Given My Life Back
Blog post 3. The Battle between Apollo and Dionysus.
Today my maternal grandfather would have turned eighty-seven, had cancer not taken him just a few months after his sixtieth birthday. Continuing the Jungian theme, he was the earthly incarnation of the Apollo archetype in our family—an athletic automotive engineer with an array of intellectual hobbies, all particularly costly in Soviet times.
He left us a vast collection of books, coins, and art reproductions—some of which have now migrated from our 1896 bungalow by the railway tracks in Ukraine to my own 1895 railway station master’s cottage in England. Among them, a particular treasure: a Rhinoceros drawing from an album of Albrecht Dürer’s sketches, for which he once paid nearly half his monthly salary—forty Soviet rubles. The bookshop director, an almost royal figure in those days, rewarded grandad with his curiosity and a handshake when the purchase was made.
I can imagine how that felt. I experienced something faintly similar when I curtsied and shook hands with Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, at the Buckingham Palace Garden Party in 2018. That handshake, I can assure you, was earned through several hours of small talk without access to alcohol—enduring conversations about a high-ranking vet’s IBS and the unparalleled beauty of RHS gardens—while maintaining the poise expected of the intelligentsia. That label was, I suppose, my birthright: I’m the fourth or fifth generation in my family to attend university and enter a “respectable” profession.
Yet in truth, I’ve always felt more aligned with what the British now call—some would say rather offensively—a chav. I grew up in the hood, where boys strutted in counterfeit Abibas tracksuits and girls balanced on ten-inch heels in Tally Weijl’s “Totally Sexy” collection. My teenage romances unfolded in playgrounds after dark—climbing fences into kindergartens whilst being “insured” (that is, checked out) from behind by my knight in shining polyester. Our cocktails weren’t Sex on the Beach or Long Island Iced Tea but the lethal alchemy of Blagoff green apple vodka and Sprite—or, worse, cheap cognac mixed with cherry juice, a “one of your 5-a-day” concoction that could result in projectile vomiting onto a downstairs neighbour’s windowsill if the party happened to be in the flat. Sex on the Beach was more of a Quickie in the Bushes – and that’s if we were lucky, and did not end up using bushes for basic needs (a penny, not a pound), vomiting, or escaping a drunken argument.
That digression paints the backdrop of a lifelong battle: Apollo, the god of order, reason, and perfection, warring against Dionysus, the god of chaos, passion, and wine.
The conflict began around age fifteen, when I noticed a minor cosmetic flaw that spiralled into a dietary “adjustment,” and then into a full-blown eating disorder—thankfully never requiring hospitalisation, though sadly never recognised either. Instead of softening my perfectionism, Apollo seized the reins: I would study my way out of it. I swapped journalism for nutrition and psychology, determined to master the thing that was devouring me.
One careless comment — “you’ve got a bit of cellulite on your thighs”— uttered one summer afternoon in 2008, became a prophecy. It dictated the next decades of my life. Now, as an eating disorders assistant psychologist, I sit across from young women fighting their own Apollonian battles, helping them make peace with their bodies—and, by extension, with themselves. Challenging their obsession with control has forced me to confront my own.
My fixation on a narrow weight range, I’ve realised, was less vanity than inheritance. It was loyalty to my grandfather’s ideal of the body: strong, capable, athletic. My mother once told me he could be a bit of a misogynist—perhaps the consequence of feeling unwanted by his own mother. Yet he held himself to the same standards. The scar across his chest was from lung resection surgery in his youth, an imperfection he sought to “correct” through sport and discipline. Maybe that’s why, weeks after my first brain and then pancreatic surgeries, I found myself at the gym—determined to recover faster, stronger, unaided. Sympathy still feels like weakness.
Grandad died when I was only six, but some memories have outlived him. One resurfaced years later during Schema Therapy, when I was asked to revisit it through imagery rescripting. I was four, walking with him at dusk. The stars had just appeared. He took my hand and said softly, “You are my moon.” To which I, small and inexplicably irritated, replied, “I’m not your star, and I’m not your moon!”. I don’t remember whether I cried afterward, but I still feel the guilt of rejecting tenderness from the man I loved most.
When my therapist asked, “What would you rather he had called you?” I said, “Just Anechka. Or Anyuta.” A diminutive form of my real name, without celestial embellishment. Even at four, I didn’t want to be idealised. I just wanted to be loved for being me - as banal as it sounds.
The higher Apollo pulls me toward perfection, the harder Dionysus drags me back into chaos. Between them, the pressure builds—sometimes to unbearable levels. I’ve even developed my own private theory that the pressure inside my skull, the one caused by that fast-growing second brain tumour, was Apollo and Dionysus finally reaching detonation point.
But perhaps that’s a story for another day.
Given My Life Back
Blog post 2. From 200 to 10k: on Jung, Black Holes and Gratitude
The title of this post refers both to the increase in the number of steps I’ve managed to take in the past two weeks and to the quiet gratitude I feel simply for being alive. (Yes, I know—cheesy. Perhaps they turned on a sentimentality setting during the brain surgery.)
About eighteen months ago, I stumbled into Jungian psychology. It was another of my characteristic switcheroos: from agreeing wholeheartedly with my CBT therapist that psychoanalysis was an outdated, unevidenced, and expensive chat—“patient treated equals patient dead,” as the saying goes—to discovering a way of understanding not just the psyche, but also art, religion, and, most intimately, my own dreams.
Dreams were absent for most of my hospital stay, except for the night before surgery and the morning of discharge. What filled their place was something closer to a metaphysical terror: a fear of falling into a black hole and being trapped there alone forever—or emerging as cosmic spaghetti, the one thing I remember from Stephen Hawking’s Brief Answers to the Big Questions.
It felt like what mystics describe as the “dark night of the soul”—that threshold of annihilation one crosses before reaching enlightenment. I doubt I’ve reached enlightenment (I can barely reach my shoelaces some mornings), but perhaps this was my encounter with the Great Mother archetype: the devouring force that dismembers before it transforms.
As an aspiring head-shrinker, I tried to turn that fear into curiosity. One night, I imagined the pain in the back of my skull as a small, lit chamber—a closet glowing softly from within. A voice there told me, “Because you are alive, there is someone out there who wants you and is looking out for you.” That image steadied me enough to drift off to sleep, sparing me from the edge of psychosis that so often follows exhaustion and pain.
A few nights later came a different vision: I dreamt of spending the night in the house of my Animus—the inner masculine figure Jung spoke of. I was sitting, somewhat absurdly, on a toilet (this motif persists) telling myself, “I’m back and I’m the same person.” Hours later, after a few on the operating table, that turned out to be true. I was back. And, astonishingly, I was still myself.
The night before discharge brought another kind of revelation. After a hellish stretch of sleeplessness, bright lights, and cortisol sweats—and after my ward-mate Sue tried to walk to the toilet unassisted, nearly falling while I watched helplessly—I was too spent even to cry. Once again, Orthodox Christian organ music came to the rescue, coaxing me into a fragile sleep.
In that sleep, I dreamt I was walking down a dark corridor, away from two assistant psychologist colleagues and toward my husband. I knew I was supposed to conduct a neuropsychological assessment, but I couldn’t—I was, after all, recovering from a brain operation. I overheard my colleagues complaining about having to do the WAIS themselves, and—true to my anankastic personality—I turned back to help.
As I walked through the darkness, another scene unfolded: a father holding his laughing baby as they jumped onto the back of a moving train. The baby, old enough to understand the danger, laughed with pure, unrestrained joy. In that moment, I realised: life is this—joy in motion, laughter in danger, love in the absurd. I woke up crying as the headphones in my ears played “Hallelujah.” (The voices were musical, not hallucinatory, I promise.)
Now, each time I watch the sunrise through my bathroom window, I whisper spasibo—thank you—in my native Russian. I’ve lived in England for fourteen years, but that word still feels truest. It roots me in gratitude, not in politics.
“The Great Mother always wants you,” a Jungian therapist once said in a video I half-understood months ago. Now, I understand completely.
Given My Life Back
Doctors have given me my life back. What am I doing with it? Blog post 1: 10 days after surgery
Ten days ago, my chances of non-survival—or of surviving with severe impairment—were estimated at somewhere between one and five percent, depending on which doctor spoke to me. Yet, as the neurosurgeon who operated on me said, “When you’re the one lying there, one percent is a hundred percent.” In that light, I suppose my odds were fifty-fifty: I would either live or I wouldn’t. And on some of the days leading up to the operation, that felt about right.
The pressure inside my skull was rising like steam in a sealed cooker, and there was no way to lift the lid. The day before surgery, I could only shuffle to the nearby toilet with a Zimmer frame—just a month earlier I’d been running seven kilometers at a sub-five pace.
Fast forward ten days, and I’m sitting in my sunlit conservatory, surrounded by fields, fresh flowers, and “get well soon” cards. I can walk, talk, cook, eat, and even manage simple bodyweight exercises. I feel largely myself again—minus the fatigue of four weeks of fractured sleep and a touch of ataxia. Balance-wise, I move like a cobra swaying to a snake charmer’s tune, and my clumsiness has achieved diagnostic status. Still, I can go to the toilet on my own now, which accounted for roughly half my happiness in the hospital. Dignity, I’ve learned, is the first thing to leave when you become a patient.
What carried me through the darkest hours—of which there were many?
The knowledge that my child would not have to endure this. She has not inherited my faulty gene, making me, mercifully, the only black sheep in the family.
The quiet wisdom of a kind healthcare assistant, Deborah, who shaved my hair before surgery. “With health and wealth,” she said, “there’s always someone better off than you, and someone worse off.” I chose to focus on the latter, and that downward comparison—strange as it sounds—helped me endure.
Music. Good old 80s new wave (I’m currently obsessed with Paul Janz’s I Go to Pieces), and—somewhat surprisingly—Christian hymns. Silent Night sung by Frank Sinatra, and solemn Orthodox organ music, soothed me before the operation and through the long, sleepless nights that followed.
And what, now, makes life worth living? Beyond the love that surrounds me, it’s the small things: autumn walks under a forgiving sun, the sudden bloom of a rosebud I thought long spent, the quiet rediscovery of wonder in the ordinary.
I no longer take life for granted—not because I nearly lost it, but because I finally understand how fragile it always was.