I Write Because I Need to Exist

Some reflections about what we are doing here

I never meant this journal to be about me.

I thought I was only a background.

A body, a brain, a heart that I borrowed from myself, used to describe what these eyes saw around them.

But somehow, it became about me too.

Completely about me.

When you write through war, you can’t separate the story from the survivor.

You can’t describe the wound without bleeding.

And so this became more than just a journal, but a map of who I am becoming.

My body feels like a city after too many air raids, still standing, trembling each time the wind passes.

I am living five lives at once.

Working, surviving, witnessing, feeling, remembering, trying to make them all serve one thing:

Purpose.

Freedom is not negotiable, it cannot be.

And neither can purpose.

Purpose is what keeps us upright when nothing else does.

I don’t write because I’m inspired.

I write because I need to exist for something.

If I stop, I disappear.

War makes everything look the same. The headlines, the sirens, the nights without sleep.

It’s all repetition.

Endless sameness.

But purpose cuts through that sameness.

It says: keep going, even when it no longer makes sense.

Some nights I sleep two hours, some four, sometimes none at all.

Forty months or so of sleep deprivation turns the mind into smoke.

You forget what clear thinking feels like.

But I still write.

Each word clears a little space in the fog.

I used to believe this space was about my Ukraine.

And it is, of course.

But it’s also about what Ukraine awakens in all of us, that tiny remaining belief that humanity still has something worth defending.

When I see the rubble, the burned homes, the faces marked by sleepless nights and endless winters, I understand what purpose means.

Purpose is not optimism.

It’s endurance.

It’s the reason you stand up when you no longer can.

When we ask for weapons, we are not asking for war.

We are asking for the right to keep our humanity alive.

War destroys us from the inside first, and the only real weapon against that is meaning.

Some days I don’t recognize myself.

I look at my heart and see anger where peace used to live.

Thoughts I never wanted to have.

Yet when I write, I can find a small light still here.

So many times I forget that I still carry this light.

And I only believe that because I read again those words I write here.

So many times I just don’t believe on what I just wrote.

And frequently only realize it after I hit “publish,” taking notice of them at the same time as you.

Wherever you are.

As if life reminds both of us that we still share the same piece of humanity inside us.

That part of ourselves that the world has not managed to break.

The part that refuses to accept cruelty as normal, and that keeps believing that kindness is still a strength.

If you ask why I keep writing, I would be confused among twenty good reasons for that and still not give you a clear answer.

But writing is proof that humanity hasn’t vanished.

These words are proof that I am still here

At the very least proof for myself.

Even at those times when I deeply regret one word or another, and it’s too late.

Perhaps freedom is nothing more than this.

To keep choosing meaning when the world keeps offering despair.

To keep building something human when everything tries to erase it.

Thank you for being here, for helping me carry this torch.

This space stays open and alive because you make it possible.

Because you remember.

Because you care.

That faith in purpose is what keeps this nation alive.

Everything else can fall

But not what we were born to stand for.

🇺🇦

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Once I thought I was writing about a country at war. But now I understand that this has always been about something larger, the real resistance of our time: to keep believing in humanity.

If you still do, or at least still trying to, even after everything, then you’re exactly who I’m writing for.