Birthday Reflections

On this day 37 years ago, I began playing the game of life

I was born with my eyes wide open. Not crying, just taking it all in. I looked around the dimly lit room of a Soviet birthing ward where women lay screaming in agony because an epidural was the stuff of the bourgeois world. This was not the place I was supposed to come into. Or was it?

Over the next twelve years, I watched the world around me transform. A century passed by within a decade in front of my eyes. The Soviet world, frozen in time, woke up from its torpor and began to devour the progress of the twentieth century. Every few months, new wonders of the technological world would enter our daily lives: VCRs, cassette and then CD players, microwaves, first computers, Barbie dolls, sugar-free gum, Coca-Cola, M&Ms and Skittles, slinkies, Lycra leggings, and all the jeans in the world, which our parents could never have dreamed of. But those things, although technically available, were always out of reach.

By the end of the decade, my country had (more or less) caught up with the outside world. I was planning my grown-up life here, picking out my future major and studying hard to win a state-sponsored university scholarship. But then, my small-town perspective split open.

On May 9, 2001, I was reborn in another country—the USA, my second home. The day after my twelfth birthday, I landed in Washington, D.C., and it was like landing on another planet. It was only a brief stint of living in the first world, but it gave me a glimpse into a totally different reality, one which I had seen in Hollywood movies but didn’t quite believe because it seemed too Disney-like, too good to be true. Turned out, it was real (at least in the first half of 2001), and I made it my goal to make this dream world my life.

When I turned eighteen, I left my old home and began chasing dreams in the land of opportunity. Opportunity mostly came in the form of money: college tuition scholarships, grants to study abroad, gift cards for participating in surveys, free pizza at seminars, and my first fifteen-dollar-an-hour on-campus job. It was a straightforward path: work hard, get rewarded, and making money was easy in a country that owns the fastest printer in the world. I had a strong career track and a bright future ahead of me. By all accounts, I had made it.

At what point, then, did the American Dream stop being my dream? I think probably when I started traveling. When I realized that it wasn’t “either/or”—a post-Soviet world of lack or one of capitalist excess—but a million other options and different ways to live. I traveled to the Himalayas and saw that the happiest people lived in the place of the fewest resources. I discovered India and, in comparison to its richness, every European country I had ever visited blended into a grey, faceless mass of monotony. I experienced the freedom of hiking mountains and visiting places that are not listed on tourist brochures, and the old laboratory job became unbearable.

Once I made up my mind that my old life was over, I set out to construct a new one. It took a few years because letting go of something you worked hard to obtain isn’t easy. Like a snake shedding its skin, the process is never comfortable, but if you stay inside the old skin, you will likely suffocate.

I am now on my third incarnation in a single lifetime. And there are a few things I have come to realize. First is that life goes in cycles: birth, expansion, crisis, transformation, and so on, ad infinitum, as long as you have the time and courage to face life. Second is that we ourselves create our reality. There is a lot more decision-making power in our free will that we realize. Third is that many of our beliefs and desires aren’t really ours. They are a mirage born out of the collective consciousness and shaped by propaganda. Our own desires are a lot harder to recognize, but they are the only ones that truly bring us happiness.

That’s the wisdom of my 37 years. No goal is final, no identity is ever complete. We are constantly evolving, discovering who we really are, underneath the masks and labels, and what drives us. If you feel lost or overwhelmed—unplug. Sit in silence. Listen to your instincts, and they will lead you towards self-realization.