"Saving my dead father"

previously published on my Halcja's Place blog

As some of you may know, I've recently uploaded the first episode of my podcast in English, where I elaborated a little on why exactly I decided to start writing fiction in English.

But what's been really bothering me for a while now was why have I bothered with all of my Ukrainian projects for so long before switching my keyboard from UK to EN. Over the time I've had a lot of projects that were aimed at promoting Ukrainian language and culture or creating content in Ukrainian. I've had a couple of blogs and rpg-forums, a youtube channel and I even volunteered for a few translation projects. There are at least a handful of Wikipedia articles translated by yours truly and I've also subtitled some TED talks. I'll stop here before it starts looking like I'm bragging, but I did a lot of stuff which could put me in the category of a patriot and language enthusiast. But I'm not... Not really.

So why is it that I keep coming back to these projects, knowing that most of my efforts will remain unnoticed and that no matter how hard I try I won't click with the local patriots crowd which I'm not even trying to be a part of, though it still hurts to be ignored no matter how much I contribute to the community...

Some of my facebook friends may know that I've been consuming a lot of content from professor Jordan Peterson lately. I won't touch on the delicate topics that made him internet famous. That's not the source of my inner grindings today.

In his lectures Jordan Peterson talks a lot about the importance of knowing your own culture and saving the best parts of it for future generations. I'm heavily rephrasing what he's talking about here, but I hope I got the main idea right.

I have to save my dead father from the belly of the beast. If I fail to do so, I will remain a puppet.

I encourage you to go and watch the Maps of Meaning lectures (available on his youtube channel), where Jordan Peterson talks about all this and a lot more in detail. He uses great analogies and a lot of references to popular culture. I'm sure you'll enjoy them just as much as I did.

But let's get back to my culture and how I'm supposed to save it from perishing. Not as much for the sake of the culture itself, but for my own psyche.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I've been trying to figure out where I stand in this whole "saving your dead father" business. I'm still trying to string my thoughts together so please excuse me if it all gets too confusing. Just stop reading it whenever you feel like it. I'm just rambling here. Sorry about that. xD

So the whole problem with my culture is that I've never really known it or felt like I belong to it. I wasn't raised that way. Maybe that's why I've been feeling uprooted. And all of my Ukrainian projects were actually an attempt to plant myself back into my own culture.

But in the end it all turned out to be in vain.

I'm lost...

I don't feel like I belong here...

Before I completely give up on that, I've decided to try one more thing. One more project. I've decided to volunteer for LibriVox and have already recorded something for a collection of poetry and prose in different languages.

This project won't take up too much of my time and I've already learned a lot and improved my tech skills while making my first recording. And I'll definitely benefit from this project in the way that I'll get to read more Ukrainian classical literature.

So that's the plan for now. I'll see where it gets me.