To the Reader

If you have found your way to this website, perhaps something in your life is changing.

Or perhaps, from the outside, everything looks perfectly normal.

There is work, family, responsibility and plans. You know how to make decisions, manage difficulties and care for those close to you. You already have enough experience not to expect someone else to give you a ready-made answer to the question of how you should live.

And yet a moment sometimes comes when the old way of living no longer works.

I know such moments well.

There have been several major transitions in my life. I have changed cities and countries, professional roles and familiar ways of living. I lost my husband after twenty-five years of marriage. I watched my children grow up and move into lives of their own. In my fifties, I once again found myself in a new country, where many things — from the language to the most ordinary daily tasks — had to be learnt anew.

Each time, I discovered something interesting.

We can change our external circumstances much faster than our inner life can reorganise itself.

You can have moved already — and continue living as though everything were temporary.

You can have raised your children — and still feel responsible for every choice they make.

You can leave your former profession — and continue measuring your worth by an old position and status for a long time.

You can understand very clearly what is happening — and still not know which next step is truly yours.

Perhaps this is where the work I do today began.

Why I created this space

I have always been interested not only in what happens to a person, but in why it happens in precisely that way.

Why does one person gradually assemble a new life after a serious change, while another remains caught between the past and the future for a long time?

Why can we understand a problem and still change nothing for years?

Why does an independent adult act calmly and precisely in one situation, yet suddenly feel helpless in another — beginning to struggle, prove themselves, wait for permission or try to control everything?

And most importantly, what helps a person move from one point to another through development rather than violence towards themselves?

These questions gradually gave rise to a space for exploring the person in transition.

I did not create it to teach people how to live correctly.

Nor to offer yet another set of universal advice.

What matters far more to me is helping a person see the system of their own life: what is happening to them now, what genuinely needs attention, which former ways of acting no longer work, what has already become a source of support — and where it may be possible to move from here.

For me, the person comes before the problem

I feel close to the image of the earth.

We cannot demand a harvest from it at every moment.

There is a time when it bears fruit. There is a time when it needs to recover. Some seeds need time. Some plants have outgrown their former place and need to be replanted.

Something similar, it seems to me, happens with people.

We live in a culture that is very quick to tell us to fix ourselves.

Not enough energy — pull yourself together.

Cannot see the future — set a goal.

Lost your motivation — find a new one.

Things are not working — work on yourself.

But sometimes a person does not need to become better first.

They need to understand where they are now.

Perhaps they are not lazy — they are exhausted.

Perhaps they have not lost themselves — an old identity has ended, while a new one is still forming.

Perhaps they do not need another ambitious goal — first, they need to regain a sense of support.

Or perhaps the opposite is true: the period of recovery has already ended, but out of habit the person continues living as though protecting themselves were still all they should do.

For me, development begins with precisely this honesty about one’s present position.

My mission

Put very simply, my mission is to help people reclaim authorship of their own lives.

Not control over everything that happens.

That is impossible.

We depend on other people, circumstances, states, the economy, our health and age, and the decisions of those we love. Life will always be larger than our plans.

But between being unable to control life and giving up our influence upon it lies an enormous space.

The space of an adult human being.

• I can see reality as it is.
• I can distinguish what lies within my responsibility.
• I can notice my own automatic reactions.
• I can stop spending energy on what has already ended.
• I can recognise the experience I have gained as a source of support.
• I can choose.
• And I can take the next step without having guarantees about the entire path.

This is the capacity I want to support and develop.

Why Project Perehod exists

Project Perehod grew out of a very specific human experience: emigration.

I know personally what it means to arrive in another country as an adult with an established history, experience, habits and sense of self — and to discover that the new environment does not always know who you are.

Your former position may carry no weight here.

You speak the language less fluently, or do not understand it at all.

You do not understand certain simple rules.

You do not know whom to call.

Things that once took five minutes suddenly require an unexpected amount of energy.

At some point, the question becomes much larger than documents, language or work:

Who am I now? And how do I want to live from here?

That is why Project Perehod is not only about emigration.

Emigration simply reveals with particular clarity a process that occurs in different forms throughout our lives.

We move from one role to another.

From one age to another.

From marriage into life without a partner.

From parenting young children into a relationship with adult children.

From one profession to another.

From a period of achievement into a search for meaning.

From the life we once built into a life that must now become ours again.

The old system may no longer work, while the new one does not yet exist.

It is this space between them that I call Perehod — Transition.

How this space may be useful to you

I do not know what question has brought you here, and I would not want to tell you in advance what is happening to you.

Perhaps you are simply curious to explore yourself.

Perhaps you are facing a decision.

Perhaps too many things have changed at once.

Or perhaps you sense a strange mismatch: from the outside, life is well arranged, but inside there is a growing understanding that you want to live differently from now on.

Here, you do not have to rush towards an immediate answer. You can begin by looking:

• What is really happening in my life now?
• What is taking most of my energy?
• Where am I continuing to act automatically?
• What am I trying to preserve, although it has already ended?
• What can I already rely upon?
• What currently calls not for still greater effort, but for a different way of acting?
• And what small step could restore the feeling that I am once again participating in the creation of my own life?

Sometimes a large change begins with a question like this.

I do not promise you a new life, and I do not feel particularly close to the idea that a person must create a “new version” of themselves.

Perhaps it is far more important to gradually bring together into a whole the person you have already become.

With everything you have lived through.

With your mistakes.

With your losses.

With your professional and human experience.

With what proved stronger than you believed yourself to be.

And with what you have yet to discover.

I created this project as a place where there is room for such a transition.

• Without an urgent need to fix yourself.
• Without a demand to know the destination in advance.
• Without a promise that someone else will provide the correct route.
• But with attention.
• With inquiry.
• With respect for your reality.

And with a conviction that becomes more important to me with each passing year: a person is capable of developing at any age and after many different events in life.

It does not have to happen in one great leap. Sometimes development begins much more quietly.

It begins when a person pauses, looks at their own life and, for the first time in a long while, asks not:

“What am I supposed to do?”

but:

“Where am I now? What genuinely matters to me? And what next step do I choose for myself?”

If this question feels familiar, perhaps you are already in Perehod.

Welcome.

Elena Bershtein