With the New Year approaching, I decided to make a gift for Nadia. The holiday itself was a fitting occasion for it: it allowed me to show some attention naturally, without imposing my presence on her or requiring any reaction in return. I wanted to create a small creative token of attention that could be sent remotely and that would speak about me better than any explanation could.
It was important to me to gradually rewrite the image of me that had already taken hold in her mind. I wanted to show that I was not the person she imagined me to be, but someone creative, someone who understood computer technologies, including 3D graphics. Back in school, I had been fascinated by 3D graphics and animation, so I decided to make a short New Year’s video: her name in a 3D scene, three-dimensional letters, snow, festive effects, a New Year’s greeting, and sound added over it. While I was working on the video, I showed my progress to the client relations manager at the training center. When she watched and approved the finished version, I felt that the video was ready to be sent to Nadya. But there was a problem: I did not have her mobile phone number, and all channels of communication with her were blocked. This was a fact I had to accept.
She had blocked my main VKontakte page, so it was impossible to send ordinary messages from it. But that was not the only issue. She had also closed the option for people outside her friends list to write to her. So even if I registered a new account, an ordinary message still would not reach her. But then I realized something important: a new account still had the ability to send paid VKontakte gifts, and with them, a short text.
It was through such a gift that I managed to tell her about the New Year’s video. I posted the video on the wall of the alternate account, and through a VKontakte gift I let her know about it. In that way, the New Year’s gift at least reached some kind of completion: I could not send her an ordinary message, but I was able to point her toward the gift itself.
After that, I continued using this method. Gifts became almost the only channel through which I could try to explain myself. It was far from ideal, but at the time I had no other way to convey anything to her at all. So I kept doing it, hoping to gradually rewrite the image of me that had already taken hold in her mind.
Nadya herself, obviously, had long since closed this subject for herself and was not going to rewrite the opinion about me that had already formed in her mind.
I understood perfectly well that by sending her VKontakte gifts, I could still seem intrusive. But the alternative seemed even worse to me: if I did nothing at all, the image of a street drug addict would remain attached to me. Through the gifts, I was trying to remove that aura and replace it with another image: even if intrusive, still a normal programmer, a person who studied, worked, understood computer technologies, and was capable of creating something.
At that moment, it seemed to me that the image of an intrusive programmer was still better than the image of a street drug addict. That is why every gift became an attempt to explain myself and show her another version of who I was. I wanted her to at least see that her previous ideas about me might have been wrong, and that the decisions she had made based on those ideas were not necessarily based on reality.
Once, I tried to call Nadya on her home phone. When I heard her voice, something clenched inside me. I could not control my emotions: I was almost paralyzed, frozen by fear. The only thing I managed to say was, “Do you even realize who you’re talking to?” But it came out sounding too frightening, and she hung up.
From my correspondence with Nadya in early 2012, I remembered that her new boyfriend’s name was Ivan. Having access to her page through another account, I decided to look through her friends list for someone with that name who matched the likely age and city. I found a plausible person fairly quickly—Ivan F.—and decided to write to him. My first message was long and candid. In it, I made clear that if I had been wrong in any way, I was prepared to apologize to everyone, although it was extremely important to me to speak with Nadya. I wrote that I recognized my mistakes, described the concept of active repentance, mentioned that I was studying journalism, and tried to convey how important it was to me that Nadya know the truth about me rather than be guided by the distorted ideas that had taken hold in her mind and among those around her.
I had not been mistaken: he really was Nadya’s boyfriend, and he replied. Ivan F. reacted skeptically: “If you study journalism, then you know how to speak eloquently and influence people with words.” I tried to explain that I was speaking sincerely and was not attempting to confuse him, but he remained wary of me.
During our correspondence, Ivan F. told me that I supposedly spent my nights at the police station. The claim genuinely shocked me. I could hardly imagine that Nadya and those around her had formed an image of me so far removed from reality. In response, I told him that I was a programmer by profession. He did not believe me and began asking tricky questions, as though trying to expose me. In doing so, Ivan F. merely confirmed that their circle regarded me as a social outcast, someone detached from reality. I was astonished by how firmly they believed these mistaken ideas. The enormous gap between the image of me they had formed and who I actually was only intensified my anxiety.
When Ivan F. said, “The fact that she left you was her choice,” I felt indignation flare up inside me. He said it so casually, as though her decision had been based on an objective assessment of the situation, whereas I believed it rested on lies, rumors, and distorted information. What angered me most was that they regarded everything as obvious and saw no need to examine what had actually happened.
I tried to explain to Ivan F. that things had turned out as they had because fate had thrown me overboard, and much had gone wrong as a result. Instead of showing understanding, however, Ivan F. replied that this was precisely why he did not want to communicate with me. I began to feel that his worldview followed a simple principle: if something bad had happened to a person, then that person must have deserved it. The mere fact that I had been “thrown overboard” therefore seemed sufficient reason for him not to maintain contact with me.
Nevertheless, from time to time I continued writing to Ivan F., telling him new details about myself and the situation. Gradually, his tone began to change. At first he had been hostile and seemed to be looking for an opportunity to catch me in a contradiction, but over time he began asking more neutral questions. It seemed that his confidence in his earlier ideas about me was slowly weakening. This gave me hope: perhaps not everything was lost, and step by step I might be able to change the opinion that had formed about me.
On one occasion, however, Ivan F. expressed an idea that irritated me: if a person was truly successful, he would not try to prove anything to anyone but would easily forget people, respond coldly to failure, and simply move on. In this remark, I heard not so much his personal opinion as a widely held social attitude. Yet it seemed too simplistic to me because it failed to distinguish between different situations. It is one thing to accept a failure or one’s own mistake and move forward. It is quite another to understand that people have rejected not you yourself, but an invented image of you that does not correspond to reality. In such a case, the desire to dismantle that false image and restore the truth cannot be regarded as evidence of a lack of success. I therefore did not consider the rule that a successful person must always leave everything in the past to be universal. Achievements, moreover, do not make feelings disappear or deprive past experiences of their significance.
In one of our conversations, Ivan F. also mentioned a video I had recorded for Nadya in 2012 or 2013. Apparently, I had sent it from another account during the period when I was still able to write to her that way. In the video message, I sincerely tried to explain that I had been deceived and was not to blame for what had happened. I hoped that this would allow me to tell her how events had unfolded from my point of view and perhaps resolve the misunderstandings between us.
Ivan F. then told me that nearly their entire group had watched the video and perhaps had not taken it seriously. It had been a personal message to Nadya, and it hurt to realize that she had shown it to other people. The thought that my sincere words had become the property of an entire group and might have provoked ridicule left me feeling bitter and disappointed.
Ivan F. continued to express doubts about my mental soundness and viewed everything through that assumption. He therefore doubted even that I had any friends at all. In response, I immediately sent him messages exchanged with the guys from Tushino, with whom I was actively socializing at the time. I also mentioned that I had students of my own whom I taught programming. Such facts clearly created an inner conflict for him, as reality repeatedly contradicted the ideas about me that had already taken hold in his mind.
My communication with Ivan F. became another turning point in my life. It was during this period that the idea of writing a book came to me again. The thought was not new—it had long been in the back of my mind—but now I understood with increasing clarity that I had to tell and bear witness to everything that had happened to me. There was a profound discrepancy between what had actually happened and what other people believed about me. A book seemed the only way to tell my story as a whole rather than trying to explain it in disconnected fragments. I felt that unless I recorded my version of events, this inner dissonance would continue to weigh on me. The book was supposed to relieve that tension by explaining and revealing all the strange and unusual circumstances in which I had found myself. Yet I still could not begin writing it because the story itself was continuing. Events were still unfolding; I was not in a state of calm and could not look back far enough to understand and recount everything as a coherent whole. I had not yet reached the point of inner and temporal distance from which books of this kind are usually written.
All of this became one of the first pieces of lived material for my future philosophy. At that time, I did not yet have philosophical terms for it, and I could not shape what was happening into a system, but the mechanism itself had already been given to me through experience. In the way Nadya, Ivan F., and their circle related to me, a clear structure could be seen: for them, it was not I myself who existed, but a phantom image of me, a certain model that they mistook for reality itself. Moreover, this model kept confirming itself. If I had been “thrown overboard,” then for Ivan F. that very fact did not become a reason to understand what had happened, but an additional confirmation of his previous picture: there was “something wrong with me,” and therefore contact should be avoided. The false picture was not being tested against reality; on the contrary, it used any event as material for its own self-confirmation.
That is why my attempts to show the mismatch between their ideas and reality were not merely attempts to justify myself before specific people. This was the first living form of what I am doing now in my philosophical project: I show that the model is not equal to reality, that a person is not equal to someone else’s phantom image of him, and that the map, to use Alfred Korzybski’s well-known formula, is not the territory.
