The War-Life Balance: Freelancing While Adapting to a Wartime Reality Veronica Morozova | Contributing Writer
“Hey, are you there? Russia has started bombing Ukraine. I spoke to our family and they’re all alive, thank God. I cannot believe this.”
I’ll never forget the first text I read on the morning of February 24. By the time I woke up, it had already been four hours since Russia attacked Ukraine. My sister was frantically trying to call me at night, but I had been blissfully asleep. I haven’t had a night of undisturbed sleep since.
As I shot out of bed and rushed to turn on the news, my phone went haywire with text after text. Seventy five unread messages and 22 missed calls. And there it was, highlighted in red, on BBC News — confirming what I had hoped was a mistake: ‘Russia attacks Ukraine.’ Since that day, life for Ukrainians split into two: life before the war, and life after the war. I sat on my sofa crying and watching the news in the safety of London — I moved here in 2008 for University and have lived here since — and felt an overwhelming sense of guilt for not being with my family in Kyiv. Although I’d built my life in the UK, Ukraine was always home. My beautiful home was now under attack.
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I finally managed to get a hold of my relatives that afternoon to find out a little bit more about what was going on— no one had been harmed, but my parents were trapped in the worst possible location. The town where they lived was almost immediately occupied by the Russian forces, and there was virtually no chance for them to escape. I felt completely shell-shocked and lost. On top of it all, I had a big deadline looming, and since I could hardly get my thoughts straight, let alone work, I picked up my phone and texted my client: “I’m so sorry, but I’m going to have to take time off.”
