Julia Kolodova

Julia tells us about how she realizes that she slowly enters the world of adults, how she is slowly gliding into the life of a general citizen, a life in which one gets married, has children and does all the things one is expected to be doing. And that she does not like this development. She says that she always says yes to people, that in fact she would love, if all the people who are pushing her in this direction of “adulthood” should just leave her alone. She spends so much time with these people that she has lost the sense of what she really wants. The only thing she knows, is that the development that is taking place with her right now feels wrong. This makes us think of the difference of yes and no and what it means to say yes for real; that not until you dare to say no to a person, are you really free to say yes; a completely committed yes. She doesn’t really understand what I mean, so I elaborate that you really get to know people and their commitment towards you, when you say no to them. After saying NO and they don’t abandon you, but give you the space to be different, only then you can be your true self with them. We continue talking about the fact that act of communicating with people and spending time with people is also associated with the danger of losing the connection with oneself, the danger of having the voices from the outside drown out the inner voices. So I tell her that the inner voice or the sense of self can only be felt, if one spends some time alone, some time in silence to connect with that inner self.

Later in the group, Julia speaks about silence, but a different silence. She speaks about her silence she feels trapped in, the silence which forces her to live the life she does not identify with, the silence which she does to not offend anyone, to fit into the social structure. The group wants her to do a project which encourages her to create more free space around her, a project which encourages her to break that silence she describes, but she uses the clock, the seven minutes I had calculated which everybody should have to talk about their project as an excuse to be silent again and, unfortunately, that is the last thing we would ever hear of her.

On the day of presentation, when everybody showed their project in the streets, she appears with a big smile, as we know her apologizing that she was unable to participate due to all the exams she had to prepare for, as this week was unfortunately also the week of exams at the university. But with great excitement and offering great support, she visits all the sites of her fellow workshop members and is so happy to see all of it.