About me, Lena Nechet, L∃N∀
In this section, I have a more informal and personal self-description: my values and origins, and selected autobiographical stories from childhood to adult life.
The first 7 defining words (nouns) I would choose to describe myself:
- Artist - an abstract fine art painter and portraitist, enchanted by photography and videography. I always knew I would paint, but it took a couple of life-threatening events to make me drop almost everything else and dare to dive into "useless" creation. I am obsessed with composition and color and have always been.
- Fruitarian - long-term, since 18, which suggests a lot about my lifestyle: predominantly fresh fruit and seeds-based vegan diet, environmentally-friendly attitude, avoiding buying too much, etc. I ran large ethical online communities. I still minimally maintain the data from the Fruitarian's Network. In the past, I paid other people to plant thousands of trees and supported wildlife protection and animal rescue causes. Recently, I got a chance to start a small orchard, which still requires some foundational work. Now, I have propagated and planted many perennial plants myself. I donate to independent media that educate people about legal changes they can support to make the Earth more life-friendly on a global scale.
- Humanist - who can criticize the hell out of the current humanist manifesto :) I am a secular person with a deity-independent moral code. I was baptized Orthodox Christian in a long ceremony in an old monastery upon the kind request of my grandmother. Still, I am a lifelong non-theist: agnostic regarding knowledge and atheist regarding belief - science and character-based. I am unwilling to be mentally subordinate. I will protect everyone's right to believe in anything they want though for the sake of the freedom of mind. What do I believe?
- Polyglot - as a multilingual person, I spoke several languages, and this experience made my thinking more independent from grammatical and cultural conditioning, I believe. The need to set my mind free by verbal expression made me a poet at 13, and I used this tool in each language I knew sufficiently well.
- Web Developer - I love the internet. I was happy with server programming for several years, regarding it as an art without emotions. I still enjoy it now and then. I like its clear logical structures, immediate results, and practical application of math. I am painfully aware of the loss of freedom, monopolization, and prevalence of misinformation and junk content on our networks. I try to do my part in fixing it.
- Investor - as a university student, I started investing risky and early with currencies and commodities and later transitioned into mid-term stock trading, followed by index funds (ETFs). My degree is in economics, and this is how I used it. Risk-taking gives me thrills, and I need to guard myself against passionate moves (e.g. I lost a lot on alternative energy stocks). I dislike being in debt, so I never had any serious liabilities. I believe that financial fluency and access to markets and capital-building instruments are essential rights in modern society.
- Female - I am a serially monogamous heterosexual woman, who seeks the depth of intellectual and erotic connection with one man at a time. I am rarely physically attracted to anyone and seldom meet people with whom I see the potential to experience what I want. Nonetheless, mutual love is not only my only "drug" of choice, I prioritize it in life decision-making. Friendship is of almost the same importance to me, but gender plays no role. I am not family-oriented, I never dated casually. My eroticism is directly connected to a person's mind. Now, I am surprisingly happily married, to a guy who also was and stays my friend, for years - we laugh a lot.
If I could use only a few adjectives to describe myself, I would choose these additional words:
- Happy - I am quite joyful most of the time. If I am not in a blissful state, it is usually because of actual difficulties in my life. If those are bad enough, which happened many times, I still cannot stay sad for too long. It feels like I can not allow myself melancholy. Usually, I quickly find ways to force myself out of sadness through action or radical material changes. Luckily for me, I started practicing prolonged meditations (zazen, pranayama, kundalini, etc.) early in my youth and had the time of my life, staring at empty walls. Only war could diminish my joy of life for longer periods.
- Sensitive - in some cases overly so. I used to have extreme color sensitivity, to the point that I could wear only achromatic clothing for some periods of my life, was annoyed by paint on buildings, and so on. Once, I painted my walls black, another time - my blond hair. I had periods of white walls and attire. To this day, you can notice these tendencies in my clothing and minimal home decoration. On top of that, I can be inexplicably sensitive to some words and especially facial expressions.
- Risky - I can handle a lot of risk if I know the reason why, have considered the range of outcomes, and can initiate the action on my own. The problem is that for most of my life, I could tolerate the possibility of very bad results as well. A few times, I lived through the scary consequences of my risk-taking attitude. At the same time, I rarely feel adventurous. Maybe, it is because I am rarely bored. In some areas, I can hardly tolerate any risk at all, for fun, for example. I maintain an emergency fund in three forms at all times because I do not want to lose any dignity or health. I take only a few things for granted because I know I am at risk of losing everything. I can hardly find comfort in dependency, this saved me from addictions and turned me into a difficult girlfriend. I take risks to let precious truth come my way: it decreases my risk of making stupid mistakes or dying largely clueless.
- Decisive - in personal matters, I tend to make up my mind quickly and permanently. I do not look back with doubts. I prevent myself from having regrets by ensuring that my process of making decisions is maximally all-factor-encompassing and minimally instinctual (benefiting the species), and does not contradict my intuition. I stay true to myself because life becomes unbearable if I do not.
- Lonely - somewhat, intellectually. Although I am willing to invest a lot in friendship with the right people, only with a few close friends I can be fully myself, and most of them live far away. In most cases, even among good friends, I need to avoid certain subjects and try to filter my humor. I spend lots of my time in solitude, by choice, but deep human connections are precious to me.
- Concentrated - I can easily focus on something of my choice for hours at a time. Sometimes I work on projects for weeks, disregarding almost everything else. It can be quite unhealthy. When I am distracted and cannot continue for a while, it becomes almost painful to keep in mind all the information needed to restart. It could be very disappointing to forget something important or not to be able to go into the same mindset. I fear interruptions. Since I was about 14, I have been aware of my big flaw: if I see the clear end of a project, I lose interest and move on. In my mind, it is done. Another corresponding flaw I have: it is near impossible for me to do something I do not want unless there is an existential threat of some kind. You can call it laziness :) Keeping project immersion longer helps me therefore to overcome these limitations.
- Intense - my brain demands stimulation and transformation. In silent introspection, it is full of visual activity. Even my meditations on nothingness are sometimes singularly intense. In conversations, I can be passionately engaged. I attempt to be sincere, even if only in essence, we always need to filter out irrelevancies. For many years, I practiced full truthfulness, but that turned out to be too dangerous. I still believe that people deserve kind measured honesty, even if challenging. Interactions with both smart and kind people energize me more than anything else.
I was able to maintain relative fluency only in three languages at a time. Switching between more languages is not practical for me. Now I use only four natural languages on a weekly basis. But at various times, I was fluent in five in total.
Я тебе кохаю. Я тебя люблю. Te quiero. Ich liebe dich. I love you.
Before I was five, I spoke mainly my first native Ukrainian (Українська). Then, I lived in a more Russian-speaking city and went to a Russian (Русский) school. By age twelve, I spoke a street dialect of Spanish (Español), while living in Latin America. I started using German (Hochdeutsch) in 1999, and became fully fluent by age twenty-eight, and my decent English fluency came after 2015.
Being a Humanist, I am often asked, whether I believe in nothing.
I do. Nothing is a wonderful concept for me that symbolizes a state of mind from which one can appreciate (or not) everything else. I do believe in emptying my mind to give place for new ideas. Jokes aside, I believe in love, friendship, kindness, cooperation, compassion, brave awareness, self-reflection, critical thinking, purposeful change, beauty of creation, usefulness of scientific method, ever changing life forms, reasonable personal rights and freedoms - to say the least.
In life, I failed almost at everything, except a few important things, fortunately. These are a few random bits of curious information about my endeavors.
- Where do you find meaning in your life?
- What are you capable of achieving?
- When do you feel truly alive?
- What is your passion?
- Whom do you love?
- Who are you?
- And now?
People deserve to know where ideas originate, I believe. And, people should share their stories.
I lived in two parts of the World, in Europe and Americas, through two centuries and millennia. This is my past, and the last years are here: My Recent Life.
This is a timeline of my recent years, in continuation of My Areas and Timeline.
Origins × 18
Before 1980s - my family of origin, birthplace, and circumstances.
Changing cultures taught me that people like to check where you came from to reduce their own barrier from your strangeness, and I am all for it. I love people's stories, and here is mine.
Childhood × 10
About 1980s - my early years of life, till the onset of puberty.
Adolescence × 3
About 1990s - after puberty into early youth: my teenage years and early twenties.
Adolescence, growing up, is a transitional stage of physical and psychological development.
Youth × 1
About 2000s - more of my determining years, mid and late twenties into thirties - my life in the West.
