Sense of Belonging: Finding Myself Through a Shifting Identity

Identity, they say, is the set of qualities, beliefs, personality traits, and expressions that define a person or group. It takes root in childhood, as self-concept starts to form, and it weaves through each stage of life like a thread in a long, unfinished image. But what happens when that thread begins to fray? When the weave feels less like one whole cloth and more like patched-up fabric?

For as long as I can remember, identity was a question with a clear answer. I was Russian. Born in a small city with red bauxite soil, I grew up watching my father work as a journalist, my mother tally numbers as an accountant, and myself - a quiet girl who read, imagined, and lived in stories. Reading sparked a habit of trying on identities like clothes, letting each character add a new layer. Through books, I learned how identity could be crafted, adjusted, sometimes even borrowed.

When I went to university, it felt like an achievement I hadn’t dared hope for. Coming from a small town, it felt like stepping into another world. I was quiet, shy, with few hobbies beyond reading. But suddenly, I could experiment. In those years, I tried to be mysterious, to listen to obscure music, and even, for a time, claimed horseback riding as a hobby - though I’d never even touched a saddle. My attempts at changing who I was, at embracing a different side of myself, felt bold and strange. It was both exhilarating and uncomfortable, a first attempt at expanding beyond the Russian girl I’d always been.

Years later, another shift: Germany, for graduate school. I found a new confidence there. I stopped hiding my sarcasm and learned to be openly proud of my Russian roots. The distance from home did something to my perspective, making me protective of my culture, my heritage, my Russianness. I’d debate professors, insist on understanding Russia’s history, even defending aspects of the Soviet Union - an argument I wouldn’t entirely stand behind now.

In my youth, Russia’s history shaped me profoundly. I believed we needed a steady leader, even a “tsar” for stability. I participated in protests for fair elections in 2012, believing that, flawed as it was, the system was ours. But when Maidan protests broke out in Ukraine, and Crimea was annexed, something changed in me. My perspective on Russia’s politics shifted, and so did the core of my identity. What was I defending? Was I tied to a narrative that no longer fit my beliefs?

A decade later, I find myself in Finland, watching Russia from afar as freedom of speech, media, assembly, and even love slip away, with the war in Ukraine as the heaviest weight. The Russia I grew up in - the Russia that shaped me - has morphed into something I barely recognize. And in this transformation, my relationship with my Russian identity became a knot of conflict, guilt, and loss.

​In July 2020, our daughter was born, right in the middle of the pandemic. The experience of raising a “pandemic baby” was challenging and isolating, and I sank into a difficult postpartum period. Those early months were heavy, marked by exhaustion and an unexpected distance from my own daughter. Therapy and the comforting recitation of old Russian poems helped. Slowly, I began introducing Russian into our lives, hoping to pass on a piece of my own language, my culture, to her.

Then, in 2022, with the war in Ukraine, my relationship with my Russian identity shattered. The weight of guilt, of complicity, was immense. I decided to stop speaking Russian to my daughter. The timing was surreal - a week after the war began, I found out I was pregnant with my son. He was born in December 2022, and I haven’t spoken Russian to him. Where does one identity end and another begin?

​For so long, my identity was simply “Russian.” Then, it was ‘journalist’, ‘Russian’, ‘media manager’, ‘mother’, ‘wife’. With each change, a piece of myself felt scraped away, leaving raw, unfamiliar edges. In 2022, I found myself unemployed and grappling with motherhood amid an identity crisis. Every label felt heavy, too heavy, as I struggled to figure out which identities were mine to keep.

Some days, I feel I’m only a collection of parts I’ve taken on and shed, leaving me somewhere in between the person I once was and the person I’m yet to become. Maybe that’s what identity truly is - an ever-changing self, shifting with life’s currents. Perhaps, like a work in progress, it is enough just to be in the process.
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And so, here I am now, standing at a new crossroad of identity. Today, if someone were to ask who I am, I would have to say: I am “complicit.” I am “guilty.” Reading Karl Jaspers' essays on guilt has stirred something within me, drawing haunting parallels between Germany in the 1940s and the Russia I come from today. When this war ends, there will be a reckoning - a moment when Russians will have to confront this guilt, not as a legal matter, but as a moral one. We will have to accept that we stood by as atrocities unfolded, and even if standing up would mean prison or death, the moral burden doesn’t disappear. It is a weight we must carry, regardless of whether we had the power to stop the war.

Today, I believe in being “guilty by association.” Acknowledging this doesn’t ease the pain, but somehow, it helps me keep going. Accepting complicity in this way, even as an immigrant far from home, allows me to live with a sense of purpose - a promise, maybe, to work toward understanding, even reconciliation, for a part of my identity that can never fully leave me.

Written by: Evgeniia Makhalina