Thoughts of a refugee on the eve of the Senedd election

Yuliia Bond

You don’t wake up as a refugee. You wake up checking who is still alive.

Behind every “I’m fine” is a life you wouldn’t survive

This is what it actually feels like

You wake up and before anything else, before coffee, before work, before pretending to be fine, you check the news and then your phone, just to see if your family and friends are still alive.

And if they are, you breathe. Just a little.

Then you go to work, smile, say good morning, make small talk, and become a version of yourself that fits into the room, while people talk about weekends, Christmas, Easter and family dinners, and you sit there knowing some of your family are dead, some are in a war zone, and some are just trying to survive another night.

You smile anyway.

In a room full of people, you can feel like the loneliest person in the world, like you are living on a completely different planet while pretending to belong on this one.

Then come the questions.

“Where are you from?”

Because they hear your accent.

“Ukraine.”

“Oh… is there still war there?”

Yes. There is still war there. Every day. Every night. It did not stop because people stopped talking about it.

“Is your family safe?”

No. My family is in the war zone.

And then comes the polite face, the awkward pause, the soft “I’m so sorry,” and people usually mean well, but they get to walk away from that moment while you have to carry it for the rest of the day.

For them, it is a sad sentence in a conversation.

For me, it is my mother, my home, my dead friends, my child asking when we are going back, and a whole life compressed into small talk near the kettle.

So eventually, you start avoiding people, not because you are rude or ungrateful, but because you are tired of turning the worst parts of your life into something explainable in two minutes.

Displacement is not just about losing a place.

It is about losing parts of yourself.

At work, especially around local people, you learn very quickly that being fully yourself does not always “fit,” because you are too direct, too honest, too intense, too much, so you soften your words, filter your reactions, rehearse sentences in your head, and translate not only your language but your whole personality.

People call that integration. But sometimes it feels like slowly erasing yourself just to exist without friction.

Bullying

Then your child asks, “Mum, when are we going home?” and you do not have an answer, because there is no answer that will not break both of you a little.

Then there is school, misunderstandings, bullying, being treated differently because of language, because of difference, because children often repeat what they hear from adults, and you carry that too.

I celebrated my daughter’s birthday while reading the message that my best friend had been killed.

You don’t stop.

You light the candles.

You smile.

You sing.

And something inside you breaks quietly.

This is not something you “heal from,” because it does not stay in the past; it follows you into every normal moment, every conversation, every workday, every school issue, every birthday, every news alert.

My mum is still in a war zone.

This is not a story.

This is right now.

And maybe the hardest part is that you do not fully belong here, but you do not fully belong there anymore either, because the home you left is no longer the same and this place, no matter how kind some people are, is not fully yours.

So you exist somewhere in between, between languages, cultures, memories, grief, survival and whatever people call “moving on.”

And that “in between” can last for years.

So when you ask people to “share their story” in a church, at an event, in training, anywhere, understand what you are really asking.

You are asking someone to stand in front of strangers and open something that never closed.

To bleed in public.

Then go home and try to be normal again.

It takes hours, days, sometimes longer to recover.

I’ll be stepping back for a while.

Consequences

And one day before an election, this is what I want to say: behind every slogan, every policy and every vote, there are real people living the consequences.

Not in theory.

Not in headlines.

In real life. Every single day.

People are already here.

Not as numbers. Not as debates.

As parents, workers, neighbours, trying to rebuild something from nothing.

So vote like that matters

Vote for policies that protect the Nation of Sanctuary.

Vote for dignity, for integration, for real chances, not empty words.

Because behind every slogan is a life.

And that life deserves safety, stability, and the chance to exist without fear.

You debate it. We live it. Every single day.

Vote like lives depend on it.

Yuliia Bond is a refugee from Ukraine who has lived in Caerphilly since 2022