Many Russians who left because of the war had to start over abroad. Some found careers they never expected.

People who left Russia after the start of the full-scale war have had to start their lives over from scratch. They’ve had to learn a new language, absorb the local culture, traditions, and bureaucracy, adjust to the climate, and make new friends and acquaintances. Many lost their jobs during the move or after arriving in a new country and were forced — despite having a college degree and a strong portfolio — to take low-paying jobs. But some have learned new professions in emigration and are happy with them. Meduza tells the difficult, but in some ways even inspiring, stories of these Russians.

Ksenia Borovinskaya, 37

From a copywriter in Moscow to a bar founder in Buenos Aires

Before I emigrated, I was never idle — I was always finding good freelance work through people I knew. I wrote copy for Afisha Daily and Mel, and for shampoo and wet-wipe packaging. In 2018, an acquaintance helped me land a job at RusTransplant, a project for organ transplant patients, where I wrote guides on eating right, exercising, and having sex safely after a transplant.

The Moscow Health Ministry funded the project. In the war’s first few days, our director told us the ministry had set a condition for continued funding: staff members and the project itself had to publicly support the war on social media. Everyone refused.

I left Russia in March 2022 with my two young children and our dog. It was hard on the kids, but they understood why we left. In the war’s first days, my older son drew a tank with a line through it at school; his teacher handed me the drawing and asked that he not do it again. We wouldn’t have been allowed to live in peace in Russia.

We flew to Armenia first. Armenian turned out to be so difficult that in two months I learned only a few letters. I hadn’t expected Armenia to be so cold, and I was a wreck, unable to pull myself together.

At some point, a friend called from Argentina and said, “Come here: there’s no war, and people drink wine.” I thought Argentina might help me reset and recover, so I decided to move. Just before that, I learned I’d been fired from RusTransplant for working remotely. I used my last paycheck to buy tickets to Buenos Aires.

In Argentina, I applied for political asylum, citing my antiwar stance and the risk of persecution in Russia — police, for one, had already come looking for me at my registered address. I was issued a temporary residency certificate that let me live and work in the country legally.

I got my first job in Argentina out of pity, a month after I arrived. I walked into a bar and said, in broken Spanish, “Me want work. Please, sir.” The owner told me to come back that evening, and that’s how I became a waiters’ assistant. Over the following year and a half, I took on small repair jobs, worked at a carpentry shop, and translated for a crypto exchange.

My planning horizon stretched no further than a single day. I was desperately short on money and decided things couldn’t go on that way. Maybe everyone secretly dreams of opening their own bar. I spent a long time talking the idea over with my kids. I have two sons — the younger is 8, the older 12 — and they’re up for anything: “Should we move to Argentina? Let’s do it!” “Should we open a bar? Let’s do it!”

My kids’ confidence rubbed off on me, and at the end of 2024 I borrowed $15,000 from my ex-husband to open the bar. With interest, I owed him $18,000, of which I still have $4,000 left to pay back. The money went toward paperwork, equipment, and furniture — though I dragged a lot of it in from the trash. I hauled a board off the street once and hammered together a stool out of it.

When I found a space for the bar and was on my way to sign the lease, someone stole my bag, with my passport inside, right on the street. All I had left in my pocket was a certificate showing I’d applied for residency. When the agent saw it, he tried to talk the landlord out of renting to me, pointing at the door and saying, “That door has more rights than this girl does.” But I told them my story honestly, and I talked them into it.

Opening the bar and signing contracts required a residency number I didn’t yet have, which meant a lot of bureaucratic hassle. I ran from one office to another, and somehow a solution always turned up. I managed to get everything registered with nothing more than a certificate of temporary residency.

I wasn’t issued my DNI, Argentina’s residency document, until two years after I moved. My case took a long time to review, and I had to renew my pending-asylum certificate several times.

I got really lucky with the space. The bar is upstairs, and I live in the basement with my kids. Things happen, of course — two months ago, the building’s sewer pipe clogged, sewage came pouring out of the sink, and everything flooded. It would have made a fittingly symbolic end to my story: climbing and climbing only to drown anyway. But by evening I’d found a way to fix everything and open the bar.

My kids came up with the bar’s name, Babushka. It’s less a bar than a cultural space where you can grab a drink and a bite. We have one of the largest Russian-language poetry libraries on the continent. As soon as the bar started turning a profit, I shipped four cubic meters of books over from Russia. There are books in other languages too; all sorts of things end up with me. Once, a regular customer’s mother died at the age of 100, and I inherited her library.

The bar also has homeless friends. In the evening, if there’s food left over, I feed them, and in return they bring me books they find in the trash. Some books are gifts from the authors themselves, since Argentine writers regularly perform at the bar. We hold book launches, poetry nights, film screenings, and concerts, all in Spanish.

The bar started making money almost right away. I hadn’t even finished getting all the permits, and I was already earning money hosting parties and cooking food. Even then, it was enough to get by.

For my wedding to my ex-husband, my grandmother gave me a recipe book she’d kept her whole life. I cook from it, though I sometimes improvise. I also love Asian food, so Babushka serves everything from Thai-style fried cucumbers to borscht. We make classic cocktails too, from gin and tonic to Argentina’s signature Fernet con Coca.

Only my kids and I work at the bar. I’d never actually worked at a bar before — my only prior experience was a year as a waitress in college. My older son handles the accounting spreadsheets; he’s better with finances than anyone else in the family. Friends help out too — they hang out at the bar, and when they see I’m swamped, they’ll make a sandwich or pour coffee for customers.

Two months ago, my landlord told me the rent was about to triple because my old lease was expiring. Somehow I talked him down, and the rent only doubled.

I also raise prices at the bar almost every week. That’s not my choice — everything in Argentina keeps getting more expensive, and when my supply costs go up, I have to charge customers more. Even so, by Argentine standards the bar is inexpensive — locals constantly comment that we have “nice prices.”

Over the past few years I’ve realized that stability is an illusion. This has been a time of fucking adventures. The 2000s were an anomaly — 15 fat years when everyone had great jobs and carefree travel. It’s really painful to remember that life. Back then it felt like stability had always existed, but it wasn’t so long ago that we were trying on knockoff Nikes on a piece of cardboard at the market. Now I try to appreciate the small things, like having a roof over my head and food on the table.

Mikhail Tkachevsky, 33

From a bar manager in Moscow to a photographer in New York

In college, I studied to be a paramedic and worked part-time at Il Patio. By the end of my studies, I’d realized I wanted to be a bartender instead — there was more money and more room to grow than in paramedic work. I sought out contacts in the bartending community, went to lectures, and competed in bartending competitions. In the end, I spent 12 years in the bar industry.

I worked as a bartender in Moscow at Strelka, Mendeleev Bar, and Simach, and as head manager at the bistro bar Mentalitet, where I ran the team and came up with cocktails. The war started while I was working at the bar Ess-Thetik on Patriarch’s Ponds. I immediately bought a ticket to Yerevan on the next available flight, but it was canceled, and I stayed in Russia until October — I needed to deal with a worsening anxiety disorder, save up some money, and hand off my work. Maybe it’s some Soviet instinct: the world’s on fire, but you try not to let your boss down.

After the collapse of the USSR, my parents moved to the U.S., where I was born. I don’t remember my childhood there — we came back when I was 4 — but I had an American birth certificate. I never thought much of it, since I loved Moscow and wanted to live only there; I dreamed of an apartment on Trubnaya Street. But when the mobilization started, I remembered the birth certificate. I dug around online, found out I could get an emergency passport, went to the U.S. embassy in Moscow, filed an application, and within two hours had obtained [a passport].

In November 2022, I decided to move to the U.S. I flew to New York with $5,000 I’d saved while working as a bar manager. For the first 10 days, I stayed at an expensive hostel and paid $60 a night. Then I moved to a cheaper one, sharing a three-room apartment with one shower and one toilet with 11 other people. I spent four months there, paying just $400 a month.

The whole time, I was actively job hunting. I was sure that with my experience I’d quickly land a job at a good bar, but it turned out to be very difficult. Everywhere in New York I was told that experience alone wasn’t enough — I needed experience specifically at New York bars, because everything here was “special.” Though what I remember most about that “special” treatment is going to Employees Only, one of the best bars in the U.S., and waiting 25 minutes while the bartender chatted with a friend. He finally came over and told me the only non-alcoholic drink they had was tonic water. In New York bars, it’s better to be the bartender than the customer.

My money was running out fast, so I widened my job search to other cities. I got lucky and found a job as a bar manager in Washington, convincing them I had extensive experience even though my English wasn’t perfect. The owner spoke Russian, so we were able to work things out. I moved to Washington and settled into another hostel. The work was hard because the staff had such a casual attitude toward the job — one bartender would drink heavily on shift, then not show up the next day because of a hangover, and I’d have to cover for him.

Employees showed up late, took their duties lightly, and left the workspace dirty. It was hard for me, given the OCD I’d developed behind the bar in Moscow. On top of that, the city itself struck me as boring.

After three months in Washington, I quit and went back to New York. For a couple of months I lived off the money I’d made in Washington and rented a room with my savings. I looked hard for work, but no one was hiring. Then I got lucky and landed a job at a good bar — but it was terribly dirty, which weighed on me. I felt depressed, looking for an alternative while also getting sucked into Instagram reels. My feed kept showing me beautiful reels from cinematographers and professional photographers.

I loved that kind of content, and soon I started taking photos myself on my phone. I realized I was living in the most cinematic city in the world. You walk out of your building, and there are Latin American preachers praising Christ through a crackling speaker; across the street, students are recruiting for the Communist Party; and on weekends, Ecuadorians hold volleyball tournaments. All around are supermarket carts converted into grills, with chicken wings sizzling on them.

Through Facebook, I found an American bartender who had mutual acquaintances with me from Moscow. He was just launching a bar in New York, and on the recommendation of people I knew from Moscow bars, I got hired onto the team. But the project didn’t take off — there were almost no customers. A month later, half the team was let go. I was fired too, from one day to the next with no explanation — I think because of my weak English.

I was furious and decided I no longer wanted to depend on anyone and would make my living through photography instead. I bought a camera on credit for $2,500, even though borrowing money from a bank without a credit history or steady income is pretty difficult. All I could get approved for was an Amazon credit card with terrible terms.

I lived and breathed photography: watching lectures, interviews, podcasts, trying to understand not just the technique but how good photographers think. I needed money, so I didn’t waste time — I quickly put together a portfolio from what I’d shot while learning, started posting about myself in all kinds of chats, and signed up for client-finding services. Sometimes I’d approach people on the street and say, “Want me to take your portrait?” That’s how I earned my first $40 from photography: a random passerby liked his portrait and paid me for it.

A few months after I put together my portfolio, orders started coming in through Thumbtack, a service that helps find clients for a small commission. One of my first jobs was on Long Island, shooting a business portrait, and I was paid $330 for it. Getting there and back, though, took nearly five hours. That’s when I first understood that photography isn’t just the shoot itself: it’s also endless travel, negotiations, client hunting, and knowing how to run a business.

Gradually, I developed my own style. At first I was scared to approach people and photograph them, but I quickly realized people don’t get angry when you photograph them — they smile instead. It was as if photographing them was a compliment to their looks. I started photographing people on the street at New York’s Italian culture festival.

I submitted my festival photos to a street photography contest and unexpectedly took first place, winning $1,000. What’s more, the head of the jury was none other than Bruce Gilden himself. But what made me happiest was finally being able to pay for my room. I later posted an ironic reel from the festival about photographing people without asking their permission, and it unexpectedly racked up 27 million views.

After the video blew up, I got a strange message on Instagram. The person said he really liked my style and asked me to shoot his wedding. I figured he was a scammer, since his account was empty and he’d agreed to my price without haggling. He then wrote that if things worked out, we’d fly to Las Vegas, where he’d need a photographer too.

I suggested we meet in person, and he agreed and turned out to be a real person. A few days later I shot his wedding, and then we really did fly to Las Vegas, and later to Stockholm too, for events tied to his startup, where I worked as the photographer.

Photos from his wedding were even published in Vogue, since his wife is an influencer. Since then I’ve occasionally shot events, which is how my photos also made it into Dazed. But most of my income comes from personal photo sessions. Half my clients are Russian-speaking, half English-speaking.

I haven’t gotten rich off photography. In the two years I’ve been doing this, I’ve borrowed a lot from friends and worked side jobs at catering gigs and events as a bartender. I was investing in the future more than earning money.

Only now am I starting to earn enough to cover all my expenses, and even then it’s not always enough to pay down my debts. The income is unpredictable — sometimes you land a traveling project, like the one in Stockholm, where I made $2,500 in four days; other times you won’t make that much in an entire month. Right now, to keep growing as a photographer while staying financially secure, I combine shoots with working at a cafe two days a week.

At one point I really needed money, so I worked at a bar for three months. After a shift, I had no energy left to go anywhere with my camera, so I decided it was better to earn less for now than give up photography, which brings me more joy, and I quit again.

I loved Moscow, but now I feel at home in New York. Sometimes I grab a couple of wings from an Ecuadorian food stand near my place. They call me “amigo,” and even though they barely speak English and I don’t speak Spanish, we manage to chat a little. Every time, those conversations leave me with really warm feelings — like the city has finally accepted me.

Viktoria, 42

From a farmer outside Moscow to a baker in Serbia

In the 2000s, I worked as a secretary handling document flow at a company that sold appliances. Then I moved to HR, and later I processed and issued loans at a bank. The pay was low, and the work was boring and far too monotonous.

In the early 2010s, my husband and I wanted to change something. We’d had a child with health problems, and we started thinking about moving to the countryside since our son needed clean air. We’d long wanted to start our own business so we wouldn’t depend on a boss, could plan our own days, and could earn more. So we decided to raise broiler chickens.

In 2012, we found a small house in a village in the Moscow region and left Moscow. We’d never farmed before. We figured: if it worked out, great, and if it didn’t, at least we’d have enough meat to feed ourselves.

My husband had always been building things — he worked in metalworking, assembling and fixing machines at factories — and he was excited to set up chicken production. He built a henhouse, put together a watering system, and made a brooder for the chicks. Pretty quickly we went from 50 chicks to several hundred.

Then Russia annexed Crimea. I wanted to emigrate, but my husband wasn’t ready. Life got harder — prices for feed and hatching eggs shot up several times over, and income dropped too, because people started buying less farm-raised meat.

In 2018, I finally convinced my husband that we needed to leave. We sold our equipment and moved back to Moscow to save up money for emigration. My husband got a job as an engineer at a metalworking plant, but two months later he died in a workplace accident. I spent the whole next year recovering, supporting our three children and my mother-in-law. Then COVID hit, and I was sick the whole year — emigration was the last thing on my mind.

Then the war started. My middle daughter, who was in third grade, came home from school one day and said, “It’s such a shame I can’t go to Ukraine to help our guys.” I realized my kids were being brainwashed and needed to be saved. The last straw was the growing pressure on LGBTQ+ people. My oldest child, who’s 15, is queer. Fortunately, he hasn’t run into problems because of his orientation, but I knew he wouldn’t hide his identity.

My family had already been touched by repression once before. A firing squad executed my great-grandfather in 1936. My grandfather was sent to a labor camp at 21, and my grandmother too, for “spikelets”. So I had no illusions about what could happen when the state cracks down. I couldn’t afford to delay emigrating, and nothing was keeping me in Russia anyway: my mother and husband were both dead.

Emigrating to Serbia was the simplest option. Serbia is great because, until you find a way to legalize your status, you can just do visa runs. To pay for the move, I sold my car and left in February 2023.

At first, I planned to live on the children’s survivor’s benefits. I didn’t have any specific plans for earning money — I was confident I could find some basic job.

I searched for work for several months through Telegram chats where people posted job listings, and that’s where I came across a baker position. I applied, even though I’d never worked as a baker. The bakery took a chance on me because of my farming experience and my volunteer work at a church outside Moscow, where I used to cook in the dining hall on Sundays. In June 2023, the bakery brought me on for training.

My coworkers trained me right there on the job. For three months, my training was in Serbian, even though at the time I only knew a couple of phrases. Sometimes I could guess the meaning from context. Sometimes the words resembled Russian ones. When I really didn’t understand, I used a translator.

I really loved working at the bakery, even though the pay isn’t the highest. At first I made just $500 — combined with the children’s benefits from Russia, it was enough for a modest life. But now my salary has gone up by a couple hundred dollars.

Five coworkers and I make bread and various sweet and savory pastries. The workday can run up to 10 hours, depending on how much needs to be baked. My coworkers have welcomed me, and we get along well. Overall, I like Serbia — the people are friendly, and it feels calm and safe. Plus, there’s no insane propaganda in the schools that could affect the kids.

At first, our emigration was complicated because my oldest child started having serious health problems, brought on by the change in climate and the hormonal changes of adolescence. For two years we searched for specialists and tried different treatments for him. It turned out he has high-functioning autism, and, as a result of a case of swine flu he had in 2009, narcolepsy. Compared to that, all the other “minor” problems — the lack of money, the uncertainty, being in an unfamiliar country — aren’t problems at all.

Almost all my time goes to taking care of my kids. My older son’s treatment, for example, requires frequent doctor visits and monitoring his condition. Because of that, I barely follow what’s happening in Russia. And I don’t miss it, since I don’t have any close relatives left there.

I never give up hope, though sometimes I get tired and angry. There’s no one to share the responsibility with, but I know that problems can be broken down into tasks and solved. The cost of despair is too high for me — my children’s health and lives are at stake.

Alexander Balashov, 36

From a photographer in Kemerovo to a handyman in Seattle

Before emigrating from Russia, my wife and I did wedding and commercial photography and made good money at it. The work was such that we could often sleep in until noon, though there were weeks when we only got two to three hours of sleep a night. At the same time, I worked as a brand manager, running ad campaigns and dealing with clients.

I didn’t like the situation in the country. I volunteered at Navalny’s campaign office in Kemerovo, and in 2018 I was called in for questioning in connection with the case against the office’s coordinator. A lawyer advised me to show up but invoke Article 51 of the Constitution and say nothing. A few days after the questioning, my wife and I decided to leave Russia for a while and went on a trip through Southeast Asia. We visited Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia.

When we came back, no one bothered me for a while. But in 2021, I started getting calls from the prosecutor’s office and the police, inviting me in for questioning without a formal summons. I refused, telling them that if they wanted to talk, they should send an official summons. But of course it was frightening. We sold our apartment in a hurry, below market price, and went into hiding.

First we went to Altai, then to Sheregesh, a small town in the Kemerovo region. I turned off my phone so I couldn’t be tracked. We then decided to leave Russia for Kyrgyzstan and plan our next steps from there. But shortly before our flight, Russia launched its war against Ukraine.

I couldn’t stay silent, so I went back to Kemerovo and staged a one-person picket with a sign reading “No to War.” I understood this was a direct path to prison, but I couldn’t act otherwise. I was detained and sentenced to 12 days. Then a cycle began: after the 12 days, I was released, but I was detained again on my way out of the holding facility for another 10 days, and then again for 13 more days. I was charged with inciting hatred “against the social group of ‘police officers’” over an old comment I’d made on [the Russian social media platform] VK, in which I harshly criticized police.

While I was in the holding facility, an officer from the Interior Ministry’s Center for Combating Extremism, known as Center E, came to see me. He said I could either go to prison or cooperate, and offered to pay for my flight and expenses in Georgia in exchange for me spying on a friend who ran Navalny’s campaign office. I realized this was my chance to escape Russia and agreed. They didn’t ask me for any guarantees. I turned down the money for tickets and expenses, saying I’d rather submit receipts afterward.

Of course, I didn’t fly to Georgia. My wife and I decided we should fly straight to a country where we could stay, so we chose the United States, where we could apply for political asylum. We flew from Moscow to Qatar, then to Mexico, and from there to the U.S. border.

We took some of the money left over from selling our apartment in Kemerovo: $8,000. We decided not to take the rest so as not to draw attention at the border, fearing we wouldn’t be allowed to leave. We put some of the money into crypto and gave the rest of our savings to friends, family, and animal shelters.

We showed up at the U.S. border six times, and each time we were turned back. You can only request asylum right at the border or after you’ve crossed it. But American border agents stand before the border itself, thoroughly checking documents and vehicles, and if they suspect you might be an asylum seeker, they send you back. Our seventh attempt succeeded because the cars in the lane we were driving in weren’t being checked.

We applied for asylum, and after that, my wife and I were sent to separate immigration detention facilities, since asylum applications are always reviewed individually.

I was in immigration detention for almost four months. I spent a lot of time in the facility’s law library, where I learned about immigration law and found phone numbers for law firms. I called around and that’s how I found a free lawyer.

One of the conditions for getting out of immigration detention is having a sponsor in the U.S. — someone who will vouch for you and provide housing and food. I got lucky and found a sponsor while still detained: a guy in the facility with me had a friend who’d moved to the U.S. from Ukraine long ago, and that friend became a sponsor for both me and my “cellmate.”

After getting out of detention, I still had to get my wife out. While I was detained, I’d had almost no contact with her. I looked into it and learned she’d only be released on bail of $35,000. I didn’t have that kind of money.

I was preparing for the hearing that would decide whether my asylum petition would be approved, while also looking for money to get my wife released. My sponsor let me stay with him and offered me work with him on a construction site. I agreed and searched for other work at the same time — checking job listings online, asking people around me, and reaching out to friends of friends.

I soon found work on a skyscraper construction site, even though I’d never done anything like that in Russia. With money from that job, I moved out from my sponsor’s place and rented a room. But there was no way to quickly earn the $35,000 for my wife’s bail through construction work. So I turned to a company that specializes in exactly these situations — it pays your bail for you, and you pay it back later with a fee on top.

My wife was eventually released, after spending six months in detention. I kept working on the skyscraper construction site in Washington, while she got a job as a cleaner, cleaning apartments for pay. We had almost no free time — I’d sometimes wake up at three in the morning, work all day, and go to bed at ten at night. My wife was exhausted too. We lived like that for several months.

In early 2023, the skyscraper was finished, and I started looking for other ways to make money. In Russia, I’d never worked with my hands — I’d only done things around my own house. But I do have an engineering degree, so figuring out repair work wasn’t hard for me.

On Facebook, I found a Russian-speaking woman who’d moved to the U.S. with her parents as a child. She bought old RVs, fixed them up, and sold them. I got a job with her doing repairs and made about $25 an hour. That went on for several months, and then she moved on to other pursuits, leaving me without work.

I started looking for jobs on sites offering small repair services. I replaced toilets, installed doors, and painted rooms. Life in the U.S. is very expensive, so I had to grab anything that brought in income and work without days off.

My wife and I got lucky — in December 2024, we won our case and received a document allowing us to stay in the U.S. We wanted to get back into photography, which meant buying equipment and investing in marketing. But our marriage gradually started falling apart. My wife and I had built up mutual resentment, partly because of the drastic lifestyle change and the enormous stress. We tried to save the relationship, but it was hard to hear each other out. Little by little we stopped talking, even though we kept living together. I was the one who initiated the divorce. Attempts to reconnect didn’t work, and we didn’t have the energy to keep trying. Technically, though, we’re not divorced yet — we’re still working through the paperwork.

Soon after we split up, I moved to Seattle, focused on repair work, and became a “jack of all trades,” or handyman, as it’s called here. In the U.S. there are several platforms where you can hire workers like that.

Some jobs are simple: changing a lock or a faucet. But sometimes there are trickier ones, like framing a house. The work varies widely: laying tile, installing a bathtub, replacing a toilet, fixing a gate. Sometimes the job isn’t building something but tearing it down — a wall, say.

I realized that working with your hands is great. On top of that, it’s quite profitable for people without local degrees or certifications. I make between $8,000 and $12,000 a month, depending on how much work I take on. Usually I have up to six small jobs a day, but sometimes there’s one big job that takes a whole day or even several days.

I prepare for jobs in advance. For example, I knew nothing about installing automatic garage doors, but I researched it all online, showed up, and did it as if I’d been doing it my whole life. There’s tons of information online now about how to do repairs — there’s a YouTube video for almost any problem, or you can ask an AI. Prep usually takes a little time, anywhere from half an hour to an hour. Sometimes I just figure it out myself, working out logically how something is put together.

A typical summer workday runs 10–12 hours, so I make my own food and bring it with me. Travel eats up some of my time too — I might spend an hour getting from one job to the next.

Sometimes I work without days off — it’s easier for me to put in a lot of hours all at once so I’ll have more time later to relax somewhere beautiful. Ideally, I’d like to work a couple of weeks a month, or every other month, and spend the rest of my time traveling.

I feel like I belong in the U.S. now. Americans, in general, are a lot like Russians — just more successful and kinder. I don’t miss Russia much, since most of my friends have scattered elsewhere. They live all over the world: in England, Australia, the European Union. Some live in the U.S. too — by coincidence, some old friends of mine from Kemerovo now live in the town next to mine. But I keep close track of what’s happening in Russia and get into arguments about it on social media.

I love my work and consider myself a very happy person. Though I do hope that my ex-wife and I will get back into photography together — if not as a married couple, then as business partners.