I really need feedback, so I guess I'll just post my PHS here. Any thoughts from anybody are appreciated.
My parents descend from villages native to Orenburg and Bashkortostan regions of modern Russia. My mother decided to pursue a higher education to become an electrical engineer, so she left the village to settle in Orenburg – a city which is situated on the border of Europe and Asia. So I belong to the first urban generation in our family.
Our family can be considered middle-class by standards of provincial Russia, even though most of our family income comes from my mother, because my father never settled at one job, and whatever money he makes are usually spent entirely on his regular travels to the countryside and an unprofitable enterprise of beekeeping.
My grandfather insisted that I should go to school where my native language is taught, but that was a mistake, because the school was fairly weak for my talents, and my peers hated me for being not like them. Ironically, the school didn’t even accomplish the initial goal – despite my passion for foreign languages, I never learned nor liked my native language, because it was initially taught as a native language.
Later I decided to transfer to lyceum, and it made a great impact on my personality and future aspirations. When people around you are talented, motivated and are striving to do their best, you can’t help but do the same. Here I seriously considered a possibility of scientific career for the first time. Selecting a math-oriented class, purchasing a computer and discovering programming by making modifications for a videogame also contributed to this decision. It was amazing to discover how much freedom you can have in controlling what the machine does.
However, this was also the time when I developed a cognitive dissonance and was very conflicted as a result of my emerging homosexuality. Thanks to my previous school, I was a pretty religious person. Adding this to hostility people expressed towards homosexuals, it’s no wonder I was in denial. It took me several years to accept myself and realize how irrational I was, but as a result I was cruelly disillusioned and my world shattered. Apostates and homosexuals are not tolerated in Islam (even though Tatar Islam is quite mild compared to Middle East fanatics), and in time I only found more and more reasons to mistrust people.
I soon realized that the country I live in is an authoritarian state halfway towards its self-destruction. Now no less than 90% of Russian citizens are brainwashed by TV into believing that by occupying Crimea we saved it from fascists. Propaganda, xenophobia and hysteria were already high, but after these events they skyrocketed. It is hard to concentrate on work, however interesting it is, when you can’t trust people and must resort to lies and hypocrisy to maintain relationships.
I can’t accept that Russian Federation is the country where the word “federation” is an empty word and the word “democracy” is a curse word, where the absurdity of laws grows with every passing month, where free business and journalism are nearly eliminated, where people are ignorant and easily misled, where homosexuality is depathologized de-jure, but not de-facto, where science and research are largely neglected by the government, where anyone who tries to change something is labeled a national traitor, where there is simply too much hatred. I wish I could do something about that, and can only hope that things may change eventually, and I will be needed then. I want to prove that I can be a valuable member of society, that I have a right to exist. And I believe that becoming a scientist, or at least simply making something new to help people, is the most fitting way for me to achieve that. I have not given up yet.