Who am I this very moment?

Manuscripts marking new eras

I am someone who submitted my FIRST manuscript to their FIRST literary prize today! I am sharing my cover letter, because I’m quite proud of what I’ve written. :-)

I have been the silent carrier of close to three decades of a mean life. I have been admired for my strength and resilience, though, inwardly I was simply trying to survive. I have inadvertently punished my nervous system while trying to swim through a sloshing storm. Now—it is time to alchemize everything, to make the ugly into beautiful. To start anew in a new life. My first manuscript is the beginning of my transformation.

I immigrated from Russia to the United States at age six. I had arrived hoping for a better life, but was surprised to find the trauma patterns followed me from Moscow, morphed into new costumes, and continued tormenting me through adolescence and into my late twenties. There were no adults in my life who were safe, who taught me how to be a complete person. I learned to traverse asinine realities with no support. Somewhere within myself I knew it was all wrong but I had no map. Anger boiled up from within, hiding my grief. This was the fuel I used to build a career in Silicon Valley, and I used extreme outdoor sports as a salve for my anxiety. I burned out twice, once at twenty-four, and once at thirty-one. The first one led to my becoming a painter after a year of depression. The second time followed one of life’s forced stops, which opened the floodgates of my own story. Veron draft one poured out in a feverish stampede and I finally looked into the eye of my life and started to say no more.

I had written academic, corporate, and legal documents, and then ventured into shadow-work journals, nature poems, and travel narratives for friends. But Veron felt different: urgent, necessary, a hundred pages in two days. My therapist observed that first-hand accounts of immigrant life from Russia are rare and I realized these stories need telling. What eventually emerged was experimental lyrical prose-poetry told from a child’s lived perspective, not adult retrospective: Veron: A Poetic Memoir from Moscow.

Over four years and seven drafts, working with an editor who taught me to write as I wrote, Veron swelled to five hundred pages spanning from age four to twenty-eight. This was too massive for me. It was like looking at a hungry wave, so I divided the manuscript into three books. Book one encapsulates my time in Moscow, where patterns began, and became the essential foundation to my healing. It spans ages four to six and ends as I land at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. On that eleven-hour flight I vomited the entire way. My mind was shut down, but my body knew that I was leaving everything I had ever known behind and taking a gamble on an entirely new life, thinking how could it be any worse?

In 2026, it seems like Russian stories are being quietly erased. After decades of invalidation, I refuse to hide my identity. Sharing rarely-told stories is medicine. They break the silence, create recognition, offer hope. Veron is a remembrance, an honoring, a search for kindred spirits.