin to a duel.

TikTok dances to stop the war.

Hashtags.

Many people think it’s their duty to make a prediction of what’s going to happen next. Their main concern is what will happen to the world’s economy, of course, yes, yes, yes, everything else is just grains of sand. The others try to guesstimate a chance of a nuclear war, a way more amusing experience than making a pretentious, naive, speculative, overconfident, to-the-point, undoubtedly important prediction about the course of actions.

The whole situation feels almost surreal.

Pain because of all countless stories, photos, videos, and live TikToks of destroyed cities and injured people, shootings, shoutings, explosions. Pain because I have friends from and in