Perceptions

As the end of year rolls around, a little bit of reflection (not too much, I promise)

from the MOMA in New York this fall

As this year comes to a close, I have been thinking a bit about how we define success. Lately, it feels like a lot of what I am working on is either running on a hamster wheel, no finish line in sight, or intangible, shooting emails off into the cybersphere, wondering if a human on the other end of a gadget will even open them. I think the intangible idea, or rather the perception, of success or failure is harder to grasp as you get older. When you are in your twenties, it feels like everything is worth taking a chance on, because surely if you don’t succeed the first time, you have ages and ages of time to try again. You have your whole life in front of you! If you kept leaping off the diving board during your thirties and forties, you may have had little bursts of success, or you may have faced more rejection or dead ends. Every roadblock you encounter along the way gets shelved away somewhere in the back of your brain, making it that much harder (mentally, of course) to motivate yourself to take new leaps, because as you age, you become more acutely aware of what failure tastes and feels like. Using the word failure is of course a choice, and there is a huge difference between the perception of failing and actually failing, although of course quite often those two do align. The nature of physics, etc.

What I personally struggle with, on a philosophical level, is the notion which I wholeheartedly believe in, that those who do not take great risks will never achieve great rewards. Those who play it safe will end up with just that: safety. Their lows will not be as low, and their highs will not be as high. If you want to reach some kind of real high, it does require the real risk of falling down embarrassingly hard. The question becomes how many hard falls can one handle before the bruising and broken bones (metaphorically speaking, thankfully) become too much.

As I reflect back on when I started writing this Substack, first as a means of processing the news and the world around me, and then to share my “volunteer” (for lack of a better term) work with you all, work I fell into overnight, I recognise the biggest impact we were able to have was when we didn’t take pause to ask how something should be done, or who should be in charge, but stepped in, in an effort to increase public awareness and more importantly, to offer real solutions which made a small difference in the present. We are still doing this, thanks to the tireless Mario who is still holding Cards for Ukraine together, and thanks to all of you who have continued to support us financially even as these stories no longer make headlines. We are still helping, but we have not managed to change anything on a fundamental level. We are offering little bandaids where needed, and we cannot help everyone.

One small example. This week, Mario send me twelve €50 Hofer gift cards which were returned to us in the mail as the addressees had moved etc. I then sent those twelve cards to Ukrainians all across Austria who had texted me privately asking for help. Most of these were pensioners. Some mothers with children who arrived recently. I know each and every recipient of our help was super grateful and this made a difference to them, even though it was “only” €50.

And then I received, on Friday evening, a series of seven (!) text messages all from a single 71 year old lady living in Poysdorf begging me for a card. And instead of feeling good about the dozen cards I just sent out, I was immediately annoyed I didn’t have a thirteenth card to send to her. And I was annoyed, on a personal level she chose to trauma dump on me with seven text messages on a Friday evening instead of just writing one on a Tuesday morning. This is what I mean when I use the word “perceptions”. On paper, we anyway helped a lot of families. In my head, I think about the one we didn’t manage to help (yet).

This past year, I have tried very hard to set boundaries. I do not offer free consulting advice over my phone on navigating aspects of life in Austria. I still receive nearly daily requests for this. I direct Ukrainians to our Telegram group chat instead. My argument is they are in a better position to help their fellow citizens than I am, as I have never asked Caritas for payments or dealt with applying for health insurance papers under the program Ukrainians fall under.

And it is funny, some people are still genuinely upset with me when I refuse to be a consultant, for free of course, on life’s issues and navigating the system. I have learned over the years not to take this personally. I find that being firm and explicit in communication helps avoid any misunderstandings. I am sure there are plenty of well-meaning folks out there who could easily get dragged down a rabbit hole of being free advisors. I have seen and heard enough by now that I try very hard to avoid this. I spent a lot of 2022 and much of 2023 trying to be a public voice for those who did not have one. The acute phase is now pretty much over, very little if anything changed for the better, and I now tell Ukrainians that they have to be responsible for their own success or failure here, not to think there is a magical European safety net which is going to catch them. Is it horribly depressing when you think about pensioners who cannot work trying to scrape by on payments which don’t even cover the price of food or medicine? Yes, of course it is. But it was a choice to come here. Many millions more chose to stay home perhaps because of these factors. The picture is clearer for those who left front-line towns or places in Ukraine now uninhabitable because of the war. They don’t have to second guess themselves. The decision was made for them.

During 2024, I have helped several Ukrainians on a one-on-one basis as an unofficial translator (German-Russian) at doctor’s appointments and the like. As such, I have seen firsthand just what happens when a population is uprooted. They bring their existing problems with them. I accompanied one woman in her sixties to a doctor’s visit recently. She is suffering from high blood pressure, diabetes, the laundry list of ailments driven by lack of physical activity plus not ideal diet, and perhaps, genetics. She explained it was easier to manage her health back home. She told me many of her neighbours back in Ukraine are now selling their apartments, trying to create a cash nest egg with which to leave. For good. These conversations are terribly depressing. These chronic health problems now become a problem for the Austrian healthcare system.

I have been helping a young man who has a rare form of kidney cancer. He will have one of his kidneys removed next month by an expert team of doctors here in Vienna. He is deemed an excellent candidate for this surgery. His prospects are good. Austria is literally gifting him a second chance, a chance he would not have had in Ukraine. The family had first travelled to Romania and Moldova, and were quoted huge amounts for this surgery. But this is a cost to taxpayers here. And I don’t know what their collective answer would be if the issue was put to them on ballots, bluntly.

And then sometimes you are faced with very difficult situations you cannot turn away from because you know the individuals involved personally. One of the beauty specialists I see once a month for a year now was just diagnosed with a rapidly growing, cancerous tumour. A total shock. She is younger than me. I helped book her into a hospital, accompany her to the scans, and we are now waiting for an emergency surgery date. The doctors will call my phone number once they figure out how to fit her in their calendar. I promised to go to the hospital for the labs and to meet the anaesthesiologist (standard pre-op procedure here). This is, of course, all a lot more than just translation. This is emotional support during a dark time, and it is not easy, because you see and hear a lot and you realise how fragile everything is. Now those who work in medicine know this, they are trained for this, but for someone like me, with no medical background, it is a lot.

A colleague asked me recently, how do you process it?

I think that is what I learned at the train station and delivering Hofer cards to dorms, hotels, and the arrival center in 2022. You just do what needs to be done, calmly, without getting overly emotional, and you think about how to process it later.

Perceptions are key to all of this, too. The patient could collapse, emotionally, or hold strong, trying to focus on the positives: early detection, quality and availability of medical care. But when I translate the words “followed by 18 weeks of chemo”, it feels damn heavy, no matter how you look at it.

In this context, you think, it is worth taking the plunge and trying things even if they feel scary as we all are only given this one life. But the older you get, the harder that plunge feels. I try so hard to be numb, but it isn’t easy. Perhaps that is the other side to the coin of people like me who do have a lot of empathy for the plight of others: you feel too much, and you feel rejection especially.

If this reads like I am writing in code, I am sorry for that. I am choosing carefully what I share at this point, so as not to be embarrassed if my efforts do not work out. This fall, I wrote something. A book, a memoir of sorts. It is very personal, and also I think some of my finest writing. Two close friends read my manuscript and agreed. Now I am trying to send my query (as they call a pitch in the fancy world of printed words) to literary agents. This step is really insane in terms of the really challenging odds of generating interest in your manuscript via an email to a stranger in this era when everyone stopped reading emails and you need connections or recommendations to get your foot in the door. Or so they say.

Part of me feels like I will soon need to start filming TikToks, although I know I cannot do with video what I do with words. But I suppose, I could try. I admire so much the young people on that app who talk about everything and anything without fear. It is just brilliant. I would like to have ten percent of their bravery. Baby steps. Right now, even hitting “send” on emails requires a deep breath.

With Christmas coming up this week, special wishes to everyone who finds the holidays extra challenging. I believe there are more of us out there than we think. Personally, I look forward to the 1st of January (wink wink). On a serious note, if you like me are struggling with a end-of-year report card of sorts, comparing personal successes and failures and still yet to be graded, I would like to remind all of us, myself included, that there is no worse feeling than not having tried, even if the sting of immediate failure hurts more than the numbness of not having done anything. Eventually, we have to believe, and I genuinely still do, statistically speaking, there should be rewards for those who take calculated risks. If there were not, life would be so boring. Many of the people we celebrate in pop culture and in life found success because they dared to imagine something others said was not possible. I just hope this imaging which stimulates action can take place in all of our decades, and not just in our youth.

I don’t have a lot of big picture analysis this week, but I will try to focus on that a bit more next weekend. I have been watching the news from Serbia with cautious optimism. I have been following each story focused on the cracks in Russia’s economy. I await the news of Austria’s government coalition (talks have been ongoing for weeks, no official announcements yet). On Ukraine, every Ukrainian I speak with agrees the war needs to end but no one can imagine how and when. Putin’s public Q&A session this week was more embarrassing than most years. A rambling old man. But for how much longer…no one knows. I don’t comment on Syria nor Georgia as I lack any kind of expertise; I have no informed opinion. Same for Elon Musk’s apparent takeover of our government (I say that only half joking). Cautious optimism? Pessimism with a spoonful of honey? It is all a matter of perception, both on an individual and societal level.

p.s. if any of my readers do know literary agents accepting submissions for non-fiction queries, I would be ever so grateful if you might please send me a DM.