Life, Love & Other Lessons Learned

Chapter 1

Trust is a special thing. As delicate as the petal of a rose, when you give it to someone, you ultimately are hoping that they will treat it with as much care and respect, in that by giving them your trust, you are giving them a special gift of yourself. In ideal circumstances that gift is treated as a precious, valued item and treated with the utmost of care. On the other hand, there are times when you find yourself placing such trust in a person(s) and in the end, you find yourself wishing you never had. It is this lesson that would ultimately be the realization for a young woman but to begin, the broader picture would need to be considered. For her, this would be a lesson that would formulate the manner in which she would look at future events in her life but, in the hopes of not getting too far ahead, it would be best to begin, as they say, at the beginning.

For Katya, she was always a trusting young girl. To her, people were inherently good and with that, she always tried to give them the benefit of the doubt when at all possible and, despite the best advice of those around her, she would often be described as having a soft skin and more specifically, a soft heart. A summation of her personality that she externally tried to portray as being something that was maybe largely naïve or open to question but internally, she would largely try and fight with herself on it because, deep down, her hope was to try and always give everything her best, whether it was how she handled her studies and how she addressed other people. Always wanting to be the better person, even to a fault and this battle within her public and private self was something that Katya had gotten quite used to dealing with, even if she didn’t quite understand it. Her hope, from a psychological level, was that the answer would come to her at some point so that she could reach that understanding. From now until then, she would just put one foot in front of the other and do what she needed to do.

As a person of Russian and Irish ancestry, Katya’s family was steeped in tradition and an appreciation for what family and loyalty were about. The sense that honor and integrity were something to be strived for and without it, you’d be less of an individual, no matter what the monetary gains you would make, or how much you would accumulate in terms of worldly goods. For her specifically, people were not to be defined by the quantity of their wallet, or their belief that their ability to be harsh and cruel to someone around them is the best possible manner in which to be considered to be a strong and capable individual for, to any other person, to behave in such a manner that makes someone else feel like you think you are better than them, would only make you nothing more than a bully and a simple thug.

For young Katya, this was something that she firmly believed was not a desirable trait in someone and as a result, found herself formulating her viewpoint on people as a result. In many ways, this would make it difficult at times for her to feel like she could trust anyone. If anything, it would often leave her feeling like she was closed off in many ways from other people, in that she would find herself wondering what peoples motives were and that kind of attitude is not exactly conducive to being able to form new relationships by any means. This is something that Katya would have to take as a day to day basis and continue to grapple with.

When you go about meeting someone, the best hope is to believe that they will, at the very least, meet your expectations of what a good and decent person is and in the end, it’s often quite common to hope for more from the people that we meet as they enter into our lives. Despite the fact that those expectations are common and many have those, to a large degree, having expectations can often lead to disappointments. No one is perfect, despite how much we try to strive for perfection, very few if any achieve it and for those that do, it only comes with sacrifice in one form or another.

Luckily in Katya’s case, she hadn’t been faced with this yet, for she was largely sheltered by a group of people around her that sought to ensure that she would be able to retain her youthful idealism for as long as she could. The idealism that sought to instill the beliefs that people, at their core, could be seen as being good and decent at heart. While not necessarily realistic, for that people are prone in their own ways to be vulnerable to influences that can jade and alter their sensibilities, Katya’s close family and friends hoped to give her the presence of mind to feel that people could be that way for as long as was possible, so that she wouldn’t have to be subjected to the harsh realities of life before she was ready. To ultimately try and make sure that she was happy and hopeful for as long as possible and thanks to the effort of these individuals, she was able to have that and it would serve her well.

As time would move on, the environment would change and as such, slowly but surely Katya would come to find out just how different people can be and it would give her the ability to learn and grow in a manner that would shape multiple facets of her life in ways that she would have otherwise not thought possible. Granted, some of these lessons would be hard and to a large degree, extremely painful to deal with on both the psyche and the heart but for Katya, her resilience would be found through the struggles and, as she would move forward in her life leading to just before she would draw her last breath, she would be able to find it in herself to be grateful for these lessons in that, even though they were hard and hurt at different intervals and different magnitudes, the lessons taken away would be found to have been worth the strife endured.

Different stimuli have the ability to bring about different experiences and lessons for the people that are a part of the event(s) taking place. People that cause us to look at ourselves closer and to consider the following; who we are, what we want and in all reality, why are we on the path that we are as we go about trying to live? Katya fell back upon this question a lot because, like most people her age and probably others, at least from what she assumed, her biggest life questions always seemed to stem back to the fact that her biggest psychological question stemmed from her curiosity about how life would bring certain things into focus, while other things would take longer to understand. As she would put together in her own mind, this would seem to be a logical question to consider, as it would fit along the concept of why we find ourselves on the paths that we do in life, being that those paths would seem to stem from how some things would be easier to understand, while other things did not.

We all have people in our lives that have the ability to experience these events with us. Those that become our advisors and friends and with those roles, act as guides that help us as we move along and try to live. The people that care for us encourage us and yes at times, ridicule us. For this young girl, there would a special friend in particular that would fill this role and someone that Katya would come to rely upon heavily. A gentleman that would make her laugh, who would teach her and also, someone that would challenge her like no other and with that, give her reason to wonder sometimes if she was crazy, or just not quite getting it. This individual will come into better focus but before that, it would be better to first get an understanding of Katya as a person before seeking to understand her growth and where her life would ultimately take her moving forward.