Dear All,

Nice to meet you and you are very welcomed here.

Despite my knowledge of how you cool kids do your blogging thing is a little, well, a lot outdated, and I am obviously not an English native, I am very happy to start this blog. I have my fear it will turn up to be a Lilac Diary, but I feel I should do it nevertheless.

I am Slavic and I live in Berlin. My first youth was a collection of irrational and emotional relationships, studies and viewpoints; it was quite verbal also, as I studied human arts and was a promising poet with a little tendency to overexcitement. Then I switched the field completely, as it looked like a too easy path for me, so I spent 5 years in my Master’s on pure mathematics, then 2 more years of data science studies, which made me a promising software engineer and gave me depression, anxiety, panic attacks, cancer phobia, hormonal diseases, excess weight and lots of other unpleasant consequences. Happily I met my best friends and the love of my life, now being my husband. Body and mental pains, together with lots of family issues I became to realize, multiplied by the necessity to start an adult life, to stick by some profession, difficult situation in my Motherland which forced us to emigrate — all that gave me a hard, hard time. I realize I am still very lucky, but you know suffering when you feel one, don’t you?

Back to now, I am beginning to realize all the mistakes I made and choices that I was forced to take when I shouldn’t have. I don’t want to be a genius poet, or a genius mathematician, or a promising anybody, the best wife in the world, that stunning girl from Instagram, a praised vegan chef, a home interior goddess or anything like it. I want to be me and to be happy. It still includes challenges, I guess. But the main thing is just to be happy in here and now.

I am positive I would write about beauty. I don’t want to mess with all the conventional connotations of this word. I am just a passionate observer and in my world ethics and esthetics are inseparable. So basically by beautiful I mean good, happy, healthy, kind and creative.

In the mornings I go to the office with a coffee in my hand. I observe people here in Berlin, and at least through the viewfinder of my eyes everybody looks like an iconic movie star. So I think that’s it, you can’t get better than an icon.

However, I know too good how everything and everybody, and especially your own self, can be painful, frustrating and ugly. Family traumas, poor lifestyle, a need to constantly make decisions you don’t want to and not ready for, bad health, all that whirlpool that’s sucking you inside and making you small, miserable and weak.

I know that really well. But I learned you can and should help yourself to be happy. Because nobody will repay that precious time you spent in disease, in despair, not seeing the beauty, even when sad, of the world.

So because apparently I gathered plenty of experience in overcoming things that were bad for me, I decided I should share.

I would post any kind of advice I wished there were out for me when I needed it. Could be anything, from lifestyle finds to overcoming an illness advices to relationships to studying math to more blatant “I know the point of life” stuff (forgive me in advance). I hate naked words and I have scientific background, so I promise everything has a decent proof link or at least is checked with my own experience.

So, hopefully I will see you again and show you the inner and outer beauty how I see it.