No-Anxiety Stories. Chapter 24: The Cloud That Doesn’t Fall
Kati walked under the Abu Dhabi sun, her voice steady but her heart cluttered with unsolved logistics and low-grade dread. Her son was at school. Her husband worked in tech.
From the outside, the family looked settled. But Kati’s inner world was something else entirely.
They had come to the UAE on a work contract right before COVID lockdowns. “We landed - and by Monday, the whole country shut down,” she laughed, but it was the tired kind of laugh. Temporary arrangements became permanent life. Four years on, the sense of temporary still hadn’t left.
“I carry this invisible weight,” Kati admitted, “like a survival backpack that never gets lighter.”
🌀 Reflect:
What’s the ‘cloud’ you carry? Does it ever dissolve - or just hover, waiting?
When Survival Becomes a Lifestyle
Kati wasn’t fleeing war when she left Ukraine. “We lived well. Warm seas, no snow - our bodies hated the cold. It was a good life.” But her husband’s contract brought them abroad, and she followed, thinking they’d experiment with sunny expat life. Then war began. “We didn’t know if we’d ever go back. Everything we left… stayed left.”
Unlike the clean, purposeful escape some describe, her journey felt scattered: “not a relocation, but a collapse into another life.”
Every aspect of migration carried a hidden price:
No path to citizenship in the UAE.
Dependent visa linked to her husband’s job - if he lost it, they’d have 30 days to leave.
No roadmap for “what next.”
She described her daily emotional baseline like this:
“It’s not a panic attack. It’s a weather pattern. A cloud that never fully lifts.”
The Hidden Costs of Strength
Her voice never broke, but her language did. Kati toggled between Ukrainian, Russian, and English - code-switching her way through reality.
She wasn’t falling apart. She was holding too much together:
A son who plays drums in school concerts but hears classmates joke about “killing all Russians.”
A husband juggling start-up risk and family pressure.
A family in Ukraine needing help - financial, emotional, logistical.
“And then there’s me,” she said, almost as an afterthought.
🌀 Reflect:
When you give to everyone - partner, child, parents, nation - what replenishes you?
Her Turning Point: The Search for a “Point of Unbreakability”
Kati didn’t want self-help slogans or meditation apps. “I tried. They don’t work when your visa depends on someone else’s employment status.”
What she wanted was simple: a “point of unbreakability” - a steady place in a shifting life. A mental charging station. A psychological checkpoint. Not just for her, but for every woman juggling motherhood, exile, and invisible grief.
She began small:
Daily walks. Five to six kilometers. “It helps reset me.”
Teaching. Mentoring students and coaching people through career growth. “When someone I mentored lands a job - it gives me joy I can’t explain.”
A book on communication. She started teaching from it, and people gathered. “It became more than a book. It became a place.”
Her mission evolved: not just to survive, but to build communal “charging points” - spaces for shared language, shared weight, and shared solutions.
🌀 Reflect:
Where do you feel most like yourself - not just useful to others, but rooted in you?
Her No-Anxiety Practices
Survival Backpack Awareness → Acknowledge what you're always carrying. Name the load. Don’t gaslight your nervous system.
Purposeful Micro-Walks → Not “fitness” walks. Re-centering walks. Five km = five kilometers back to self.
Legacy Projects → Anything you create that might outlast you - a course, a story, a system. → “My book group is my lifeline.”
Selective Giving → She’s a giver by nature. But now she asks: Will this drain me, or nourish me?
Self-Honest Conversations → When the cloud thickens, she lets herself say: “I’m not okay.” And then decides what small action to take - one that doesn’t require fixing the whole sky.
💡 What you might take from Kati’s story:
Chronic uncertainty is a nervous system state - not a personal failure.
You can be resilient and still need a map.
Rebuilding your sense of safety might mean building spaces, not plans.
Even in a foreign land, you can be someone’s lighthouse.
Sometimes the most radical act is to receive - rest, support, visibility.
Thanks for reading!
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