“That happened to me,” I told my best friend, and then promptly hung up the call. I was ashamed and embarrassed and needed to cry alone. Until that point, I had not had the words for what had happened to me. I convinced myself it was normal. I thought I deserved it. Seeing it framed in the context of the film, I realized what I experienced was wrong. That I didn’t deserve it. No child did.

I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t watched that film. I don’t know who I would have turned into, or even if I would have made it to adulthood. At that point, staying alive was a constant struggle.

But seeing someone I could relate to on screen, seeing that she made it out alive, gave me hope.

The feeling of being seen, of seeing a private part of my life reflected on screen and the realizations that came with it, stayed with me. Around a decade later, the memory resurfaced as my career took a turn towards focusing on my personal life. My agent and I were discussing the possibility of me writing a memoir. I had written a YA book about a kid who was undocumented and was trying to get her citizenship. This book was a thinly veiled fictionalization of my life. An editor commented that she would be open to the idea of this book if it wasn’t fiction. We strongly considered the suggestion and decided to change gears.

I would write a memoir.

My agent had represented a few memoirs already and she told me memoir writers nowadays need to have a platform of some kind. A social media following was a must since I was neither a celebrity nor celebrated.

I admitted I was scared of putting myself out there online and she told me not to look at it that way. “You have important things to say,” she reminded me. Her encouragement and support helped me realize a platform might be a way for me to make a difference.

I thought of The Quiet and how this movie changed my life. I decided to dive in, even if I was scared.

I started slow, learning that TikTok dances were not my forte. And then, one of my videos comparing my life to 90 Day Fiancé went “baby viral”. It hit 30k views. I gained a few hundred followers.

It was at that point I knew that I needed to become grittier. If I wanted a following so I could sell my memoir, I needed to show more of myself. This makes sense in retrospect but at that point I thought I didn’t need to be that vulnerable.

I remembered The Quiet. I remembered what seeing my experience on the screen did for me. So, I started making videos about growing up undocumented, with a mom who had been a mail-order bride and abusive stepfathers. I started speaking about my trauma and suddenly I skyrocketed to over 20K followers almost overnight. People weren’t just curious about what I had to say, they could relate.

On one video that blew up, someone had commented that I was “disgusting” for using my trauma for views. I was used to cruel comments, so I ignored them. But then, someone in my husband’s family implied that I was using my trauma for TikTok clout and a friend told me I was being cringey.

These comments got to me and I was stung with self-doubt. I stopped posting because I became embarrassed and questioned what I was doing. What kind of person uses their trauma for views and likes and follows? What kind of person profits from the terrible things that happened to them? I thought about zipping back up the ugly parts of my life and hiding that part of me away again to be kept private. But then I thought, who benefits from that silence?

My abusers are millionaires. I wonder how successful they would be if I had told a teacher back then what my stepfather was doing to me at home? My stepfather’s actions toward me have shaped my life in a debilitating way. I am not a millionaire. I have a hard time keeping a job. I am bad at relationships. I am chronically ill due to stress and cannot work a regular 9-5.

I am not trying to become a millionaire; I am trying to build a career to support myself and my family. My goal has always been to help people feel seen, but I cannot do this work for free. I do not have a wealth of resources.

And so, I find myself in an uneasy compromise; profiting off my trauma, not to become rich (scratch offs would be a better move than becoming an author), but to contribute something valuable to those who are vulnerable and hurt like I once was.

Our society asks that we look away from trauma.

It asks that survivors keep quiet.

But our stories are important.

Maybe some people watched The Quiet and thought it was too traumatizing for them. Maybe they didn’t like the movie because they couldn’t relate to it. But watching that movie changed my life because I no longer felt alone in my experiences. I found a reason to live because the girl in the movie survives.

I need to make my trauma work for me. It is not going away. My memoir is my way of harnessing the bad to create some good.

When I started sharing my experiences online, measurable good came out of it. Messages from other survivors, full of kindness and solidarity, flooded my DMs. In those messages, people shared stories of painful immigration, difficult childhoods, and the emotional resonance of my shared stories with their own.

The more my account grew, the more comments of “You’re cringe for selling your trauma,” I got. And every time I got these comments, I would have to remind myself that if I don’t talk about my trauma, then its only purpose is hurting me.

Releasing it to do work for me is better than trapping it within myself to destroy my body and mind. I have to remind myself that not sharing my experiences only helps my abusers and they have good enough lives. I can share my experience. I don’t need to protect them.

I am reclaiming my story, and I can only do this by sharing it. I am cringey. I use clickbaity hooks. I am selling my book. I am profiting from what has hurt me, and I am still working to come to terms with that.

I survived.

And I survived not by staying quiet, but by speaking up.

As a thirty-something with an impatience streak, almost everyone I mention in my memoir is still alive. Which meant I had to do an extremely painful revision with a fine-tooth comb to change identifying details of my abusers. It took time and energy that added fresh blood to wounds I have worked hard to heal from.

The protection I provided them was also ten times more than what any adult did to shield me from the abuse in the first place. In a twisted and nauseating bit of irony, if I don’t safeguard my abusers, if I name them, if I tell you their real hair color or where they work, I would be the one in danger.

These people, these men, are prominent in their community, still. They show up, they volunteer, they are kind. But behind closed doors they molested me as a child and almost killed my mother.

You would never know it.

In fact, some of you would probably go to court and give them character witnesses because what you saw on the outside was so impenetrable.

I know because it happened before.

Their mask was so convincing they had people rushing to advocate for them. That, and my abuser bought their character witnesses houses and cars and new appliances for their homes.

But the American courts didn’t take that into account.

One person who went to give a character witness for my abuser had her whole family’s phone plan cut off when she dared to question him once. He screamed at her and her kids. But he turned their phones back on when he was in a better mood. He masked his monster again and she went to court and said there was no way he ever showed any violent predilections. There was no way that what my mother was accusing him of was true.

It’s amazing how much money, comfort and luxury can make someone turn a blind eye. People are shocked that none of the abusers in the Epstein files are getting retribution.

I am not.

Not when my entire life in the United States was watching how abusers got away with it.

My father, though, is outraged. He thinks justice should be served. He wants to be an instrument of that justice. And it breaks my heart to tell him every time he brings it up that it won’t ever happen.

My father and I reconnected in my late 20’s. He told me how my mother told him she was taking me on a vacation to a Mexican beach town to “heal,” after I had come down with a bad case of pneumonia and so he let me go. Eastern Europeans truly believe the ocean can cure anything.

Except he didn’t know where I was again for 5 years after she took me. 5 years of missed milestones as I learned to be American or at least pass for one as a white undocumented immigrant.

By 8 years old, I didn’t recognize him. I didn’t know who this man was to me, and my mother told me he was evil and didn’t love me. I believed her because I had seen, all too frequently by the time I was 8, how these types of men got away with hurting my mother and facing no consequences.

For her, I would be the consequence. I would hate my father. I would be her justice.

Every time my father came to visit me when I was in America, I told him I hated him. I didn’t speak to him. I didn’t want to see him. I was my mother’s sword.

And then, when I was 24, I became estranged from my mother. The abuse from the American men became too much. She turned into someone whose life I could no longer witness. I could not bear to see the pain she continuously put herself through, because after more than two decades in the United States, a life without pain, even pain that she inflicted on herself, became foreign to her.

So I broke up with her.

And then, 4 years after our breakup, I found my father on Facebook. I added him, shut my laptop, and didn’t open it again for a while. I was no longer my mother’s weapon.

When I finally opened it again, he was there with a message.

“I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

We talked nonstop for months and he told me everything. How he never wanted my mother to take me. How he loved me. How he tried, over and over, to be in my life. How he would never give up.

And I told him about my childhood he didn’t get to see, about growing up undocumented. About how scary life had been for so long before we got documents and eventually citizenships, legitimized by beautiful blue passports.

About half a year into our relationship he said something that sat wrong with me. He treated my stepfathers as victims of my mother’s behavior, like he was. I stopped talking to him for a while. I determined that I could not keep speaking to him if he looked at these men as victims.

And then I realized he didn’t know.

I had never opened up to him about what had happened to me. I was terrified to open up to him; almost every other adult I had told about my abuse had sided with my abusers. Or they acted like it didn’t happen. If there was a chance that my dad would also have this reaction, I knew I wouldn’t be able to speak to him anymore. I knew our relationship would be over.

The risk wasn’t worth it.

But I also knew that if I heard him talk about how these men were victims of my mother one more time, I wouldn’t be able to have a relationship with him anymore either.

So I told him.

I told him about what I experienced and I shut the computer, like the first time I added him as a friend on Facebook.

I avoided the message box like the plague until my husband very gently nudged me to open it back up.

When I finally opened up our chat box, my dad’s reaction shocked me. He told me he wanted to kill them. He said he had already contacted a lawyer in the United States and asked for this lawyer’s advice. He said that my abusers needed to be in jail. His reaction was so unexpected I cried.

I cried for my six-year-old self that needed this. I cried for the teenager that needed this. I cried for the adult that was getting this protective father, the dad I had needed my whole life.

And I cried for him, because he believed so vehemently in the United States justice system.

“No,” I told him, sadly. “Please don’t send my contact info to the lawyer. Nothing will happen and we can’t afford the legal bills.”

My dad argued with me. He said that the court system in the United States was the best in the world. He said for me to give it a chance.

I told him I did. I had reported my abuser a year after I left my mom’s house for college, going to the police station, giving my statement, and stepping out of the station again, alone with the terror of retribution for speaking aloud what I had kept quiet so long. All for my case to be dismissed. The dismissal was one of the single most traumatic things that have happened to me, and I don’t want to go through it again.

“Drop it,” I told him. “Please.”

He didn’t understand that his belief in me, that his protectiveness over me, was enough for me. He didn’t understand that the justice system doesn’t protect victims of abuse, it protects the abusers.

“The United States protects rich white men,” I told him.

“That’s not right!” He typed back. I could feel the anger in his response. I loved that he was so passionate that I receive justice, but I didn’t want him to spend his energy on something so futile.

He dropped it, at my request. We didn’t talk about it for a while.

And then, later, when I got a book deal for my memoir, he brought it up again.

“I’ll expose him” he told me. “He can’t do anything to me. I’m in a different country. I am not American.”

I told him, once again, that it was too legally dangerous for anyone to expose anyone in my book. It’s not worth the legal hassle and the sucking money pit of the legal system. It’s not worth the vitriol and defenders that will most certainly come out of the woodwork to tell me I’m lying.

“We have to drop it,” I told him, again.

He told me that we’ll revisit it later. I hope we don’t, because I know, too, that the United States will not protect me later, either.

My mother placed a bet on the United States. She put everything she had and more on the table. Her family support, her youth, my fatherless childhood, it all went into the pot. She thought the blue passport would be worth it. She thought the blue passport would shield us.

I have the blue passport now. I am the outcome of everything she bet, the chips she cashed out.

And the blue passport has not protected me, not once, when I needed it to. I reported my abuser to the district attorney as a citizen, not as an undocumented immigrant, not as a green card holder. But as a citizen.

And America still chose the rich white man. American people still showed up to defend him against a teenager.

I have since left the United States, with no plans to go back. This country has broken my heart in so many ways. But maybe the biggest way was me having to explain to my father that the justice system does not protect little girls, blue passport or not.

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I grew up repeating this same mantra, hearing stories of unhoused people and their struggle, relating to those stories, but still not thinking I grew up in the kind of poverty that could be labeled as “homeless.”

I was wrong. We were homeless, but my mother’s insistence that this was not our reality shaped how I viewed our situation. When we slept in her car multiple nights in a row because one of my stepdad’s locked us out of the house, we weren’t homeless. That situation was just temporary. It happened a lot, but I had a bed the majority of the time. We weren’t under a bridge. Until that stepdad kicked us out and because she was undocumented without a proper job history, we couldn’t get a place to stay.

It wasn’t until I was in my late 20s and I was talking to my psychiatrist about a habit I had of “always finding shelter” that I realized I have trauma from housing insecurity.

After I discovered the root of my compulsion, I spiraled into shame and doubt. I didn’t want to even talk to my husband about what I had discovered.

I became fixated on whether I had really been homeless or not, my mother’s bridge comment again echoing in my mind. I started with a search for a definition. The National Institute of Health defines homelessness as someone who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence. This definition describes so many instances in my childhood, it shocked me. We had several short bursts of homelessness, but the longest spell was for half a year.

Then came another question that wouldn’t have existed 20 years ago: had I been homeless or unhoused? The answer came easily. I didn’t have a house or a stable place to live, but I was also truly without a home. I did not have a safe place within 5000 miles. The last house I had felt truly safe in was my grandparents’ apartment in Russia, a place I would never be able to see again.

It wasn’t until writing about that long, chaotic stretch in my memoir, Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter, that I realized how much it had shaped me. It started like most stories of homelessness do. My mom had gotten fired and we couldn’t afford our $750/month apartment in Houston anymore.

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She had just restarted a relationship with one of her ex-husbands, and moved all of our belongings to a storage unit. As we walked into the storage unit for the first time, I remember thinking through how we could live there. I clocked the bathroom down the hall and reasoned the unit would be a good place for us to rest our heads because at least we had a toilet.

I play this messed up little game with myself, even now, in my 30s. Any time I see a shaded area outside where I could pitch a tent, anytime I see a church, and especially when I see self-storage buildings, I think about how viable it would be to live there, if worse came to worst. This habit has stayed with me, clawing at my brain, the idea that we could be homeless always in the back of my mind. After that night, watching my mother pack our few belongings in that storage unit and then sleeping at her ex-husband’s house, the game never left me.

Despite this, my persistent rationalization is that we weren’t homeless. Even writing this, I keep reflexively trying to come up with reasons the label doesn’t actually apply.

I keep coming back to: we weren’t under a bridge.

We may not have been under a bridge, but not having a permanent address, or a reliable place to sleep meant we were homeless, whether I like it or not.

After the initial shock of the realization washed over me, I didn’t know what to think. The idea that my mother had given up our entire family, an apartment, a whole life in our home country to be homeless in the United States seems absurd.

Was the bet my mother had placed by coming to America really so incredibly wrong? I had always believed that my mother sacrificed her life in Russia for a better life in America. What did it mean if she actually didn’t live a better life after all?

I grew up with the idea that the more you sacrifice, the better your life will be eventually. The harder the planting, the better the fruit. What if someone can just live a good, comfortable life for their entire life? What if her sacrifice truly was for nothing?

I am trying to unbury my own roots to understand how my experience with homelessness shapes who I am, how it made me stronger, more resilient, more resourceful, but all I can dig up is that it has made my life much worse. The labor and trauma of the planting took its toll, and the fruits it yielded are anxiety and fear. I know too well how easy it is to lose a stable bed.

In the end, realizing that I was homeless as a child makes me angry. No one should be homeless in the richest country on earth. No child should look at a warehouse and wonder how long they can go without a shower before other people would notice, especially not a 9 year old.

My feelings have migrated from shame to anger, and now, with time, to profound sadness. I don’t know if the game I play will ever go away. The survival game of: what can I go without? What can I use as a shelter? How long can I last without food? These questions and scenarios torture me. I now live a life wholly different from the one I grew up having, but I can confidently say I never lay my head down at night peacefully. Financial security has not taken away the fear.

It is something, I think, I will always live with.

There is no emotional or psychological lesson in living in constant fear. My only takeaway is that no one should have to endure it.

I think about the 2.5 million homeless children in the richest country on earth and hope each one of them will find financial stability soon, but I know that is unlikely to be the case. My good fortune in finding relative stability in my life was an outlier.

If the option was to be homeless in the United States or have a weaker passport and less comfortable life in Russia growing up in my grandparent’s cramped apartment, I would choose Russia every time. Homelessness is a trauma that doesn’t teach lessons worth learning. It taught me hunger, shame, and relentless vigilance.

When I think of survivalists I don’t think of gun-toting libertarians, canning peaches for their bunkers. I think of my endlessly resourceful, beautiful mother having to solve the problem of where we will sleep that night and then how to talk to her 9-year-old about it.

Technically, her mantra was right all along.

We never slept under a bridge.

How many times did she repeat that mantra to console herself instead of me?

Would it have been better for her to call our situation what it was? Maybe if she had said, “Katya, we don’t have an address right now, but it will be okay,” I would have felt better. Maybe if she had acknowledged our homelessness, but reminded me we were still human, I wouldn’t have felt shame.

Maybe.

But I’m starting to think the act of survival alone was the bridge we were sleeping under.

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Hi! I’m Katya! I’m the slightly unhinged but well-meaning author of the forthcoming memoir Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter. In my book, I write about growing up as an undocumented child in the US dealing with a string of awful stepfathers and a complicated relationship with my mail-order bride Russian mother.

I look forward to sharing my publishing journey with inadvisable transparency, failures and all, as well as meditations on immigration (I am, unexpectedly, a second-time immigrant, except now in Europe), writing craft, mental health and more.

I will be publishing weekly so subscribe if that sounds like an interesting train wreck to tune in to.

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I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t start a new foray into social media with a bang:

My husband’s family said they wouldn’t read my memoir.

It wasn’t just one member of the family; it was multiple. Told to my face, and then to my husband, when I was out of the room. They said they’d buy it, but didn’t think they could bring themselves to read it.

Hearing they wouldn’t read it was very painful. I cried about it. A lot.

But then, after reflecting on their rejection I realized: they do not understand how to support people, even those in their own family. I suspect they are far from alone in this upside-down world where social networks refer to posts, tweets, and reels and loneliness is an epidemic.

My husband’s family do not want to open themselves up to my experience growing up as an undocumented immigrant because it would make them uncomfortable. I had the sort of childhood that I’m lucky to have survived and to do justice to the immigration elements of my story I did not shy away from sharing painful memories of abuse.

His family were among the first people I called when I got my book deal. I thought they would be happy for me because they knew how long I’d been working towards this.

I was wrong.

Their response was lukewarm.

“It’s okay,” I thought. “The support will come with time.”

For context, my entire family is in Russia and Ukraine, sans my mother and sister. I have not had a relationship with my mother in over 8 years. Basically, other than my friends (who are my chosen community and have all read my memoir) I am alone in the United States.

On a trip my husband and I took to Tbilisi, Georgia, last year, my Slavic family were fighting over who would get to read my book first. It was eye-opening and unexpected based on the reactions I had received in America. I didn’t realize the support I wasn’t getting until I got it from somewhere else. My dad even said, “How could I not read your book?” When I told him I was surprised he finished it.

My family’s enthusiasm for my book showed me what it was really like to be in a community, an experience that was foreign to me any time I was “part” of an American family as a step-kid in the United States, and then, later, as an in-law.

My memoir was not easy for my father to read. It was hard for him to see what I had gone through after my mother abducted me from him. It was hard for him to read about my trauma. But he did, because he wanted to show his love for me. He wanted to know what I had experienced, to see the last 30 years through my eyes, even though it was uncomfortable.

And the rest of my family followed suit.

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It was this act of love and caring that got me thinking about what community really means. How being in community with someone means reading their book even if it’s hard. It means eating their food, even if you don’t know if they’re a good cook. It means going to the craft fair and sitting with them, even if you can’t buy their art. It means saving up to buy their art. It means listening to their goals. It means being there for them in ways that are inconvenient, because when you show up for someone when the timing is right for you, it’s not as meaningful as when you make time.

I have observed for many years now how an avoidance of discomfort has become an increasingly center-stage part of American culture that even I find myself drawn to. So many screens are trying to convince us that we don’t need to be uncomfortable. We can escape for just one more viral video, one more swipe of the thumb so we don’t have to think about the things that are causing us pain.

The problems with this behavior of avoidance multiply when people avoid the uncomfortable feelings of showing up for their friends or family members’ vulnerability, sorrows, and achievements.

Because it’s not just about a book. We, as humans, want to trust the people in our community to support us. If something as simple as reading a book is too much discomfort for someone who is supposed to be in community with me, how can I trust that person to fight for me when the stakes are higher? When it’s my citizenship on the line? How can I trust them to defend my name in rooms I’m not in? How can I trust them to defend those who are more vulnerable than I am? Who will they do hard things for?

This whole experience has made me reflect on my own behavior. Am I showing up for others even when it is uncomfortable? How do I show the people I am closest with that they are not alone?

Beyond the hurt, I feel genuine sympathy for those who are not able to withstand the pain people sometimes must go through to show up for the people they love. They do not get to share in the bonds made through standing together and supporting one another.

I’m not sure exactly when, but somewhere along the way, we got so comfortable we forgot that being human is intrinsically an uncomfortable experience. Growth is always painful, but if we can stretch and mold and open our hearts up to what the pain is showing us instead of avoiding it, something magnificent will almost certainly be the result. For seeds, the result is flowers. For winter, the result is spring. For humans, the result is connection.

And truly, what is the point of it all if we can’t experience life, with all its misery and beauty, together?

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