16 november

Ever since I’ve come back from Ukraine, I’ve occasionally had the overwhelming feeling that I can accomplish anything. Lack of resources? No problem. Difficulty communicating? We can straighten this out. Challenges? Patience and innovation. It’s as if the successes of my Peace Corps experience—which, you will note, come in many forms, many of them very, very small—have led me to great faith in the potential success of future endeavors. This is, after all, America, I have a bank account, and I speak English!

Again, to be very, very clear: although some of my successes were visible to others, through shout-outs in the Friday Digest listserv, an article in the Kyiv Post, or even the certificate that eventually reached me at my Home of Record, signed by the outgoing Peace Corps Director, Aaron Williams, and (at the time) His About-To-Be-Re-Elected-Ness Himself, your president and mine, Barack Obama (Thanks, dudesky! That’s worth a vote!), the majority were not.

Small successes are pretty much the only kind in real life anywhere, but somehow they seem even more important to celebrate in a strange and challenging environment.

Order what you meant to order from a menu? Hooray! Eat it.

Bought non-bubbly water when you meant to buy non-bubbly water? High-five! In your pocket.

Successfully got correct change from a 20 passed back to you on a crowded marshrutka? (Man! That’s probably 18 hryvnia!) Write a text to your friend! Maybe don’t send it, though.

Bargained for an amazing price on tomatoes in late summer (not that it’s that hard, but hey)? Brag to your friends in America how little you paid—in dollars, per kilo. Help them to convert kilograms to pounds. Wait while they try to figure out the price of tomatoes in America.

The list could go on and on, and indeed it did.

Recognizing that you understand, dear friend, the list of failures that must shadow this list of relatively meager successes, I’ll move on. Let me just say that it’s the moving on that matters. Even as the optimism rises in great waves at times these days, there are moments, days when anxiety crashes down and I am unsteady and ready to topple, uncertain of how to catch my breath or bearing. Regaining stability in this new scene and creating the next steps means believing again in small successes, and moving on.