Natalie Oceanheart is a trained psychologist and volunteer counselor. She immigrated to the United States in 2023 after the second Russian invasion of Ukraine. She has been awarded for her volunteer services and leadership by the Red Cross. Her new book Life Beyond Fear: A Ukrainian Woman’s Memoir (Potomac Books, 2026) was published this month.

When you see the title of my book, your eye will stop on the name of the country on the cover, and you will immediately realize that this is a book about war. You will be right, but only partly.

It is about life from the inside; how my family and I tried to survive what was happening around us. How my children dreamed of a peaceful sky and calm sleep. How I dreamed that my children would never again distinguish the sound of shells. How I lived with fear for my husband’s life. How as a daughter and a sister, I wished for peace and safety for my loved ones. And how, in my work as a psychologist, I was not always able to help others because of my own shock.

An important goal of mine was to convey to the world that the war began earlier, back in 2014. It began for my region in eastern Ukraine a full eight years earlier. My older daughter managed to live only two years of her childhood. After that only war and flight, again and again, in a circle.

The trials did not end there. Because immigration is invisible losses that do not make it into news headlines. Roots are lost, as are accumulated property, connections, people, and places. I was an immigrant not only in the United States; I was one even at the other end of my own country. There, people looked at me with distrust, with caution. They looked at me as a second-class person, because I was not local. But that does not mean I had no place; I did. And there I belonged until it was taken away and destroyed. Now it is a ghost city in which not a single intact house remains. Everything in this book is inseparably connected with war.

Yes, I very much wanted to pour my pain onto paper: the pain of war, the pain of relocation, the pain of the past. A kind of self-therapy. But at the same time, there lived in me a desire to say: it is normal not to cope, it is normal to lose yourself, it is normal not to achieve the American Dream in a year of life in the United States. This is a bitter, unpopular truth. If at least someone sees their story reflected in these pages, I will be happy.

I chose the final title Life Beyond Fear to encourage the reader not to give up. Life erects numerous obstacles. I myself have gone through circle after circle of Dante’s hell more than once. Many disappointments and trials can fall to the lot of one person. But if you keep living, having passed the ninth circle, you can make your way through the center of the Earth, feel the reversal of gravity, and begin to rise upward.

Each of us goes through our own pains, our own obstacles, day after day, and it is customary to remain silent about much. But that does not mean that we are alone on our path. All of us walk here in circles, and I know for certain that there is a way out.

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