A silver bicycle with large red wheels squeaked as M pressed the saddle down and pulled it closer to the table. She sat on the floor to fix the pedals.
“This bike is vanity,” M said without looking at me. “Who even rides a single-speed in this city?”
“Um, a lot of people,” I replied quietly. My friend continued, her voice rising slightly as if to make a point. “Vanity,” she muttered, clicking a screw into the pedal. “Such vanity,” she repeated, handing me the detached straps. “It’s not practical! All those people who claim single-speeds are cool—yeah, they’re the ones riding multi-speeds,” she added. M. stood up, adjusted her linen pants, and slipped on a colorful camp shirt. It matched her red hair.
“It was a gift,” I said, trying to justify myself. The word “vanity” stung. “It’s beautiful, it means a lot to me, and I love it. Don’t I deserve beautiful things? I wore free clothes from the community center for two years—I still do. I don’t even buy things.” My excuses felt humiliating. My eyes started to well up.
Before moving to the States, my life in Russia had been reduced to work—writing about those whose suffering I assumed was far greater than mine. I was isolated, numb, and quiet behind the pain of others. All that I had to show for it was a string of bylines, the only thing saving me from complete erasure in the public sphere. Beyond this chosen disappearance, Russia was turning people like me into blank slates—stripped of identity, sexuality, and voice. As the German-American historian and philosopher, Hannah Arendt, put it, the totalitarian state makes its opponents disappear in silent anonymity.
I held on to a sense of self through hope, while it was suppressed by laws, traditions, and fear. Eventually, I forgot how to cry, how to make love, how to express myself. Some might think it’s a high-functioning depression; I view it as the inevitable state of being under a totalitarian government.
While I performed the role of a prudish, polite, quiet, old-school girl, my true queer self was screaming in agony. The tragedy of a state-imposed closet is that the performance never ends—unless you find a way to escape, or the government finds you first. Detached from my own body, I watched myself become a fictional character. I developed what my ex-therapist called a dissociative disorder, a product of Complex PTSD. Though I still experience dissociative episodes, they happen far less often now. Back home, they were daily. I began to feel like I was in my own skin again three years ago, when I left Russia with two suitcases in search of a new language to speak.
Right after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I chopped off my hair at a Pine St. barbershop run by Rafael, a Jewish immigrant from Azerbaijan. He’s been my friend’s go-to barber for over twenty years. I stumbled upon him by chance while buying a pack of cigarettes next door. Hearing me curse in Russian, he greeted me, and before I knew it, I was in his chair. He didn’t ask questions, but spoke about the war from the perspective of Rossiya 1, the state-owned Russian TV channel. He remarked it was a shame I chose to look like Mads Mikkelsen when I had such a beautiful South Caucasian mane. I replied, thinking I was exaggerating, that the real shame was that I had never looked like myself before. After he was done, Rafael offered to let me keep the chopped hair, but I refused.
Soon after, I moved upstate, where I found a community center filled with expensive clothes donated by the rich people in the Hudson Valley. Within two months, I collected over forty suit jackets. I wore a suit every day—for all the times I wanted to in Russia but couldn’t. It was my second adolescence. Though I still felt small, my sense of belonging grew clearer, my sense of self growing stronger. I realized that my attachment to things, this “vanity,” was part of the bigger ecosystem that allowed me to validate the “who” in question: my authentic self. At times, it was pure kitsch, but I accepted it. Even three bulky leather suitcases full of books didn’t feel excessive. After all, what kind of Russian émigré would I be without them?
Shortly after, I reclaimed my name. Anastasia (pronounced with a heavy American accent) was the name I used previously while traveling in England—a name I embraced to explore myself, experiment with my gender, kiss girls, and hang out with other queers in Camden. Nastya, on the other hand, felt like a deadname—used only with Russians in Russia. It represented everything I was expected to be: a daughter, a sister, the future wife of an Ossetian man.
Imagine this: you’re practically a queer teenager again, in a writing class in the middle of nowhere in New York. Your professor is a queer Russian immigrant and a journalist. They have a rule: everyone is “they/them” in class unless stated otherwise, and the classroom is a gender-free zone. They’re talking about queer rights and home, and then they call you by the name you once reserved for your closeted self. For the first time, you don’t hate it. The environment affirms you, you feel seen, and you realize you can be whoever you want to be. Nastya doesn’t bite anymore.
In Denktagebuch, Arendt wrote that everything alive has an urge to appear; this urge is called vanity. Since there is no urge to disappear, she claimed, and disappearance is the law of appearance, the urge, called vanity, is in vain. “Vanitas vanitatum vanitas,” or, all is vanity, all is in vain.
The spaces of appearance healed parts of me. Vanity, if that’s what it is, is something I can’t despise or judge; it gave me something tangible and fueled my ambitions, pushing me to fulfill my identity and desires. It glittered in the sun, reignited my love for aesthetics, sharpened my focus, and offered a sense of pleasure and indulgence. Reclaiming your name and affirming your existence is one thing, but finding beauty in the world—impractical or even empty as it may be—and choosing to keep it, to collect beautiful things when you’ve never had anything permanent, is something 27-year-old Nastya can finally embrace.
As for my bike: it was a gift from my exiled friend T, whose husband had received it as a gift too (but it didn’t quite fit him, so it sat in their Bushwick basement for a while). I inherited it without even knowing what it looked like. Its beauty was a surprise. When I told T about the “vanity” conversation, she lit up: “Yes! It’s just like us—beautiful, sparkly, everything we want to be! And yes, it’s made for flat roads, for peaceful rides, not rushing.”
“That’s exactly what I want in life right now,” I said. “To ride, tout court, not constantly conquer hills.”
Nastya Dzutstsati is a writer and social researcher based in New York City who holds an MA in Human Rights and the Arts from Bard College (U.S.) and a BA in Journalism from the University of Kent (U.K.). Their writing explores the intersections of grief, borders, sapphic love, and the temporalities of exile.
