The worst (but still inspiring) summer of my life

I want to share four things that inspired me during this otherwise uninspiring time

I just came back to Kyiv. I was away for about a week. I spent two days in Lviv, five in Lublin, and two more days back in Lviv. This was the only trip I did this summer. I’ll stay in Kyiv till the end of summer and hope I won’t need to go anywhere else again.

It wasn’t even a trip to rest. I went to Lublin alone to get a new visa at the Ukrainian consulate. I was worried I’d face new barriers, but the bureaucratic wall finally crumbled. The consul turned out to be a proper human being. He stayed overtime to give me the visa. He didn’t have to do it. He did anyway. Unbelievable.

Now I’ll have to apply for a residency permit, once again. I was trying to extend my last extension for months and still got rejected in the end. This time it has to work out but, still, I’ll spend August finishing what I’d started in April.

With all of that in my mind, the summer of 2023 is officially the worst out of the 27 summers I have had so far.

I’ll remember this summer as one that was taken away from me by Russian terrorists, air raid alerts, Iranian drones, missiles, fears of nuclear disaster, fears of losing a job, financial debt, know-nothing clerks, greedy and sloppy lawyers, hair loss, unsatisfactory bowel movements, tiredness, anxiety, depression and other unfortunate nuisances.