The Liberation of Memory
Earlier this year something strange, almost mystical, began to happen to me.
At the time I was emerging from a ten-month depression, a long winter of the soul where everything felt heavy and silent. And then, slowly, signs began appearing around me as if the universe was whispering that I was not alone.
The first sign came quietly.
One day I opened my mailbox and found a book that I had never asked for. It had been left there by a neighbor. The book was written by a Christian pastor and it was titled Finding Purpose in Pain.
The neighbor who left it there had a name.
His name was Chris.
Not long after that, I met a shaman who helped guide me through a deep spiritual cleansing.
His name was also Chris.
And then, not long after that, I met the man who became my boyfriend.
His name too was Chris.
Three different men.
Three different roles in my life.
A neighbor who left a message of faith.
A healer who guided me through shadow.
And a man who came into my life with love.
Chris.
Chris.
Chris.
Sometimes the universe speaks in strange repetitions.
The shaman guided me through a process of cleansing using what he called sacred medicine, a humble masculine warrior energy mushroom sometimes referred to as Aztec Gold.
During those journeys something inside me broke open.
I cried in ways I had never cried before.
I felt emotions with such intensity that sometimes I thought my heart might burst from the pressure of it.
But it was not destruction.
It was release.
During those moments I confronted things I had carried for years.
I confronted my parents about wounds I had never dared speak about before.
I confronted my past.
I confronted myself.
I saw patterns inside me that had quietly shaped my life.
I saw emotional blockages that had lived in my body for years.
And I also saw something deeper.
Something older than me.
A generational memory.
I am from Bulgaria.
And Bulgaria carries a long memory.
Our country was born in the year 681, when the warrior khan Asparuh crossed the Danube and founded the First Bulgarian Empire.
There is a legend about his father and his brothers.
Their father gathered a bundle of sticks and handed them to the brothers one by one.
Each stick alone could easily be broken.
But when the sticks were bound together in one bundle, no one could break them.
And the lesson was simple.
Brothers united cannot be destroyed.
The early Bulgarian rulers were fierce steppe warriors.
Among them was the formidable khan Krum of Bulgaria, remembered in legend for defeating the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros I and, according to chroniclers, fashioning a ceremonial cup from his skull.
These were brutal times in a brutal world.
Yet from this warrior foundation emerged one of the greatest golden ages in Bulgarian history.
Under the reign of Simeon I of Bulgaria, Bulgaria became one of the most powerful empires in Europe. Its territory stretched toward three seas, and it experienced a flourishing of literature, theology, art, and the Cyrillic script that would shape the Slavic world.
It was a golden era.
But history rarely allows golden eras to last forever.
In 1014, during the Battle of Kluch, the Byzantine emperor Basil II defeated the Bulgarian army.
What followed became one of the darkest moments in Bulgarian history.
Thousands of Bulgarian soldiers were captured and blinded.
For every hundred men, one was left with a single eye to guide the others home.
When their ruler, Samuil of Bulgaria, saw his returning army of blinded soldiers, the shock was so immense that he died shortly after.
Soon after, the First Bulgarian Empire collapsed under Byzantine rule.
But the Bulgarian spirit did not disappear.
In 1185, the brothers Asen I of Bulgaria and Peter IV of Bulgaria led a great uprising and restored Bulgarian independence.
The capital rose in Veliko Tarnovo, one of the most magnificent medieval cities in Eastern Europe.
For more than two centuries the Second Bulgarian Empire flourished again.
But history moved once more.
And in 1396, after years of struggle, Bulgaria fell under the power of the Ottoman Empire.
The centuries that followed became the longest night in Bulgarian memory.
For nearly five hundred years, the Bulgarian lands lived under Ottoman rule.
Churches were destroyed.
Cultural life was suppressed.
People were forced to hide their language and identity.
There were massacres.
There was fear.
There was humiliation.
Families were broken.
Yet even during those dark centuries, the Bulgarian spirit did not disappear.
It hid.
It lived in monasteries.
It lived in songs.
It lived in poetry.
It lived in whispers passed from parents to children.
In the 18th century a monk named Paisius of Hilendar wrote a small book that awakened a sleeping nation.
His work, Slav-Bulgarian History, asked a simple question:
“Why are you ashamed to call yourself Bulgarian?”
Those words ignited a cultural awakening.
And soon revolutionaries began to rise.
Among them were the great poet-warriors Hristo Botev and Vasil Levski.
They were not only fighters.
They were dreamers.
They believed Bulgaria would be free again.
Their dream came at a terrible cost.
The April Uprising of 1876 was brutally crushed, but its tragedy awakened the conscience of Europe.
Soon after came the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, and in 1878 Bulgaria was liberated from centuries of Ottoman domination.
The nation was reborn.
And somewhere inside me, during those spiritual journeys, I began to feel that history not just as knowledge, but as memory.
I felt the weight of generations.
The suffering.
The resilience.
The survival.
I began to understand that some of the wounds we carry are older than ourselves.
But I also understood something else.
If trauma can travel through generations, then healing can travel through generations too.
And perhaps part of my journey was not only to understand that history…
but to release it.
To honor the past without allowing it to imprison the future.
To remember where I come from.
And to walk forward anyway.
Mon’s short stories 