There are days that are burnt into our memory forever. As life goes by and yields a new perspective, we may come to think of the events they brought as good or bad, but their significance never fades.

Most people I know feel like their birthday is the biggest holiday in their life. They celebrate it with wholehearted joy, and that makes total sense, and there’s nothing wrong with that. For me, though, it’s different. My biggest holiday in life is not the day when I was born.

It's the day when, for the first time in my life, I found the sense of true belonging.

This day is today, November 15th. Today is exactly six years after my first trip to Spain. The trip that turned my life upside down and divided my story into before and after. The trip that, after years of silencing and numbing my pain and running away from my truth, inspired my spiritual awakening and fueled my biggest creative endeavor. The trip that made me reclaim the authorship of my journey, no matter how troubled and muddy the waters it was in were at the moment. The trip that laid bare the story of who I was, the truth of my purpose, the truth of what kind of difference I had the ability to make and for whom, and the truth of what my life deserved to be. But above all, that trip brought me to the country which, despite me not having been born and grown up there, I wholeheartedly believe to be my homeland – because only there, for the first time in my 25 years of life, I discovered what true belonging feels like.

What is true belonging? It's the feeling you have in a situation, place, or relationship that doesn’t require you to change who you are so you could fit in and survive – but demands that you be who you are so you would grow and thrive.

I didn’t know that definition at the moment. Nor was I self-aware and emotionally literate enough to wrap any words around this overwhelming, previously unexplored feeling that increasingly swept over me from the first minute after the plane landed in the airport of Barcelona. But I felt it with my whole heart, and I instinctively surrendered to it during my numbered days in the city – without needing an instant, comprehensive intellectual analysis of it in order to believe in its legitimacy. After all, as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio said, we humans are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think. Our hearts are more agile than our minds, and our minds often need time to catch up.

Did it look crazy at first sight? For a guy who had been born and grown up in Russia who now came to Spain as a foreign visitor, just for five days, on the occasion of attending a scientific meeting – to realize that this country was his true home?

At first sight – yes. It seemed completely, self-indulgently bananas. Especially to a guy raised in the culture of machismo and emotional ignorance. A guy who, just like so many other guys, had for years sucked it up, pushed through, manned up and soldiered on, trivializing and dismissing his feelings instead of exploring and honoring them.

But that feeling was just too powerful to ignore. It felt like a mighty hand of the power greater than me, wiser than me, was guiding me towards the truth I needed to see.

Here’s the thing, folks. True belonging, as it turns out, is not what everybody gets since day one. Some of us are born into families we don’t belong. Some of us are born in the countries we don’t belong. Some of us are raised in the cultures we don’t belong. Some of us are pushed by circumstances into occupations we don’t belong. See, it’s similar to how transgender people are born into bodies in which they don’t belong – and they can live struggling for years, without clear awareness about the absence of belonging in their lives. Why? Because our society values fitting in above true belonging. Then, this moment comes when a transgender person realizes who they truly are. And just like for them transitioning into their real gender is a costly, painful, and long process, so is it for anybody who has to move over to a different country, a different culture, or different occupation in pursuit of true belonging. And, just like with transgender people, it’s still warranted and worth it anyway. And, the majority of people – those who got true belonging by birth or through unearned privilege and therefore take it for granted – won’t make an attempt to understand your experience and will judge you instead.

Once you find true belonging, your life can never be the same.

I felt this joy instantly, the moment the landing bump in my seat awakened me from the nap I’d been taking on the flight. I opened my eyes, and as I looked outside the window, I wondered if I was still sleeping and it was all but a dream in front of me. The cloudless blue sky, the blindingly bright sun, the lush greenery of trees, people on the airfield wearing light jackets – it never occurred to me that a November could look like that. Just four hours and two thousand miles behind, I left the sleety, snowy, dark Moscow with its impermeably gray skies, choking on morning traffic jams – the city that, as I now realized with painful clarity, had never felt like home to me.

I felt this joy instantly, the moment I drew the first ounce of Spanish air into my lungs and sensed the thick, salty scent of the Mediterranean. I’d been in love with the sea since I remembered myself. Now, its presence could be felt everywhere. It never occurred to me that there could be a place where you could literally enjoy every breath – and where every breath would inspire your zest for life in a way you had never thought possible. Because, this place essentially shows you that life can actually be life, not just survival.

I felt this joy instantly, the first minute I walked into the terminal and started hearing the sounds of Spanish, my beloved language, all around me. For ten previous years, I had only spoken that language to myself, as I studied it myself, without ever taking a class because I could never afford one. The language that, unlike other foreign languages, entered my mind with incredible smoothness and ease, as if I was recalling something buried deeply within me, rather than learning something new.

Perdonadle al desterrado
ese dulce frenesí:
vuelvo a mi mundo adorado,
y yo estoy enamorado
de la tierra en que nací.

(Spanish: "Forgive the exile
this sweet frenzy:
I return to my beloved world,
and I'm in love with the land
where I was born.")

These lines by Puerto Rican poet José Gautier Benítez, describing his comeback to his home island, perfectly capture this overwhelming feeling of unadulterated joy I felt at the moment. Superficially, it all felt so crazy and delusional. I hadn’t been born in Spain. Spanish wasn’t my mother tongue. It was the first time in my twenty-five years that my foot ever stepped on this land. I came here with a tourist visa, which allowed me the maximum stay of one month. In fact, I had a return ticket and was supposed to fly back to Moscow in just five days.

But here’s the thing about truth: once you see it, you cannot un-see it. Once you find true belonging, your life can never be the same. And, mind you, dear reader, our wild hearts are so much wiser than our skeptical, armored-up, judgmental minds, scarred by the culture of scarcity and cynicism.

It’s only two years and two episodes of terminal clinical depression later that I got crystal clear on what informed my sense of true belonging in Barcelona. It wasn’t the warm climate, or the delicious Mediterranean food, or scenic natural landscapes, or the scent of the sea, or even the language that sounded like music to my ears – although all those things were beautiful.

Instead, it was the seemingly unbelievable fact that over there, in the country and the culture that were formally foreign to me, I could afford to just be myself, without the pressure to constantly fit in. Strange as it sounds, I’d never been able to afford that in Russia, the country where I had lived my entire life.

For example, I could walk down the street with a slight smile on my face, just like the majority of people did – and no one would look at me with judgment or ridicule. I could ask strangers for directions, just like they asked me – even though almost everyone already had Google Maps in their phones – and not fear getting brushed off or sworn at in response. I could strike up chats with people on bus stops, just like they did with me, probably because my features allowed me to easily pass for a Spaniard – and no one looked down on me because of my accent. I could feel safe riding down the avenues on a rented bike – because car drivers wouldn’t honk at cyclists and squeeze them from their lanes.

In other words, it was the social culture in Spain, so strikingly different from Russia, that gave me the sense of true belonging. I could afford to put down my armor and walk through life with a soft front, reaping all the benefits inherent in vulnerability and authenticity. In Russia, they had been a threat to my survival. My 25 years of life had shown me this truth in so many contexts. Exposing your vulnerability to most people, you would get screwed over, taken advantage of, ridiculed, judged, harassed, laid off, or, if you’re political enough, even imprisoned. In Russia, you had to fit in with the existing systems – no matter how corrupt, mismanaged, oppressive, and ineffective they were. There were big historic and economic reasons to this state of affairs, but here it was and so it would remain in the foreseeable future. And in it, I just didn’t belong.

Before coming to Spain, I’d for years believed that my place of belonging only existed in my imagination. Without traveling much and having my life horizons effectively confined to Moscow, with my dead-end, hand-to-mouth jobs in a highly corrupt industry, tanking within the larger economy of the post-Soviet Russia that offered no better employment opportunities, I had no awareness that things could be different – not in my imagination, not in a Utopian world, not on Mars, but on our imperfect Earth, just two thousand miles to the southwest. And here it was, Spain. The tangible, irrefutable evidence that my place of belonging, freedom, and opportunity existed.

You know, such is a life-changing realization. The one that prompts a bigger process of self-exploration and puts back together your self-esteem, no matter for how long it had been crushed by the constant pressure to fit in, exerted through multiple systems of oppression. Coming to my home country for mere five days, even with a foreign passport, allowed me to come back to the deepest core of my truth – what my true potential was and what kind of difference I needed to make in the world. It began with the idea of what later became my first book. And boy, didn’t it end there.

Here’s the hard truth, though: finding and experiencing true belonging doesn’t automatically grant you access to the place, relationship, or profession that you belong. It just opens your eyes and shows you the direction in which to go in life. Personally, professionally, spiritually – you name it. But it doesn’t necessarily equip you with the resources to go on that journey. It doesn’t necessarily align the circumstances for a fast and easy transition. Just like identifying a problem doesn’t always amount to solving it, getting aware of a need, existential as it may be, doesn’t always mean finding a way to fulfill it.

After five days spent in my place of true belonging, I had to board the plane and fly back to the country where I’d spent a lifetime of unbelonging. My heart was ablaze with the idea of the story – a story of love triumphing over fear and the power of dreams defeating systems of oppression. Now that the power of my creativity had been unleashed by the sense of true belonging that my hometown had given me, the plot of Souls of Silence was growing in my creative mind like an embryo, after so many years of my own silence. But boarding the plane, I had this sinking feeling in my heart:

—No te digo 'Adiós', Barcelona. Te digo, 'Hasta luego'.

(Spanish: "I'm not saying 'Goodbye' to you, Barcelona.
I'm saying, 'See you later'.")

I whispered this as the plane took off and dove into the midnight sky. I needed it to be true. It had to be true.

But I wasn’t sure it would work out. Too many odds were against me and my true belonging. Most of my university mates, who just like me couldn’t find decent employment in our corrupt industry in Russia, moved over to Europe or the U.S. with the financial support of their families. I knew I didn't have the same privilege. In fact, my family reacted to a mere mention of the possibility of my emigration with judgment, shaming, and ridicule. (We don’t choose the families we’re born into, you see.) My own savings were too scarce to fund the emigration enterprise, to get my diploma legally recognized in Spain, and to pay for the prep courses I needed to get into medical residency. With the amount of economic opportunity I had in Russia, there was no way I could ever earn that budget on my own.

Who cared about my true belonging and the suffering inevitable in its absence?

Who the fuck cared?

Well, no one but myself. And, obviously, God, who had somehow aligned many unlikely circumstances for me to go on that trip and blessed me with the idea of the book. Obviously, not just for the fun of it. Because, in my disadvantaged circumstances, this book was the only way to get a breakthrough in my life, earn the opportunity to move away from Russia, and start over in a better place.

I do believe that creative ideas have a divine origin. I didn’t have any previous experience in creative writing, never mind in a foreign language. But in January and February 2013, as I sat down to work on the book, chapters of elegant English prose just started flowing onto the keyboard through my fingers as the plot unfolded in my mind with increasing clarity. This story wasn’t coming from me. It was being brought to life through me.

Could this story make a difference for other people? No doubt. It addressed social issues that were globally relevant – from homophobia to mental health stigma to corruption to medical malpractice. Could it eventually make a difference in my individual life? Probably. But that outcome was far from guaranteed, and anyway it was too far off to think about.

Meanwhile, the circumstances of my life in Russia were immediate in their toxicity. Two incidents in the beginning of February – my first-hand experience with corruption in Russian police costing me a shitton of money and draining the scarce savings I’d been scrambling to make, and, almost immediately after, the abuse of power by the supervisor at my academic clinic and the system providing cover for it – these incidents traumatized me in a way that triggered my first clinical depression attack.

Why? Actually, those incidents weren’t significant in the big scheme of things. After 25 years of life in Russia, I’d been very familiar with how corrupt state authorities, such as police and courts, were. After three years of working as a physician, I’d been fully aware of the semi-slavery organizational culture not just at that clinic, but in the industry as a whole. If anything, these experiences weren’t surprising. Why then did they damage me emotionally so much?

Because now I had already seen what life and work looked like in Spain. Previously, I’d been effectively brainwashed into the belief that corruption, abuse of power, medical malpractice, social injustice, economic struggle, and many other things comprising Russian reality were necessary and inevitable – because, as senior people said, “it’s always been that way”. There'd been no source of critical awareness in my life. And now, in Spain, I’d gotten a new reference point. Now I’d seen with my own eyes how things could be different. How, to be honest, they could be normal. And this new, crushing pain came from me being unable to get to where things were normal. To where opportunity existed. To where a life of dignitity and freedom was possible

And here I was, trapped in a dead-end job, with the only option to change it for another dead-end job in the same tanking industry. Just like I was trapped in this corrupt country with its fucked-up economy. Just like I was trapped in traffic jams for four hours every day on my commute. A better life did exist. Not just in my dreams, not on Mars, not in a Utopian future – but two thousand miles to the South-West, in the place where my true home was. And that place was outside of my reach. In the place where I was now, living under oppression and amidst corruption was inevitable.

At the moment, I was so hell-bent on continuing to write the book that I didn’t take the time to reflect on how these incidents affected me emotionally. My focus was on productivity. At that age, I still didn’t have the tools to understand what emotions had been triggered for me and work through them.

Instead, I followed the my machist conditioning: suck it up, push it through, soldier on. Feelings aren’t for men. These incidents, after all, weren’t so important in the big scheme of things.

Oh, the irony of a man writing a story about love and belonging – and denying himself the right to feel the pain of their absence in his own life.

What I didn’t know is that with creativity, this “Man up!” kind of BS doesn’t work. What I didn’t know is that in the midst of any big creative process, we’re super vulnerable – and it’s a prerequisite for being creatively productive. What I didn’t realize is that I’d lived with the baggage of multiple traumas layered one over another for more than a decade – and, as any real man, I denied myself their reality.

I’d lived too long in denial of my story, running away from it instead of owning it. So now came the time for it to fully own me. Maybe, just maybe, it happened so I could finally face it and take my ownership back. Because only after owning my story could I write a different ending to it.

And my own story needed my authorship as desperately as my unfinished novel did.

Physical symptoms of clinical depression took time to develop. It wasn’t until the beginning of March 2013 that I realized I was sick, in a way I’d never been before. My appetite and libido disappeared completely. I could no longer feel joy from anything. Anything. Even from writing music and learning Spanish – two things that had infallibly given me the biggest joy in my entire life. On the inside, I felt like a scorched, lifeless desert amidst the proverbial nuclear winter. Where once were brooks of running emotions and trees of growing dreams, now there was only dry, barren, cracked, poisoned soil. It was like a black hole opened inside of me sucking in every thought, every feeling, and every bit of my being. And at the bottom of that black hole was this notion: what a worthless, useless, unlovable and unbelonging person I was. Mountains of shame and scarcity that I’d been carrying for years, without even knowing it, now came crashing down on me.

Then again, I couldn’t articulate it that way at the moment. I lacked emotional literacy. If I’d been able to at least name my emotions, perhaps I would have better understood the nature of my condition and its psychogenic origins. I understood none of that.

But one thing I did notice first and foremost, way before the clinical presentation of major depression became obvious. My inspiration for the writing started to progressively fade, and so did my productivity. With every day, the amount of text I could write decreased, like water from a source drying up. Instead of creating pages of fluent narrative, I started struggling with finding the right words. Taking a break from writing for a few days didn’t help – it only got worse. Then, there was more shame about not being good enough of a writer and not strong enough of a man. Shame about being too big for my britches. Shame about daring greatly to start writing a novel in a foreign language, involving complicated social and political issues, without any education in creative writing and any degree in social science.

Who the hell did I think I was?

By mid-March, I had a complete writing block.

I had to finally acknowledge the truth: there was something wrong happening with my health, but I misunderstood the nature of what was happening. First, I thought it was some advanced cancer manifesting in my body – as an oncologist, I knew that my condition looked much like the symptoms of tumor intoxication. I took blood tests and MRI and CT scans, which all, unsurprisingly in hindsight, showed nothing. Then, when the diagnosis of major depression had become obvious, I thought it was bipolar disorder manifesting – i.e., there was a genetically predetermined biochemical failure in my brain. Well, what I didn’t know is that shame is the dominating emotion in most cases of depression, and in shame, we by definition believe that something is wrong within us – not outside of us, not with our life circumstances or our relationships. In clinical depression, shame is blown out of proportion so much that it hijacks our judgment and critical thinking completely. So I effectively deluded myself into this bipolar theory. Moreover, I deluded myself into believing that my feelings of belonging in Spain and my inspiration for the book were just the manic phase of bipolar, which now simply gave way to the depressive phase. This misconception was the price I paid for not owning my story and failing to see its context. It was the price I paid for my own ignorance about mental health.

The truth in my heart – about where I belonged and what I deserved – was now tied up by depression, coated in the slime of shame, and thrown into the most remote, darkest corner of my consciousness, with a gag put in its mouth. It was powerless, but it refused to be completely silent. Its voice still somehow reached my mind. It told me that the book hadn’t been a manic delusion. It told me it was vital to continue writing. To find a way to do so. If depression was the obstacle, to fight it at any cost.

In the end of March, I made the first attempt to do that. I had so much prejudice against psychoactive drugs. I had so much shame about seeing a psychiatrist. Instead, I decided to give my brain sort of a hard reset by coming back home. Back to Barcelona. Back to the place that ignited my inspiration and awakened my zest for life. Back to my place of true belonging.

It was low season, so plane tickets and hotel accommodation were cheap. Even despite my staggering finances, I could afford it. My visa was still valid. I took one week of leave from my dead-end job and flew back to Spain.

Instead of relief, my symptoms only got worse there. I could no longer sleep normally. At best I got three hours of sleep at the hotel, and those were full of nightmares. I woke up about 4 a.m. and couldn’t go back to sleep, instead losing myself in the whirlwind of shame. I hated myself for my dreams. I hated myself for my appearance. I hated myself for my poverty. I hated myself for my inability to continue writing the book. I hated myself for being unable to enjoy this beautiful city, the scent of the sea, and the sounds of my beloved language.

Then, I hated myself for hating myself.

I didn’t understand that this trip, instead of being a remedy, became a tantalizing torture for me. Yes, technically I traveled back to my place of true belonging. But I came here again as a foreign tourist, again just for a week, with a visa expiring in twenty days. I felt like a prisoner allowed to walk around in the free world, but handcuffed, escorted by a guard, and for a limited amount of time before being put back into jail. Except that what felt like jail to me – living in Russia – was a lifetime sentence I got for no fault of my own.

Coming back in close contact with the kind of life that I deserved, in the place where I belonged, only made me yet more painfully aware of how inaccessible it all was in my particular life situation. Unlike the kind of effect I’d naively hoped for, there was no hard reset to my brain and no bolus of hope of inspiration. As I roamed the streets of my beloved city, unable to enjoy its beauty and its glory, unable to feel joy and belonging, I only found myself immersing further into shame and despair. I found myself increasingly lost.

And then, all of a sudden, I found this.

By the gates of the evergreen Montjuïc park, stands another beautiful building – one of the hundreds of beautiful pieces of architecture in my city. It’s a former textile factory that these days has been converted into a contemporary art space sponsored by the major Catalan bank La Caixa. In fact, they sponsor a chain of such art galleries across the country, viewing it as an important part of the company’s social responsibility. You can see one in Madrid and Lleida, too, but the special thing about La Caixa space in Barcelona in those days was that the entrance was completely free. Aside from exhibition halls, there was a media library with free Wi-Fi, and a Mediterranean cuisine cafeteria located on a sunny, open terrace.

What could be a better place to go for a guy like me? A creative drowning in depression, running out of money and inspiration, struggling for the sense of true belonging?

Whether it was coincidence or Providence, but it was exactly that week that the space hosted an exhibition called Què pensar? Què desitjar? Què fer? (Catalan: What to think? What to wish for? What to do?) As I bumped into the signboard, I realized that those were the exact questions I struggled with at that point of my spiritual journey. With hindsight, that was the beginning of my spiritual awakening. And at the moment, it felt like God sent me a guiding hand as I was losing myself in the murky hole of mental illness.

I didn’t hesitate to walk into this exhibition immediately. Had I been in a healthy state, I would’ve first dropped by the cafeteria and grabbed a lunch, but now that my appetite had been erased along with other bodily functions I’d once taken for granted, it was only my mind that starved for food. And here it was. A tall, long wooden wall installed in the exhibition hall, with hundreds of tiny, inch-by-inch holes in it. In each hole, there lay a colored ribbon with one wish printed on it. Each visitor was allowed to select a ribbon representing the most important wish in their life, and take it away for free as a souvenir – and a symbol of that wish coming true in the future.

I stood in front of the wall for about fifteen minutes contemplating my life and the turmoil that the sense of true belonging and the idea of my book brought to it. I read the wishes printed on different ribbons, and I realized I couldn’t pick the most important one. One just wasn’t enough. Just like my story didn’t fit within two paragraphs, and my journey didn’t fit within 160 characters. It all was too big. Too big for my britches, I know. But so it was.

So when the guard looked away, I grabbed five ribbons reflecting my most relevant wishes and values. Yes, they all were equally important and I knew it was against the rules. But by that moment I’d already known in my heart that fitting in and playing by the rules had never worked for me. I needed and deserved all five. Here they are, from top to bottom:

1. I wish to have a job that gives me a sense of fulfillment
2. I wish to have the courage to express my feelings
3. I wish for the walls to tumble down
4. I wish to have a happy and healthy child
5. I wish to stop being mediocre

I’m still keeping these ribbons in my closet. I call them Cinco Deseos, which is ‘Five Wishes’ in Spanish. Symbolically, each year on the anniversary of my first comeback to Spain, I take them out to reflect on how much progress I made in my life. Now it’s been six years, and despite my ongoing effort, I haven’t made it to the place and the kind of life where I belong. No, I still don’t have a job that allows me to fulfill my potential or get out of poverty. I’m still single and don’t have a child. All of that depends on external circumstances that are outside my control. But as to the other three wishes, they’re an indicator of my inner growth that happened over these years through previously unfathomable multisided trauma – among which clinical depression was just one.

I’ll start with the last wish – about stopping being mediocre. It took me two episodes of depression to finally face this story that I’d been living under, and in denial of, for the most of my life before the age of twenty-five. The story about being mediocre and not worthy of my dreams coming true. The story that lay at the root of my mental disorder. The story that my dysfunctional family, the Russian educational system, and the entire social culture of this country had been for years bullying me into. The story rooted in shame and scarcity instead of courage and wholeheartedness. The story that had kept me fitting in, giving up on my potential, and denying myself what I deserved — before the sense of true belonging in my hometown brought me back, face-to-face with my truth. See, guys, it takes a lot of time and uncomfortable inner work to call bullshit on what you’ve been internalizing since childhood. But I had to. I owed that to my inner child. I owed that to my hometown. I owed that to the people I could serve with my work using the gifts God had given me. So today, I realize that this wish was in fact irrelevant – I didn’t need to stop being mediocre because I had never been. And I didn’t come to realize this looking at my university diploma with highest distinction or my job performance feedback or my growing private network of patients. Instead, I came to realize — surprise here! — that no one is ever mediocre. Period. If you have a dream that lives in your heart for years, it’s only because you have what it takes within you to make that dream come true. Whether it’s about a career, a relationship, or moving to another country, this dream isn’t sent your way by God (Universe, Cosmos, whatever you call it) just for the fun of it. Yes, I struggled mightily with the impostor syndrome 90% of the time writing Souls of Silence. I didn’t think my English was good enough. I didn’t think I had the authority to write about complex social problems without a degree in social science. I didn’t think I had the right to portray the kind of romantic relationship I’d never personally experienced. And yet, I ended up with a great book. It was only years later that I learned that all people who dare greatly, including the world’s most successful creatives, feel like a fraud occasionally, especially often when making first steps in the arena.

So, folks, there’s no need to wish to stop being mediocre. You never are. Instead, just embrace that feeling mediocre is part of the process you sign up for the moment you choose to start realizing your gifts. It gets better with time, but it never disappears completely as long as you stay in the arena – no matter how many degrees, awards, multi-platinum albums, or thousands of followers you have.

The second wish marking my progress was about having the courage to express my feelings. Dear God, this was a hard one for me – as a guy raised in a culture of masculinity that trivialized vulnerability as weakness and enshrined emotional ignorance as strength. Show your emotions – and people will take advantage of you. This was the lesson I’d internalized from so many previous relationships, starting from my family to my high-school friendships to my academic colleagues. It was only now, after hitting my quarter-life mark, that I realized the truth: expressing our feelings is the only meaningful way to connect with people who genuinely belong in our lives, and it’s also a prerequisite for creativity. No vulnerability means no creative output. It was in writing Souls of Silence, and in rumbling through two episodes of clinical depression that interrupted it, that I reclaimed my ability to express my feelings with courage and dignity, instead of shame and fear, and this fucking changed my life. It changed my relationships, both personal and professional. Mind you: it wasn’t a victory march. As Leonard Cohen says in his famous song, it was a cold and broken hallelujah. As I started to express my feelings, I had to leave the job in a corrupt system that was taking advantage of me, with no financial alternative in sight. As I started to express my feelings, 90% of the people I’d previously socialized with were no longer there. As I started to express my feelings, there was no more pretending that I had a normal family, and new boundaries had to be set with the people with whom I shared my DNA and still had to share my living space.

And yes, I’m grateful for that outcome. Because after leaving that dead-end job my perspective opened up enough to finally get crystal clear on the career I’d genuinely wanted in my heart all along – but denied myself the right to pursue because of the trauma that surrounded this dream in my adolescent years. Because after showing my real self and having 90% of people fall out of contact, I had a chance to transform my connection with the remaining few into genuine, deep, fully functional, incredibly supportive friendships – the kind of relationships I’d never experienced before. Ultimately, it was through expressing my feelings that I got to light up my little corner of the Instagram world with motivational poetry and had hundreds of people reach out to me sharing their stories and telling how much of a difference my words made for them – because, although silenced and diminished so many times, now they knew they were not alone in their feelings. Isn’t that the most precious award in the world?

And this leads me to the third wish – about the walls tumbling down. In the majority of the world, we still have political leadership that’s working hard to either build new walls or, at least, to secure those already in existence. Those are walls of inequality – in terms of rights, power, and opportunity. In developed countries, they say such leadership makes its desperate last stand. And as to Russia, I’m sure there won’t be a different leadership in my lifetime. But through accepting the challenge of my creative project, I had the honor to join the community of people committed to demolishing those walls.

The mission of my existing work, and the career I eventually aim to build, is to leverage the power of creative storytelling to promote intersectional social justice.

There are places in the world where this is already a tangible reality – that’s why Spain struck me with the sense of true belonging. In a fascinating contrast to Russia, it was a society where social inclusion, equal opportunity, and celebration of diversity were deeply ingrained in the culture and supported by state policies. So I know for a fact that intersectional social justice is possible, not just in my dreams, but in a real, imperfect, messy world.

The protagonists of my novel had their love clash against the walls of classism and homophobia. In my mid-twenties, I had my medical career in Russia break against the walls of corruption and favoritism. In my artistic journey and my networking efforts over the last four years, involving upper-middle-class folks from American creative industry, I’ve been running into the walls of privilege and power over that sabotaged people’s integrity and drove behaviors underpinned by shame, greed, cowardice, and hypocrisy. And yet, no matter how unscalable and indestructible those walls appear, especially to a person like me who’s aiming high and daring greatly from a place of disadvantage, I keep working to overcome them. That’s why over the last three years I’ve been studying empathy and things that get in its way, both in personal relationships and large-scale sociopolitical contexts. I’m learning how to effectively lead conversations about social justice and use my creative gifts to call bullshit on everything that’s happening in the world that is untrue and unkind.

And each and every one of you, my dear ones, can do it too. You don’t necessarily have to be an artist in order to help promote intersectional social justice. You just have to pay attention and show up when you see injustice in any form happening around you. Walls won’t just tumble down by themselves, especially when they’re supported by dominating power structures. It takes one act of courage at a time to take down one brick. So when you’re a man in a male company and someone says a sexist joke, don’t laugh even when everybody else does. Instead, take this as an opportunity to start a conversation. When you’re an Anglo working in HR and you see your Anglo colleague skip over a job application because of the applicant’s Hispanic name, be curious why they’re doing this – in a compassionate, respectful way, instead of dismissing what you saw. When you’re Christian and you hear the news of another anti-Muslim hate crime, then instead of pretending that it doesn’t affect you, start a conversation in your community. If you’re straight and you hear someone you care about use homophobic language, start a conversation with them about the heterosexual privilege that you both have. If you’re gay and you’re upper-middle-class in California and you see the news about gay men brought into concentration camps and tortured in Chechnya, spend your morning coffee time reading this news, as uncomfortable as that is, and figuring out what real action you can make to help fight homophobia in the world, instead of switching to Instagram and double-tapping on shirtless selfies of fortunate, well-groomed, well-fed and well-buffed gay men like you. When you’re a fifth-generation New Yorker, don’t delude yourself into thinking that it’s Puerto Rico’s government and obsolete power infrastructure that are to blame for the island’s humanitarian crisis in the wake of Hurricane Maria. When you see an influencer, a media figure, or even a guy next door not practicing the values they proclaim – call bullshit. When you see a person advocating gender equality and at the same time stating that ‘trans women are not real women’ – call bullshit. When you see a church preaching love and compassion and at the same time rationalizing trauma, serving corrupt systems of power over, and choosing reputation over truth – call bullshit. When you meet someone who has experienced, or is experiencing, mental illness, don’t think that you know what depression is just because today most of us use words ‘sad’ and ‘depressed’ interchangeably. Instead, take this as an opportunity to learn more about this global problem, taking away millions of lives despite not only being treatable but in most cases curable and preventable. Finally, when a trauma survivor tells you their story, believe them instead of questioning their perspective. Choose empathy over comfort. Choose curiosity over comfort. Choose courage over comfort. Because the world won’t be changed by people who stick to comfort. The world will be changed by people like YOU.

Yes, it’s a shitload of work and it takes up a lot of your bandwidth. To not pay attention to injustice is easy, especially when you live on the upside of the walls and are culturally licensed to walk through life believing that injustice doesn’t affect you (which, in fact, is a complete lie). But just imagine that one day, your work – with every and each act of ordinary courage – will have built a different world. That will be the world where people won’t hit their head against the walls of injustice and inequality. That will be the world where people will come across a different kind of walls – the walls offering thousands of opportunities of what to think, what to wish for, and what to do – just like this wall I saw at the museum in my hometown, in my unraveling quest for true belonging.