u/Soggy-Translator4894

Paternal haplogroup is J-L283 and maternal haplogroup is H. From what I understand, my paternal haplogroup is a bit rare for my region.

Family origin is mostly ethnic Ukrainian from
Ivano-Frankivsk and nearby regions, with some ties to other Carpathian Mountain cultural groups in neighboring countries. Plus a few ancestors from the central, southern, and eastern regions of Ukraine.

It is not at all shocking that I have ancestors who were ethnic Poles. To be honest, what was more surreal was looking at my DNA relatives and seeing that I have literally hundreds of Polish relatives, many of whom are not so distantly related to me. One of my friends is Polish with roots in the North East of Poland and we matched as distant cousins.

I was not told specifically that I dont have Polish ancestors, and given the historical context I imagined there’d have to be at least some connection there, but this brought that connection to life on a deeper level, which I’m super grateful for

I knew that I have Roma ancestors, so that checks out. I think at least some of the Balkan DNA in my results is related to my Roma ancestry, as most of my Roma DNA relatives have a big chunk of Balkan %.

The Balkan % is common in a lot of Western Ukrainians, especially those with roots in the mountains, so it’s not a shock to have though.

The Jewish ancestry, I did not know about honestly.

It frustrates me that the map and phrasing they use for the “Czech, Hungarian, Slovak, & Southern Polish” reference population ends up falsely presenting a lot of Ukrainian Highlander and general Western Ukrainian ancestry as being from a foreign source.
If they could go out of their way to add Southern Poland to the map and name due to criticism, they can change it again lol

I have struggled with depression, anxiety, OCD, and ADHD for most of my life but in the past year, and especially the past 3 months, it has gotten to a point where I feel intense anxiety, dread, and hopelessness constantly. I still want to do things but it is excruciatingly difficult and painful to do even basic tasks. I’m in university and it’s gotten worse since I got home for summer.

I do know what triggered this. The past few years have seen two different genocides/wars escalating in two different countries where my family is from. I am safe but a lot of people I care about are not. And it is still excruciatingly painful and traumatic to watch this violence happen from afar, even if the exact city being bombed in a given moment isn’t where my family is from.

What is really difficult too is that the violence in my family’s homelands has influenced people here (in the US) to be openly hateful towards my family’s religious/ethnic backgrounds and I, and so many of my family and friends, have experienced so many very traumatic and scary harassment both online and
in-person because of our religious and/or ethnic identities. It has been multiple years like this now for both cultures I’m from and it’s only getting more frequent and more hateful and more scary. Even professors and doctors have said horrible things in front of me not realizing I was part of the group they were talking about.

I have been involved in community activism on my campus for one of the countries my family is from, and it has helped a lot because it gave me a way to connect with others with similar struggles and help out the movement in meaningful ways.

But my university heavily cracked down on our ability to do a lot of the organizing we do on-campus. The university faculty whose job it was to advocate for us completely abandoned us and then gaslit us about it ever happening.

What was really emotionally devastating for me too was that the censorship and disinformation we faced led to many other students distancing themselves from our organization, rather than standing by our side. This was extremely painful and isolating.

The levels of religious/ethnic hate and violence on social media have been very traumatic and scary.
I was on instagram today and the amount of violent rhetoric I saw towards my family’s religion without even scrolling far was astounding. I looked at the comments sections of two posts reshared by creators that I follow who make normal content, and within only a few minutes I saw multiple extremely hateful comments about people with my cultural background. Not just short hate comments but long paragraphs written about how “evil” we are and extremely graphic drawings of a stereotype of a person from my cultural background being shot in the head.

I know there are a lot of bots online and also that there is an over-representation of crazy people online. But after how many traumatic experiences I’ve had with religious/ethnic discrimination, trying to tell myself that it’s just crazy people online ends up making me feel worse because I’ve experienced firsthand how random crazy comments online turns into real life violence and hate.

It’s really hard too when I see mean comments about my cultures from influencers or even just regular people that I follow. Or when the post and comments are filled with pure hatred towards us and there’s not a single comment telling them to stop dehumanizing us…😢

In the past few months, politicians waged a campaign of online hate towards refugees from one of my countries living in a neighboring country. It started with hateful and violent comments online and within a month it turned into a massive increase in violent hate crimes against people of my background in that country. Some of the victims of these hate crimes have even been killed. It is so painful because they went there seeking safety only to be assaulted or even killed for being from our ethnicity. The officially reported numbers don’t even include so many other hate crime incidents where people are being verbally or physically abused but don’t report it.

Here in the US too one of my family friends was detained by ICE, and he is being held in a horrible facility… he has schizophrenia too and whenever I think about how horrible the conditions in the facility are it makes me want to cry 😢

And my friends and family still back home (in either country) have to deal with bombings and attacks, and are always at risk of being displaced, harmed, or killed.

Before the past few years I was able to tell myself that it was just random losers and to ignore them, but now I just feel terrified and overstimulated and exhausted all the time.

I tried so hard to make the world better through organizing for my communities, teaching people about our reality, and fundraising for medical aid back home. And I do think that accomplishing that while also taking classes, and being severely depressed, is something to be proud of.

But it feels like I have been trying so hard and everything is just getting worse and worse and worse

my results as an ethnic Ukrainian 🇺🇦

Does anyone have tips on getting out of a severe depressive spiral as an ENFJ