Clirium’s Magazine · Issue 07 · 05.2026 · Member Story

Galina Kozhevnikova: “I kept waiting for someone to notice me. Then I realized my life was already happening”

After decades of marriage, one woman stopped waiting for someone else to change her life — and began, step by step, to build her own: a new profession and a new relationship with money, with her body and with herself

Featured: Galina Kozhevnikova — Massage therapist in training · CLIRIUM® ME member. Published: May 11, 2026. Reading time: 11 min. Story and interview by Victory Naydenova.

Topics: Member Story, Self-Worth, Money & Health

Galina works at Pyaterochka, Russia’s biggest discount grocery chain. She’s learning massage, looking for her first clients, figuring out how to promote herself, paying off loans and working on her body. She lives in a marriage that has made her ask herself hard questions for many years.

This is not an overnight-success story. There’s no business yet, no loans paid off, no apartment bought — none of the milestones that neatly split a life into “before” and “after.”

I chose to leave her right at this point on purpose. It’s the hardest and the most interesting one: the old life hasn’t gone anywhere, and the new one is only beginning to take shape.

We’re used to showing women once they’ve crossed the finish line. But the most honest part happens here — when a woman sees her life clearly, without illusions, for the first time.

And asks herself, seriously and for the first time: What do I want — and what am I willing to do to get it?

Victory Naydenova · Founder of CLIRIUM® ME

As told to the editors of Clirium’s Magazine

Her Story · In Her Own Words

Galina Kozhevnikova

An introduction by Victory Naydenova

Some stories matter most when you tell them mid-process, without waiting for the pretty ending — the business built, every loan paid off, the relationship sorted out, the apartment bought, and a life that can be tidily laid out as “before” and “after.”

Galina Kozhevnikova’s story is different. She’s at what I believe is the hardest and most interesting stage of change: the old life hasn’t disappeared, and the new one is only starting to take shape.

Galina works at Pyaterochka, a discount grocery chain. She lives in a marriage that has made her ask herself hard questions for many years. Little by little, she’s learning massage and trying to turn it into a profession, looking for her first clients, figuring out promotion, thinking about a small product of her own, working on her body, paying off loans and learning to handle money differently.

There’s no instant success here yet. But there is something I consider far more valuable: a woman beginning to see her own life without illusions and, for the first time, seriously asking herself — What do I actually want, and what am I willing to do for it?

Here is Galina’s story.

I knew. I could feel that something had to change

These days I think a lot about the fact that I knew. Somewhere deep inside, I’d felt for a long time that I didn’t want to live like this — that a lot in our relationship wasn’t working for me, that I was unhappy. But instead of trusting myself, I listened to everyone around me.

People told me, “You’ve never lived on your own,” “You two make such a beautiful couple,” “He may not be much, but he’s yours.” So I kept going, because I was scared: What happens if I leave? What if he stops loving me, walks out on me? What if being alone is even worse?

Now my kids are grown, and I look back with completely different eyes. I see how many years I lived believing I had to think about everyone else first, how much I did for my family — and how little I built for myself in all that time. I don’t have my own apartment, I don’t have real savings, I don’t have a profession where I feel truly fulfilled and independent. And at some point a thought just pierced me: How much longer am I going to wait?

For years I was waiting for my own “golden fish” — like the magic fish in the Russian fairy tale that grants wishes. It seemed that one day things would change on their own: my husband would become a different person, circumstances would line up, and I’d finally be given what I was missing. Now I can see how long I kept myself stuck in that waiting.

And the most painful part for me isn’t even how much time has gone by. It’s seeing that I could have started asking myself different questions so much sooner.

He once wrote that he was happy with me. So I started wondering: What happened after that?

Not long ago, completely by accident, I found my husband’s old notebook and saw entries he’d written many years ago.

He wrote that he was going to marry me. Then there was an entry from March 1998: “My Galochka is pregnant” — and he went on about waiting for a son or a daughter and how happy he was. Then in November came the next entry: his son had been born, and again he wrote that he was happy.

I read it and thought: What happened to us after that?

All these years it was easy for me to see only what he didn’t do. I didn’t get enough attention, enough help with the kids, enough help around the house. My husband was always ready to help anyone else, to take care of other people — and at home, I slowly piled up an enormous amount of resentment.

But now I’m starting to see myself in that relationship, too.

To avoid hearing “no,” I’d rather not ask at all. It was easier to do everything myself than to ask, wait and maybe be let down. To avoid a fight, I’d leave things unsaid or keep them to myself. My husband made a lot of decisions on his own and simply presented them to me as done deals — even about perfectly ordinary family things, like vacations.

And underneath it all, I kept waiting for one thing: When will my husband finally notice me?

I wanted everything in our family to be good, but now I understand that a family is a relationship between two adults. One person can’t spend years staying quiet, accommodating, stockpiling resentment and waiting for the other to guess everything — and then be surprised that nothing changes.

That doesn’t let the other person off the hook. But for the first time, I’ve started to see my own responsibility for my life.

I was asleep in magical thinking. Now I’m waking up

Probably one of the biggest shifts for me has been realizing how many years I spent waiting.

At CLIRIUM, I started noticing things that used to seem completely normal to me. For a long time I really did think this way: he should understand, he should give, he should notice, he should change — and then I’ll feel good.

Now I catch myself more and more often with a different thought: What can I do today?

I describe my old state very simply: I was “asleep” in magical thinking the whole time, and now I’m slowly waking up.

I don’t want to sit around anymore waiting for my husband to change, for money to show up, for someone to offer me a good job or for a new life to just appear out of nowhere. I’ve started looking at what I have right now and thinking about what I can build from it.

And that’s where very down-to-earth changes began.

Pyaterochka is where I am today — but I no longer think of it as where I’ll end up

I still work at Pyaterochka. I’m not going to make up a nice story about how I’ve quit everything, opened my own massage studio and have clients lined up out the door. That hasn’t happened yet.

But where I am today used to feel almost like a life sentence. Now I see it simply as the place I’m moving forward from.

I love massage, and I want to grow in that direction. I’m already trying to talk about what I do, posting content, looking at how to redesign my page on VKontakte — Russia’s most popular social network — learning to make content and thinking about how to turn views, little by little, into actual clients.

Of course, sometimes it really stings. You make something, post it, wait — people watch, some leave a like, and nobody books.

At first, moments like that made me want to give up.

Then something shifted inside me. I thought: So what? I’m going to keep going anyway, because I find it interesting. I like figuring things out, I like learning to make videos, I like mastering new tools, I like seeing that I’m actually capable of learning all this.

For some people, making a video, downloading a file, figuring out an AI tool or designing a page is no big deal. For me right now, every one of those things is proof that my world is much bigger than I was used to thinking.

I’ve even started talking with ChatGPT and Claude, trying to understand my strengths and thinking about a small product of my own. I’m still searching for the right form, but the fact that I no longer tell myself “Who do you think you are?” already means a lot to me.

I got my paycheck and saw money differently for the first time

Money is a whole separate story for me.

There used to be so much anxiety around it. This time I got my paycheck, paid my loans, bought the medication my gynecologist prescribed, looked at what was left and thought: Okay, there’s meat at home, the hens are laying, there are tomatoes and cucumbers in the garden — we’ll manage.

And that same day, my sick-leave pay came through.

I don’t see it as a miracle, and I don’t want to live waiting for miracles anymore. What matters much more to me is this: I’ve become calmer about money, and I want to learn how to create the flow of money in my life myself.

Now I have a new goal: to make money come in on days other than payday. That’s why I’m thinking about massage, about clients, about my own product, about which abilities I can turn into a profession and extra income.

It’s important to me to stop feeling that my financial life is completely determined by someone or something outside of me.

I’m not just taking back money and work. I’m taking back my body

Right now I’m also working on my body.

My goal is to get to 55 kilograms (about 121 pounds). I’m down to 85.5 (about 188 pounds) now, and I know there’s a long road ahead.

But for the first time, I’m trying to see that road not as another punishment for something being “wrong” with me, but as part of the life I want to create for myself.

Actually, everything happening right now is gradually coming together into one picture for me.

Relationships. Money. Work. Massage. My body. New skills. Trying to find clients. Wanting to create something of my own.

Before, I might have seen all of that as a dozen separate problems. Now I see one shared task: finally learning to build my life myself.

I no longer want to live thinking, What if he stops loving me, leaves, walks out?

I still don’t know what I’ll ultimately decide about my marriage.

And that’s an important change, too: I no longer need to come up with a pretty ending right away.

Once, the thought “What if he leaves?” terrified me. Now I sometimes think: Lord, let him go, then. So much energy went into being afraid of losing a relationship in which I often felt lonely anyway.

Today, the question for me is no longer how to make someone stay at any cost.

The question is different: What do I want my life to look like?

Maybe the relationship can change if we both change. Maybe not. I don’t know yet.

But I do know this: I don’t want to disappear from my own life anymore just to keep it in its familiar shape.

I’m glad I woke up here and now

Sometimes the thought of how much time has passed scares me. I’m not a young girl anymore, the kids are grown, a new chapter of life has begun, and it would be very easy to look at all of it and decide: That’s it, it’s too late.

But why too late?

Yes, I can’t go back and live twenty or thirty years over again. But I can decide what I’ll do with the years ahead.

I can master massage and find clients. I can learn to promote myself. I can create my own product. I can get my body in shape. I can get my finances in order. I can learn to talk in my relationship instead of staying silent out of fear of conflict. I can stop waiting for someone to one day hand me the life I want.

I think that’s the biggest change for me right now.

I can’t change the past.

But I’ve finally understood that I can take part in creating my future.

And I’m glad I understood it here and now.

Galina on Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/galina.uzhik2020?stkn=ZzFwaGs5MXUxc3I2

Editor’s afterword by Victory Naydenova

With Galina’s story, I especially don’t want to rush things or invent a pretty ending for her, because today she is still in the part of the journey that usually gets cut from success stories: the decision has been made, the first steps have been taken, and the world hasn’t yet offered any convincing sign that it will all work out. This, to my mind, is exactly where the true maturity of a choice gets tested — to keep going not because someone has already noticed you, praised you or recognized you, but because you yourself no longer want to go back to the old waiting.

Her husband’s old notebook gives this story real depth. A few lines written many years ago by a happy man don’t erase what happened afterward, but they make it impossible to settle for the too-simple explanation in which one person is always to blame and the other only endures. Between blaming the other person and blaming yourself lies harder territory — the chance to see a relationship between two adults, to acknowledge the other person’s responsibility and, at the same time, to notice your own years of silence, of requests never voiced and of fear of hearing “no.”

It also matters to me to leave Galina exactly where she is today — with her job at Pyaterochka, her massage work, her first attempts at promotion, her loans and questions that don’t have answers yet. Her story is powerful not because she’s already arrived at a perfect new life, but because for the first time she has stopped seeing her current life as a final sentence. The past truly can’t be rewritten, but the years ahead haven’t been lived yet — and the right to take part in shaping them changes a great deal on its own.

Timeline: A Story in Progress

• Before — Before
• — Many years of marriage; grown children.
• — A life of waiting: resentment, unspoken requests, fear of being alone.
• — No apartment of her own, no real savings and no profession in which she felt fulfilled.
• Now — Now
• — Works at Pyaterochka, a Russian grocery chain, and is learning massage.
• — Runs a page on VKontakte, Russia’s leading social network; learning to make videos and content; looking for her first clients.
• — Exploring AI tools and thinking about a small product of her own.
• — Paying off loans and learning to feel calmer about money.
• — Down to 85.5 kg (about 188 lb); goal: 55 kg (about 121 lb).
• — Seeing her own responsibility in her relationship for the first time.
• — A story still being written.

Training as a massage therapist, running a page on VKontakte and developing a small product of her own.

Previous issue: No. 6 · Raisat Ramazanova Next issue: No. 8 · Olga Saeliya