There is this special kind of hopelesness that is so specific to being a person from Eastern Europe that I cannot put into words and that is never really talked about on Tumblr because Tumblr doesn’t really care about Eastern Europeans and puts us in the same category as “those other European colonizers” despite the fact that most of us were too busy being oppressed ourselves to even dream about possibly colonizing anyone, much less actually doing it when we barely had any contact with the rest of the world for decades, didn’t have access to foreign media and if anyone knew languages it was probably Russian.
There is this kind of deep generational trauma that never really stopped and has been going and going and seems to be culminating now. It’s the kind of thing you don’t even notice, you are so used to it, and then one day, out of nowhere, it hits you in the face.
I’m only now realizing how much last year’s mass protests that I joined affected me. It’s been almost a year. And it’s only now starting to sink in how fucking traumatic that was and even now my first instinct is to rationalize it and second guess myself because ‘it wasn’t that bad’ and ‘we’ve all been through this’ and ‘you avoided being tear gassed, so what? you’re fine, stop being a crybaby!’. And it’s a culmination of events that started long before I was born, a cycle of oppression most Eastern European countries are so used to. My parents at my age were doing exactly the same thing. Protesting. On the streets. Trying to survive. The reasons for protesting might change a little, but ultimately it’s always about the right to live and be free. To stand against corrupt politicians. To fight with harmful propaganda.
There is something deeply isolating and hopeless about being from Eastern Europe on the Internet that seems to be so hyperfocused on the US and about being surrounded by american politics whenever we open a browser when our world is literally falling apart, you know?
