January 12, 2016

The daily battle with fear and conditioning

"Do this. Do this. Do this. Don't do this. You're not doing it right. Do it like this. I said, like this. Do this. Do this." The constant directing and scolding and reprimanding that starts early eradicates something in you, the rush of spontaneity, the impulse to have fun, to simply jump around and do nothing and be happy for no reason but being alive. The fear sets in. "I'm not doing this right. I'll be scolded. I better do a good job." Girls get the heavy end of the stick. When boys are allowed to "be boys" which is total bullshit, girls are taught to confirm, to be good girls, and to watch boys have fun as reward.

"Don't you dare come home dirty. Shame on you. Dirty as a boy. Go wash yourself." We can't get into fights. We can't tear or stain our clothes. We can't masturbate. God forbid we get caught. With boys it's inderstandable, "They have the urge." Which is another bullshit myth that we've been fed. Biologically a woman's libido is stronger, if we're reduced to talking about ourselves as animals. Which is yet another bullshit underneath the first bullshit. When we talk gender we reduce it to biology to hide behind bogus ideas.

November 6, 2015

Coming into your own power

by Ksenia Anske

To have power you have to believe you can have it, and for that you have to know you're worth it, and for that you have to love yourself. The amount of self-love is proportionate to what we harness in childhood. How much have we been given, how much have we retained, how much of it was beaten out of us by parents, well-meaning strangers, institutions. At one point in our adult lives we face this dilemma for the first time: the first time we get dumped, get fired, have someone die on us, suffer an irreparable loss. In these times we look to those in power and wish we were like them. "If only I had that kind of money," we think, "if only I had that kind of a family," "if only my health was that good," "if only I were that pretty," and so it goes, ad infinitum.

We keep looking in all the wrong places until some kind soul tells us to look inside our grief-stricken chests. Some of us were lucky enough to have been told this early enough in life to have had the time to dig through the crap and get rid of most of it. But those of us who weren't as lucky, those of us who got very little love growing up have the hardest time and sadly sometimes never find it, that path to the power (which is paved with shit-bricks, by the way).

October 5, 2015

Abuse destructs creativity and delays your development as an artist

by Ksenia Anske

I don't talk about this anymore, or not as often, as the hotness of it, the sting, the pain and the anger are behind me, but there is not a day that goes by when I don't feel the effect the abuse I have endured as a child has had on my life. It delayed my blooming, my physical, emotional, and intellectual development. But sometimes something would jar me, poke me, and remind me of it. This time what poked me was Americanah, the book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that I started reading the other day, and Adichie's TED talk on feminism.

If you can think of a bird, a young weak fledgeling that crawls out of the broken shell, and if you can imagine what would happen to that fledgeling if it doesn't get proper care, if it's not fed like its brothers and sisters are fed, if it's beaten and pecked at daily, you can predict that this fledgeling will be the last to chirp and the last to learn to fly and maybe it will crash to its death on the first try because the bones in its wings are broken. But now imagine that it did learn to fly, despite its shortcomings, only it learned much later, and every move of its wings sends painful spasms down its nerves but it perseveres and it struggles and it does it. It gets better and better. Yet it's easy to break it. It's not whole. It's injured for life and any wind that's too strong and any cliff that's too high might be its ruin.

September 7, 2015

The moment I decided to become a writer

by Ksenia Anske

Quite often in interviews I get asked about the moment I decided to become a writer and I always get stumped because I can't remember a precise moment when it hit me out of the sky: I WANT TO BECOME A WRITER. And then it did hit me. Not out of sky, but out of my brain. I guess it's been sitting there all along and decided to show up suddenly. So I'll use this post in the future to refer people to when they ask me this question.

And that moment was...while sitting in the movie theater at SIFF 2005 after having just watched the movie Parsley Days. But I'm jumping ahead. Let me give you a rundown off all moments that could be it and weren't it and instead were lost opportunities but that in the end contributed to the moment when it finally happened.

May 10, 2015

I love you, mom

by Ksenia Anske

I called my mom and told her that in US today everyone celebrates their mothers. She laughed. She was pleased there is such a day, because there isn't one in Russia. Before I could say anything else, she told me, "I understand what you wanted from me now, when you were little." I said, "What's that?" She said, "I'm reading this book about the dissociative behavior and where it comes from...I understand you now." I said, "Thank you." This floored me. And something else, too. I realized it was my mother who taught me to seek answers to life's riddles in books. She would always read something to try to understand things. I said, "I'm so glad you're reading it." She told me how under-educated children's psychologists are in Russia, and how her mother in turn liked to put her into a psych ward every time she had one of her "moods."