Select Written Works

Mother: Roots

I've been mulling over writing a post about the power and beauty of the written word for the past few days, but all my thoughts and anecdotes ended up leading to the person who first showed me that to speak well, write well, and read was a priceless skill in itself: my mom. I realized then that today is not a day to write in generalizations; today is a day to write about Mothers.

I'm sure that the big news of the past weekend did not escape you. The USA did all of us proud and elected their first female, POC vice president, an incredible woman who was raised by a single mother. A single immigrant mother. Having one of those myself, you can imagine the buckets of joyful tears I cried watching VP-elect Kamala Harris walk on to the global stage in her suffragette whites and thank her mother in her victory speech. I am not a POC, I am not American, but I too was raised by a mother who put everything on the line to ensure that I had the kind of possibilities she was never afforded, who faced God-knows what kind of fears picking up and moving to a new country with no support system. Having always thought that being raised by a single mom was a barrier to success, I watched that barrier shatter into a million pieces. As I build up the business I've always dreamed of running, I want to give credit where it is due, and tell the story of the woman who made it all possible.

My mom loves to tell me that when I was three and she was painstakingly writing her dissertation on a typewriter, I would sit on her shoulders and ask over and over again "Mama, I wanna type, can I type? I wanna type." This was my first introduction to the process of writing, and it happened long before I was even old enough to know my letters.

I want to appreciate with you the strength it took for a young woman with a nightmare of a toddler, no partner, very little money, living in a 3rd world country to choose the pursuit of higher education and a brighter future over money. Ukraine in the early 1990s was 3rd world poor, only discovering the concept of democracy, and lacking pretty much everything, even a currency. In spite of all of that, my mom chose to pursue the dreams that she knew would enable us to escape poverty.

However, to do this, she had to enroll in a university in a city thousands of miles away, and live in a child-free student dorm. Without a say in the matter, mom was forced to leave me behind in Ukraine with my babushka, my grandmother, and moved to abroad to enroll in the best and only institution in the now former USSR for her field - linguistics. By day, mama worked on her degree, and by night she worked as a tutor to support herself and me. She could only afford to visit me every 4 months or so. As a poor graduate student, she couldn't even afford regular phone calls as the long-distance charges were exorbitant.

Instead, my grandmother would send mom letters and she would read them between classes and work on the metro in tears, heartbroken that she was missing out on the pivotal moments of her only child's life. Any money she had, she would send to support me. When she was able to visit, I often treated her like a stranger because I had already forgotten her. This lasted for three years, and as a result, I have almost no memories of my mom before the age of seven. I don't even have pictures.

I am not a mother, and as such cannot fully comprehend what it felt like to have no choice but to live so far away from your child and miss out on so much of her young life. My mother is too strong and proud of a woman to let me know how much this hurt her, but based on how fiercely I know she loves me I know that the hurt must have been irreparable.

Fast forward 13 years and several international moves later. My mom packed up our entire lives and moved us to Canada, a country I will always be honored to call my adopted home. We had three suitcases between us, knew no one, had very little money and no idea what to expect. Mom was now in her (so sorry for revealing your age, Mama, but it's kind of important for the narrative) late 40s, and had to re-start her career from scratch. Her multiple degrees would not help her earn money in Toronto, so she worked alongside Canadian teens doing menial jobs until she landed the one she is currently in, one that she was born to do, one that she loves.

Mama's hustling skills go way back. In order to get into her BA program in university, she was obligated to work in a factory for a year, putting together transistor radios. Because no one in our family was a high-ranking Communist Party member, because that’s how it worked back then, and the program she wanted to get into was so elite, she had to prove to the Soviet government that she was committed to the Communist cause through hard labor.

My mom’s father, my grandpa, designed tanks and because of his high security clearance their phone was tapped by the KGB her entire life until the collapse of the USSR. Throughout university, she and all her classmates were monitored by the KGB as they were being trained to work with non-Eastern Bloc foreigners - a huge privilege in the USSR. Like so many former Soviet citizens, my mom grew up wanting to escape the constant fear and suppression that surrounded her so that her own children would not grow up with the oppression she did, with the poverty she faced, and with the constant high threat of deportation or, worse, death. To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union the walls had ears and my mom had a loud voice.

Unsurprisingly, she also found a way to buy jeans and Western makeup on the black market, which was incredibly illegal and punishable by jail time. She still maintains that it was worth it. As Kamala said, women like myself and so, so many others stand on the shoulders of giants; of women, like my mother, who fought fearlessly and tirelessly to break barriers. Women who thought nothing of sacrificing everything they had to ensure their little girls knew that they could achieve anything, and to provide them with a better quality of life. Women who pursued education so that they could become their own bosses. Women who encouraged their daughters to try their hand at everything, and to never think that they couldn't do something because of their gender.

And that's my mom in a nutshell. Proud, strong, confident, completely unconcerned by what others may have thought of her ambitions or gender. I am so proud of my mother for building a career from scratch in a brand new country in the latter part of her life. I'm so honored to have inherited my temperament from her - she says it's because of my dad's Southern European roots, but we both know she's kidding herself. I am so happy that my brain is similar enough to hers that we excel in the same fields. I'm so glad that we have the same sense of humor and are able to laugh like idiots together almost on a daily basis, in spite of the fact that we live six timezones apart. I am so grateful that my mother always, without fail, picks up the phone when I call, even when I obnoxiously call her at 6am her time. My mom is always on my team, nay, my mom IS my team.

A day before the 2020 US election began, an American man I barely know asked me how the results could possibly impact me personally, given that I'm not a US citizen and don't live there. Well, Bill, I hope you have your answer now.

Representation matters.

Father: Belonging

Today I spoke to my father for the first time in 5 years. There aren't really many jokes I can crack about that since it's no laughing matter. My therapist can testify to that. It's not unusual to have a complicated relationship with a parent, so I'm going to skip right past that part. But I will say that it was strange to hear his voice again since it's almost a carbon copy of my own. He speaks just as fast, his thought process is just as all over the place, and his asides just as weird. The only difference really is that the private jokes he makes that only he finds funny he says out loud, whilst I say them in my head. This is how I pass for "normal" way better than he does. Although neither of us hold much hope for ever being “normal” - or “neuronormative” as it’s called these days. 

There are a lot of weird or painful holidays for me (Father's Day, Thanksgiving - pretty much anything family-oriented, you get the picture). The biggest and baddest is coming up - Christmas. Somewhere in the confusion of intermittently celebrating (Protestant/Catholic) Christmas on December 25th, New Year's Eve (the big Ukrainian secular present-giving holiday), and the more quiet, family-oriented Orthodox Christmas celebrated on January 7th, I find myself completely emotionally lost in the holiday season. No matter what day I choose to celebrate (and it varies largely on who I’m dating that year) it always feels slightly off. When the world around you is exploding with joyous color, spectacular baubles, and Christmas lights a jaded, sour disposition inevitably makes you the Grinch of any group.

(I’m such a Grinch, I couldn't even get through writing an article about being a 3rd culture kid without whining about the holidays. I’ll save you the bother and roll my eyes at myself right now.) 

My conversation with the man who gave me half his DNA turned into more of an interrogation into our family history on my part than a true father/daughter catch-up. See, I'm a nerd. I love history. I love politics. And even more so, I love that sweet intersection of history and politics which, being Eastern European, is pretty much all we're good for except vodka and pickles, preferably in that order. I'm not going to dive into all my family history because I'm saving that for a novel, but I will say that every branch of my family tree has experienced genocide in the past 100 years. The Bolsheviks and the Nazis even had the good grace to document theirs. Add to that my legal place of birth (USSR/Ukraine), the country where I spent my childhood (Hungary), the state that adopted me as its own (Canada), and the one I'm currently writing this from (The Netherlands) and I really am utterly and completely untethered from any one culture.

And yet, no matter how hard any of us try, none of us can live in a vacuum of our own making. Even now, locked away as we have been in our respective homes during the pandemic, Zoom is making bank because humans are by nature social creatures. Communication in one form or another is what keeps us sane, what keeps us grounded to reality.

When I was studying political science at university, the running joke was asking for a definition of "globalization" (the joke being you can't define a concept that complicated with an elevator pitch - like I said, we were nerds). Although globalization is often positioned as a recent invention right up there with cell phones and bitcoin, it is nothing of the sort. There was never a time when our ancestors did not intermix. (Non-Indigenous, Caucasian) North Americans understand this better than anyone. Many are able to trace their roots to ship manifests and beyond! Lucky. They belong, whether it's based on where they are born, their racial or ethnic identity, their religion.

And then there's us: "3rd culture kids". Kids that grew up in so many different places, absorbing just enough of each different culture to be knowledgeable, yet not enough to truly fit in anywhere. There is nothing inherently special about us; we’re just a byproduct of unusual circumstances. No one sets out to raise a 3rd culture kid because that would be cruel. If we're lucky, we retain enough of a connection to our homeland to still fit in if we try, but that's not always the case. I for one have a passport from a country whose official language I understand but never spoke growing up. Instead, my now native language is one none of my ancestors spoke, one which my mother still speaks with a heavy accent and my father not at all. Worse, my first language is the language of my country’s oppressors.

As long as I can remember, I've wanted to feel like I belong somewhere, even if it's some small boring town in the middle of nowhere. For someone to recognize me as part of their tribe. The closest I came to that recognition was in Canada, but I am under no illusion that that land is my land. That land belongs to the people who were there first, and it sure as heck wasn't anyone from Europe. Canada, such as it is now, adopted me. But like many adoptees, I also crave a biological connection to something. I want to belong. I want to know, to feel the land my ancestors lived on and died defending. Which is exactly why I called my dad. He is the 50% of my DNA that is a mix of Balkan / Baltic / West Asian. He's the reason I don't look anything like my Slavic mom's side of the family. A sense of belonging is integral to knowing who you are, and understanding and appreciating the sacrifices your forefathers and foremothers made to get you to where you are.

My father’s mother was born in a thatch cottage in what was then a distant, forgotten outpost of the Russian Empire. There was no running water or plumbing, let alone electricity. The Bolsheviks came and took everything her comfortably middle-class family owned and forced them under pain of deportation to work the state's land for nothing. They also forbade them to speak Ukrainian, their mother tongue, and forced them to learn Russian instead. Then, they did their best to starve them to death with Holodomor. Luckily for me, like almost everything they tried their hand at, the Communists failed to exterminate our will to live.

Grandma and her siblings were shaved bald until they were teenagers because lice ran rampant through their tiny Eastern Ukrainian village. She had tuberculosis by her late teens due to the freezing cold winters and malnutrition. Even so, when the time came, she signed up to serve and eventually became a Captain 1st Rank in the Red Army during World War II. She was severely injured in battle, suffering medical consequences for the rest of her life. This included several miscarriages and 4 late-term stillbirths before, by some miracle, she gave birth to her only surviving child at the age of 40: my father.

Every time I sink too deep into my problems, I think of the quality of life I have compared to her, and my well of inner strength is refilled as if out of nowhere. Of course, it isn't from nowhere. My babushka’s blood holds the DNA of a survivor and it runs thick through my veins. Her victories and survival belong to me just as any success I may achieve is a result of her resilience and strength. 

My grandmother was laid to rest in Crimea at the age of 86 in 2004. If she had lived another decade, she would have once again seen Russia invade and occupy her homeland.

Sociobiology and Tribalism

Throughout history, tribalism in its many forms has been closely linked to ensuring the survival of an individual’s gene pool. It is one of the key tenets of sociobiology and is defined by the expression of innate emotional and mental ties to the social group an individual is born into. 

Although the concept of the “tribe” as a form of “community” may appear archaic, tribalism continues to dominate the modern world through its impact on domestic and foreign policy, and, as such, it highlights the importance of the study of sociobiology within the context of criminology. 

To find an easy example of modern tribalism at play, one need only to look south of the Canada-US border. The same people that were vehemently critical of President Clinton’s sexual indiscretions in the 1990’s (which, although by some standards immoral, were legal), chose not only to turn a blind eye, but to vehemently throw their support behind Donald Trump, even after his own sexual crimes came to light. This is because, as a species, we are more willing to accept criminal behaviour from our own tribe members than we are from outsiders.  

The United States are far from alone in their modern tribal tendencies. In every country that has conducted studies on incarceration rates, members of some minority groups greatly exceed those for the majority population. In Canada, that minority group is undoubtedly the First Nations population. Statistics Canada states that Aboriginal persons are vastly overrepresented in the correctional system. Moreover, the rates of incarceration have been steadily rising over the past 10 years. In 2016-2017, the proportion of admissions to federal correctional facilities for Aboriginal adults was 27%, in spite of the fact that they comprised only 4.1% of the population. In comparison, in 2006-2007, the proportion of admissions of Aboriginal adults to federal correctional facilities was 19%. Although youth incarceration rates have been steadily declining at a rate of 10% between 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 alone, Aboriginal youth incarceration rates, much like Aboriginal adults, are heavily overrepresented within the corrections system. While accounting for only 8% of the Canadian youth population, Aboriginal youth represent 46% of admissions to Canadian correctional facilities.

 Although there are many historical, sociological, and even geopolitical reasons for the complicated and often deadly relationship between First Nations Canadians and the government, it is evident that tribalism plays a heavy hand. People view ideas and behaviours more positively if those ideas and behaviours were presented to them by members of their tribe, rather than an outgroup. More specifically, members of the same tribe are more willing to accept immoral actions from members of their group than they are of outsiders - even if they are the same exact actions. 

Needless to say, the consequences of tribalism can quickly become socially toxic, and are evident in the world today, not just in Canada, but also the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, China, Russia, among so many others across the world. Our job as citizens is to ensure that, not only are tribalistic tendencies exposed, they are recognized and addressed as such.   

I Am Angry

I am angry. 

I am so angry.

I am angry at an industry that rewards lies and smugness with profit and promotions. I am angry that creativity stands for jackshit. I am angry that innovation might as well be inflammation for all the recognition it gets. All the true innovators are buried so deep under the egos of the Musks and Bezos’ of this world that not only do they not get credit, they get harassed. Does anyone even remember the names of the first scientists to develop the Covid vaccine? How about that they were Germans of Turkish descent? Immigrants, just like so many others in the world fighting for their right to simply exist. 

I am furious that after millennia of human migration anyone has the right to tell anyone to return to certain death rather than offer them help. I hate that, even though I was born in a third world country, I get treated like the cream of the crop because I’m white and sound North American. The shit I get away with because of how I sound and look is an absolute travesty. 

I’m so angry that in 2021 people of color still have to fight to be recognized as people with fundamental human rights: the right to peaceful protest; the right to love and be who they want to be; the right to have the futures they deserve and work for, not the future “society” has deemed them worthy of. I am so disappointed that even in Canada - the peaceful “utopia” according to pretty much every European I’ve ever met - the government cannot admit that they fucked up so badly and for so long, that tens of thousands of innocent children lost their lives under unbearable conditions and were buried in mass graves. 

I’m exhausted that I can count on one hand the number of men I’ve met who recognize that the world they inhabit is inherently different to the one I, a woman, live in. And that it is even worse for women of color the world over. And how every time I see yet another atrocity committed against a woman who looked just like me, who dated a man I could very well have dated, I feel the world closing in and I can’t breathe. Three months ago I was followed home to my own door in one of the safest neighborhoods in one of the safest cities in the world. Which begs the question, “Safest for whom, exactly?”

I’m sick and tired of the role I have to play in the corporate world to be taken even remotely seriously. Why must I change everything about myself - how I dress, my tone of voice, my smile, my personality - to even get a seat on the outskirts of the boardroom table. I am not a competitive person, does that mean there is zero place for me in the workplace? Is there really no space for kindness, for empathy, for understanding there?

Why is what I can offer the world not good enough? I’m educated - overly educated according to some. I’m experienced - too experienced according to others.

What will it take? Do I have to embrace the pursuit of mediocrity that seems to be working so well for others?

I have struggled my entire life to become a better person, not because of what people say or think (someone will always find a reason to hate you so why even bother) but because I truly believe that’s what we were put on this planet to be: the best version of ourselves. 

But what I am angriest of all about is that being a good person is not only not rewarded, it’s a hindrance to success. 

I am 32 years old and I am so fucking angry. 

Employees as Citizens

One of the major challenges at the heart of organizational communication involves how best to define the relationship between organizations and the people who work for them.

To a large extent, organizations have come to treat their employee relationships as transactional. This is not only true in North America where the hire-and-fire culture and reliance on workplace-provided benefits can lead to an undercurrent of expendability in the relationship, but outside the US where organizations often speak of employees as “internal customers.”

While it may be prevalent to treat workforce relationships as transactional, doing so belies some basic realities of what being in the workforce involves:

Agency

Within the framework of established rules, priorities and processes, members of the workforce have the right and opportunity to make their own decisions, particularly when they are working away from detailed supervision

Commitment

Employees with long-term ambitions within an organization generally are committed to its long-term success, and have often staked their own personal commitments on the pursuit of a mutually beneficial relationship. Even contract and temporary employees tend to have a desire to perform well, leave a good impression, and perhaps be invited back.

Connection

The workplace isn’t simply a place where most of its members go, perform individual transactional tasks, and leave. For many participants, work is where many of the most significant activities and conversations in one’s life take place and where many fundamental relationships form

Visibility

Where companies have high visibility, either through wide public brand awareness or because of prominence as a local employer, employees willingly or unwillingly act as representatives of the organization and its brand in the larger community. In that capacity, they engage in conversations about product and service quality, organizational values and the extent to which positions in the organization would be desirable to potential job-seekers.

Given that people in the workforce have considerable discretion over the extent to which they invest their agency, commitment, connection and visibility on the company’s behalf, a one-dimensional transactional model does not neatly apply.

But what is there to replace it?

Citizenship.

The role of an employee within an organization bears much greater resemblance to citizenship than customership because it accounts for agency, commitment, connection and visibility.

Workforce “citizenship” also accounts for the level of “skin-in-the-game” for employees who bet their careers, familial stability and personal reputations on their choice of employer, and because it is sufficiently two-way to balance those factors against organizational objectives, rules, values and governance processes.

A workforce citizenship model doesn’t need to devolve all decision-making to employees.

But it can benefit from acknowledging and addressing the discretion employees do have in executing organizational decisions. Ideally, it can also incorporate the expertise, experience and aspirations of employees as key decisions get formulated.

When I first wrote on this subject nearly ten years ago, both internal and external social media were in their infancy and employee advocacy was anticipated but not yet widely embraced. Indeed, the slower-than-anticipated spread of internal social media and employee advocacy appears to align with organizations’ hesitancy to move beyond transactional thinking about the broader organizational and social roles of their employees.

At the same time, a shift in thinking combined with access to appropriate communication platforms and tools – tools which allow employees to share ideas, content and opinions appropriately in an organizational context – have the potential to help align internal communication with the lived employee experience, and create platforms where employees can be effective citizens inside and outside the workplace walls.

Moving beyond a transactional approach to workplace relations

A Filmmaker’s Review of “Collective” (2019)

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Alexander Nanau’s Collective (2019).

For me as an Eastern European - a Ukrainian at that - Collective is a very important, very tragically beautiful film.

As much as people in America love to complain about their country (and with cause) I have found that it is hard for them to imagine what hardships look like in other places around the world, especially if it involves the idea that poverty looks different in different places. As does wealth. 

That is especially true when it comes to small countries far away that most Americans don’t hear about regularly. It was shocking to me that the same people that get rightfully furious at the injustices in this country were unmoved by the literally toxic injustices in Collective. 

I personally was shaking with rage throughout the film because Collective is an all too familiar story found in a different shape or form in most post-Communist countries over the past 30 years. Corruption seems to be visible in the very ugliest of incarnations in Eastern Europe, and yet a lot of the time the world chooses to hold that against the citizens of countries like Romania, while continuing to view its government as legitimate… which this film proved was so obviously not the case.

The journalists put their own lives and the lives of their families at stake to break a story that I’m fairly certain they knew from the start would not ultimately change anything. I knew it, so I can only assume they did too. How they did not win a Pulitzer for breaking this story, running with it, and persevering in spite of all the odds is beyond me - if that’s not groundbreaking, genre-defining journalism, what is??

Romania is a place that hardship has haunted for generations, and is likely bursting at the seams with stories that deserve telling, no matter how sad the endings are. Not every story has a happy or even a satisfying ending… but that’s how you know it’s real. And real stories are our bread and butter as journalists and filmmakers.

For me, the difference between Collective and many US social injustice genre films is the aspect of pity. I can guarantee you, none of the journalists working on breaking the story in Collective wanted pity from anyone either in Romania, nor the West; support, encouragement, understanding, help - yes. But I never got the impression that any of the characters felt sorry for themselves… except maybe the Minister of Health in the very last scene, but let’s face it, who wouldn’t. American films about social injustice, I feel, build a sense of pity around the victims of the injustice - that is their way of building sympathy in the viewer.

Presumably, on that particular spectrum, I fall under the Eastern European way of connecting to an audience which, if I’m honest, may not be my best feature as a filmmaker. But I’m still learning.