Ivan Shmatko is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Alberta (Canada). Ivan has been a part of the volunteer movement in Ukraine since February 24. He has done research on policing in Ukraine and the imaginaries that shape how police officers see their work and interact with others. His doctoral research project focuses on experiences of newly mobilized soldiers in Ukraine.
War is a black hole, some say. It mercilessly consumes people, time, and money. It feeds on energy stored in the machines, fuel, ammunitions, and society, turning most of this energy to dust. You can never do enough. You can never have enough to fill it. It is a voracious beast that requires enormous resources and efforts to keep it going.
It consumed me as well. At least, the energy I had. I know because I feel the exhaustion growing inside of me (or, should I say, slowly consuming me?). A simple ‘proper’ interaction with another human being became just too much to handle. An everyday ritual of enveloping the gist of the conversation with elaborate scripted phrases and gestures is hardly present in my life anymore. All of the “how are you doing” and “I am so sorry” has almost disappeared from my vocabulary, and my face rarely shows emotions. I am brief and concrete: “What do you want me to do? When?” Hardly a pleasant conversation for people who still live their relatively ‘normal’ lives.
I don’t have the energy to receive your “sorries,” I don’t have the energy to walk around the issue at hand. And I don’t even have the energy to tell you this. I feel that one more word or one more effort to engage my facial muscles may lead to some explosion inside of me. Mainly because there is a constant (this time, non-metaphorical) pressure inside. It accompanies the permanent light headache that I am having in the office and in my bedroom, on the street, in the car, and in a shopping mall.
I wonder what people in other countries feel when they say that they are tired of this war. I envy their ability to escape and switch their attention to something else. Do they feel this pressure growing inside of them? Are they tempted to release it?
It must have been harder not to be engaged at the beginning of the war, though. People who left Ukraine after February 24 seemed to lose their mind scrolling the news from morning until night, reading about death and destruction hour after hour, and not being able to do anything about it. It felt nice, in contrast, to hop into your car, pack it with bulletproof vests and meds, and drive for hours to Kyiv, Kryvyi Rih, or Dnipro. You regained not just your sanity but also restored some sense of agency, stolen by the invading empire.
Some months into the war, after the ‘adrenaline’ has gone down, I feel that fighting for your agency and sanity requires quite an effort. The cost is that you are not quite you anymore. Is this how getting tired of the war looks like in Ukraine? Perhaps, for some. It is hard to tell.
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Sociologist Randall Collins introduced the concept of “emotional energy” – a resource that emerges out of our everyday rituals. Successful rituals produce high amounts of emotional energy, making us feel satisfied, energized, and even ecstatic sometimes. It drives us to be active, show initiative, and be creative. We store some of the emotional energy from successful everyday rituals in symbols that remind us of those encounters and, possibly, even moments of collective effervescence – the moment of pleasure from losing oneself in a conversation or, perhaps, a rally, a sports game on a stadium, collective singing of an anthem. We load material and immaterial objects with memories and associations that refer us to those social pleasurable experiences.
I wonder what the war does to our storages of emotional energy? How does it deplete them? Simply by requiring you to excessively spend it? By attacking the symbols we hold dear? By disrupting the daily routine of ritual interactions? Or by requiring us to spend more and more empathy on all those who are caught in this tsunami of suffering that we call war?
Certainly, as a volunteer, you know that you cannot save everyone. You also know that your emotional resources are limited in the face of the stream of suffering that seems endless. You simply can’t fundraise enough to provide everyone with a bulletproof vest, a tourniquet, or night vision. That means that someone will die – someone who would have lived had you fundraised some extra six hundred dollars. But this is an endless process: if you had done that, then you would feel that another six hundred dollars were achievable. And then another one. And then another.
You can never do enough. You can never have enough.
So, you draw some red lines not to go mad in the process. You say to yourself that you cannot save everyone. Even if you don’t sleep, spend everything you have, and do absolutely everything you can, thousands and thousands would need more cars, protection, meds, and everything one can imagine. And so you draw that line fully knowing that you draw it, very possibly, with someone’s blood.
Quite often you draw it too far. You draw it right where there is a limit to what you can do. And when you do, you find yourself in a place of that very pressure that is building inside of you, consuming you, and making you afraid of what the release will look like.
How you can help: Come Back Alive (Повернись живим) is probably the most reputable Ukrainian organization that helps Ukrainian defence efforts.