What is your reality?
Let’s start with another question—what is reality itself? My teacher, in our first year at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, told us, “Everything that impacts your life is reality for you.”
He was talking about subjective reality, meaning that your personal experience, beliefs, and thoughts form the world you live in. What are you thinking about first thing in the morning? What are you dreaming about? What are you afraid of—truly afraid of? What makes you proud of yourself? What makes you feel unworthy? What makes you feel ashamed? What are you planning to do next weekend? Are you planning anything at all? Why are you working here? Why are you living here? Why are you loving who you love? Why are you here? Why are you not here?
I could continue, but most people don’t like those questions—or avoid answering sincerely. I could answer them as a young Ukrainian woman living during the war. But most people would shun this conversation. I could have chosen to have different beliefs and live a different experience, but I did not. And all the 18-year-old students in the army did not. All the volunteers driving to the east of Ukraine right now did not. All the wives hugging their husbands for the first time in a year did not. The parents of a 3-year-old Mykyta I met today in Kharkiv did not.
And most people won’t look them in the eyes.
Why? Because they know it was a choice—and this reality is frightening. Ukrainians didn’t desire living and loving under missile strikes, fearing for those we love losing our dearest. Losing people. Losing our brothers and sisters. Our family. But it is our responsibility—to stay or not. To run from the line or to fight. To hide from the edge or to form it. To look into the eyes of the shot-through walls.
To remain with our mutilated home as with a tender infant. To hold on to the scorched roots of our land until we are exhausted. And in the end, if you do let go, there are those who will choose to hold your heaven and earth until you rest. Your brothers and sisters—not by blood, but by choice. Bonded by beliefs, thoughts, and experience. By decision.
It has a price—a huge price—which sometimes makes you doubt yourself. Maybe instead of sleepless nights in bomb shelters, you could leave for London and study philosophy. Maybe, rather than waiting for your boyfriend in Kupiansk, you could enjoy your youth in a theater, holding the hand of someone you love. Maybe you want to wear new Margiela shoes instead of Solomons covered in dirt.
Sometimes people who are not here ask me why I don’t leave Ukraine. I know several languages, I’m capable of learning, I’m proactive, I adapt easily, I have financial opportunities, I could study at a good university abroad. I could be free. Free? Knowing that my home is being torn apart? That the past histories of my land are being crossed out and the future amputated?
The only place I am free is here.
I am free from doubt, free from shame, free from not knowing, free from real fear. Of course I am scared—every day and every minute, when I sleep and when I wake up—but real fear is the one that paralyzes. The fear that forces you to close your eyes. I am terrified, and still I choose not to isolate myself, not to run away from reality.
I choose living near the edge because my life starts here. Not ends.
So let me ask you again: What is your reality?
By Solomia Pavlenko / Nov.3 2025 / Kharkiv.
