When people ask “How are you doing?”, my favorite answer is “It could always be worse.” They laugh, but I’m only half-kidding.

People often comment how I have “such a sunny disposition” and always seem “so cheerful”. The truth is: I wasn’t born with a smile on. Far from it. But if I’ve learned anything over the years, it is to always look for a bright side.

Because it could always be worse.

The method is simple, and it works for everything. Your child got a C in math? You could have given birth to a serial killer. Your spouse cheated on you with your best friend? It could have been your parent.Your boss yelled at you at work? Be grateful you aren’t forced to work for a drug cartel.

For me, it’s extra easy because I have a whole basement of childhood memories to use.

When I get stuck in a middle seat on a transcontinental flight, I remind myself I was born and raised in a cage of a country, with zero hope to ever set foot outside Soviet Union until the crazy ‘90s turned everything upside down.

When I want to complain about driving on Los Angeles highways in rush hour, I remind myself my Dad spent years on a wait list to be able to buy a shitty Soviet 2-door. And it was brick orange, because you didn’t get to choose the color.

And when the Covid lockdown gives me the blues, I remember the first time I had to be quarantined.

The year was 1995, the Soviet Union had just collapsed and the borders came crashing down. I was still a teenager in my hometown of Magadan in what we call in Russia the Extreme North, when I made an 8-student exchange group sent to study business at the University of Alaska. It was nothing short of mind-blowing. Nobody in my family had ever been to America (or anywhere else for that matter), and I felt like the first man in space.

A short 4-hour flight away from Siberia to Alaska across the Bering Strait, Anchorage should have been very similar to Magadan, but it was like traveling to Mars.

Everything was different. I vividly remember how clean and homey the airport was. Calm elevator music coming from the speakers, light fragrance in the air, floor to ceiling windows – it was like a rich man’s mansion instead of public airports I was used to. The other unsettling thing was how smiley the border patrol officers were. They were so friendly, it was confusing. It was like they were… human, instead of government officials on duty.

And then we were taken to a 24-hour supermarket.

Listen, all those clichés are true: I personally lived through several food shortages growing up in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I still have the PTSD flashbacks of standing in line for sugar (1kg per family member) as a 5-year-old, with adults pushing and shoving me along, while my Mom was doing the same in line for butter (yes, kids, a separate line and cashier for every food group). I remember having to go to bread store early, or you would get none. And fruit was always worth its weight in gold, having to be brought North all the way from mainland. I remember the ultimate excitement of Dad bringing home a crate of mandarins – a treat you only got by special order for New Year only.

We had a special word in Russia then – «достать» – which means “to procure, to get a hold of”, food, clothes or household items. It was not at all like “purchasing”. It was more like trophy hunting, having good luck of being at the right place at the right time, or knowing the right people, to bribe or to barter with, to get what you needed for your family. Bringing home a lemon in the middle of the winter in Magadan back then was like winning Who Wants To Be Millionaire today.

This Anchorage supermarket just had… everything. And it was just sitting there. There were, unbelievably, watermelons and peaches and grapes – piled high, with nobody paying any attention to them. There were apples, so shiny they seemed made of glass. Lemons like mounds of liquid sunshine. Even potatoes were clean of any dirt, each of the same size and free of imperfections.

The packages of perfectly sliced, perfectly square ham. Matching the perfectly sliced, perfectly square bread. Matching the perfectly sliced, individually wrapped, perfectly square cheese.

The floors were so clean you could eat off of them. The lights bright. The doors opened automatically on your approach. It was like a Temple of Food, and it nearly broke my mind. That first trip there, I only bought a bottle of milk and some bread. It was just too much to handle.

But that was nothing compared to what was waiting at the University. I had to plunge myself into a whole new world of business management – a concept that simply did not exist in newly formed Russia. My first semester was a full load of accounting, economics, management and computer studies, all of which I had zero understanding of.

I remember getting my first batch of those textbooks. I opened the first one and realized the only words I knew on that page were “and”, “the” and “but”. The rest was a minefield. Back in 1995 we had no smartphones, no home internet and only limited access to the university computer lab. So I had to rely on a 2-tome, 10-pound, hard-cover 1965 edition of English-Russian dictionary I brought from home. First, you had to manually flip through 800 pages until you find the word. Then try to understand the concept you’ve never encountered in your life from 1-line explanation. Then copy it by hand into your notebook, to try to commit it to your brain already bursting at the seams. And then go back to the sentence and look up the second word.

It took me 2.5 hours on that first day to read and translate the “Preface” chapter on macroeconomics. I understood none of it. Two more chapters plus homework were due the next day. I cried myself to sleep that night. I was sure my life couldn’t get any harder.

That first semester was a whirlwind for our little Russian squad. But eventually we found our groove, we made American friends, geeked out on learning American slang, we got our first campus jobs, we porked up on those perfectly squared ham sandwiches, and we finally made it to the long Christmas break.

I couldn’t wait to go home. Everybody’s first semester in college is tough, and to me it felt like I’d survived a year-long space mission. I just wanted to be back on solid land. To exhale, to be with my family and speak my own language, to have a cozy New Year, mandarins and all, under a proper New Year tree with our old decorations, no textbook or dictionary in sight. I just needed to feel safe and secure again.

The day after I landed home I broke high fever. And then I couldn’t breathe. And then get up. Turned out I contracted diphtheria. Somebody on that plane was a carrier, and my vaccinations weren’t up to date.

It is highly contagious so the state doctor declared I was to be isolated in the local hospital’s Infectious Ward. It felt like a death sentence. It looked like one, too. Imagine a state-run Soviet hospital in a remote northern town in the mid ‘90s amidst an economic collapse. Whatever you are picturing, it was worse.

I was the youngest in an all-female room of 6 patients. The women were all older, grumpy and in no mood to socialize at first. It was late December with -30C outside, but the building was barely heated. We slept fully clothed, two pairs of wool pants, wool knit hats, and double sweaters, shivering under paper-thin hospital blankets. The shower was ice cold, barely illuminated by a single hanging bulb, casting gloomy light on the tiled walls the color of “безнадега”, the special Russian word for “utter hopelessness”. The toilet was hole-in-a-floor type with zero privacy, because the way Soviet Union always ran its hospitals never strayed too far from the way it ran its prisons. And if I had the pictures of that food for you now, you’d weep.

The worst was the treatment protocol: 2 weeks of total lockdown, plus daily injections of antibiotics. The first injection of the day would be delivered by ruthless Nurse from Hell at 7am sharp. Not wasting time on greetings, or even to see if I was fully awake, she would snatch the blanket off my carcass, pull down all the pairs of pants with a steely hand and plunge what felt like a horse-sized syringe needle in my butt cheek. I quickly learned the best way to survive the assault was to just let it happen, and cry myself back to sleep to escape the grim reality for as long as possible.

I realized then, deciphering 100 pages of an accounting textbook due tomorrow was not a curse. It was a blessing. A blessing that now seemed so far away, like it was a mirage, a shining star in the sky, millions of light years above the pit of despair I was now living in.

Soon, I started mingling with the other women. The ward had no TV and no radio, but I had stories for hours. I would sit cross-legged on my bed, telling them about America, and how amazing Americans were, and what a computer is, and how you can chat on it with someone all the way across the world, and all that food: the mid-winter grapes, the clean potatoes, the perfectly square ham. I was the National Geographic of the Infectious Ward. Sometimes, the Nurse from Hell would come to turn the lights out at sleep time and allow it a few extra minutes, sitting down to listen. I hoped that would make her a bit more gentle at the morning injections. It never did.

I didn’t know back then yet, but that was the Universe teaching me to enjoy every turn of the road, because It Could Always Be Worse.

I was released shortly before my return flight back to America. Mom and I wept at the airport. Hidden from the view, my butt was spectacularly black-and-blue on both sides from dozens of injections.

But I left with a little bit more than a spectacular butt. I left with a whole new perspective.

***

Today, I’m boarding a flight home again, this time amidst a global pandemic.

The family council decided it was important to be together now.

It’s going to take me 50 hours of travel on 3 planes with 2 long layovers, potential contagion crawling all around. But hey, it could be worse. I’m still alive, I’m going home, and even if I end up back at the same Infectious Ward with the same Nurse from Hell again, at least we’d get a fun sequel for the story.

Meanwhile, stay safe y’all. And don’t forget to enjoy whatever is in front of you.

Remember: it could always… (you know the rest).