Purification Is Not Just a Word

A personal memoir about the messy, paradoxical work of purification—how craving, ritual, and place reshape who we become.

Oct 28, 2025

“Do what you do, mind the ending,” says a Latvian proverb

Sometimes I give in: I walk to the village shop, buy a few sweets — six carefully weighed by a shopkeeper who knows I avoid sugar — and pick up eggs as a cover. At home I make bulletproof coffee with butter and that special coconut oil. It’s paradoxical that to write about purification I still reach for a stimulant, but maybe that’s practical logic: where there are vices, people look for cleansing.

It Began with a Word

I first noticed the word printed on a book cover in the library. Later I found myself reading Sofi Oksanen’s novel Purge on a bus along the highway in Latvia where I was living then. The sentences echoed in my mind immediately. A purification from the past and, at the same time, an encounter with it. When I finished the book, the word lingered: purification.

I was too young then. I had to keep getting high. I had to fall asleep on banquet tables and then revel in it afterward. I had to run wild, to lose myself fully in my own labyrinth of hell. Foot to the floor, the light had been red, but I couldn’t bring myself to hit the brakes. Not yet, please.

Still, purification was a brilliant word. It pressed on my feelings. It reminded me I wasn’t clean enough.

That I could be brighter. That I could stop drinking myself into oblivion and then wake in the hangover. That I could be reborn into clarity for more than a single triumphant moment. That I could...

And I found myself again, guzzling fizzy, strong drinks, talking and doing foolish things at the same time.

Foolish, of course.

It could have been better. Or maybe it couldn’t.

My First Purification

My first purification took place in the countryside.

I was away from home, in snow on the edge of the Zemgale region, in a place I didn’t know, still in Latvia. I remember that once a day — in the evening — we were allowed rice and ghee. I also remember the hazelnut-and-chocolate cake I planned to bake for the moment the cleanse ended. But then we left and the cake stayed in the fridge.

Purification was truly a paradox.

At one moment it seemed impossible to endure that torment without sweets and other temptations, and soon after I had already forgotten what I had been suffering for.

That time it felt as if wings had grown. I bought heeled ankle boots and invited my mother to a restaurant for coffee.

Someone needed to hear this.

“Mom, imagine — you can go the whole day without eating!” I was ecstatic.

Half floating, I returned to my apartment in a small town where nothing had changed. My neighbors were unmoved by my cleansing triumphs. They kept watching television through the wall, loudly because some of them were almost deaf. I looked out the window — a streetlamp lit an empty bus stop. Beyond it, a forest sank into darkness.

Minute after minute I turned from a sunny meadow into black, threatening clouds because I thought it didn’t count.

Wasn’t the world supposed to cheer and celebrate with me? Apparently not.

Beside our block of flats there was a small shop. In crisis moments its candy shelves soothed my sorrows. Now I think a proper cry might have helped. Back then it didn’t occur to me. My senses — my instruments — had gone blunt, like a knife nobody sharpened. I always wanted something, and I didn’t realize I was stuck in addiction and consumption.

I truly began to crave purification after we moved from Latvia to the Georgian countryside, where I started to question my long-held vegetarian certainties.

A Year of Purification

It felt utterly strange to travel 62 miles to the city by public transport just to bring plant milk for my coffee while cows grazed along the roads and in green patches — fat, unhurried, radiating an aura of simply being.

For a year I became a purification champion — mainly to myself, because to the world my cleansing adventures seemed unprecedented.

To me it felt like I had changed unbelievably. I avoided sugar and gave up flour, nuts, oats, and much more.

Sometimes I ordered milk from the neighbor women, whisked it with egg yolks, and called it my cappuccino — delicious and almost timeless joy, a settling-in for both the body and the Georgian countryside where I hadn’t grown up but had arrived a few years earlier.

That whole year I drank detox mixtures more than once a month and wrote about it in my diary. Usually purification is associated with subtraction, but for me it was the opposite — I gained weight, strength, and, I hoped, conviction. My circle of friends and acquaintances widened — it turned out some people were curious about how I was doing.

At some point I felt I had to stop. How long can one cleanse?

The Beginning and the Crack

It was time to start living. During the purification, which had now stretched for at least a year and a half, a list of desires accumulated — oh, how I longed for people, events, hikes!

One wish: take my laptop and go work in a café by the ocean. Checked. The sound of waves outside the window, salty air on my skin, peppermint tea in a pot that looked like Aladdin’s lamp — the dream had actually come true.

Life swept me along; I was in the whirlpool of events and often the center of attention, yet I hadn’t imagined that eating oysters, for example, would still make me think of my unpolished rural life.

When I first ever joined a women’s circle, I realized that among urban women I seemed like a historical artifact — a woman from the countryside. That image, as you can guess, had not been on my wish list and I didn’t believe I would ever long for purification again.

I wasn’t ready to see myself — who I had been. I had shed layers of cultural clothing. I had come to know the fabric I was made of down to the finest thread.

My vision had cleared, yet I still hoped to go unnoticed.

Still, I wanted to tweak myself, improve, create. Put on lipstick, emphasize my eyes, maybe dye my graying hair.

In some way it felt like my duty to make myself look like others. Ha!

But feeling like the heroine of an ad campaign no longer fulfilled me. The once-appealing images and roles I might inhabit had lost their charm. A crack had opened in the dream I had about the world.

“I am not a product,” I wrote in my diary.

Continuation, the Present

I reach for the detox mix on the kitchen shelf — sometimes I drink it, sometimes I don’t.

Purification. Indistinguishable from life, it has become a parallel frequency where the superfluous is continuously sifted out and it’s impossible to forbid oneself what doesn’t need forbidding.

Purification guarantees nothing; it isn’t a path to perfection.

Yet in tandem with life, purification can become rock and roll, or equally well a deeply investigative experience in which the temporal and the spiritual are no longer separable.

A person is whole, and so is everything.

Yet Another Paradox

I did not come to Georgia for the countryside or for purification. I am here because, thanks to the mountains, the whole land vibrates in a register familiar to my body. For a long time I haven’t been able to silence that voice.

Mountain expeditions, fasting while on them, are one of my passions revealed through purification processes. In the mountains I am the same person I am now as I write.

My blog “Detoxed Paragraph” has also become a space freed within the purification process. The earthly life’s ether has curled into cosmic expanses. Nothing unnecessary. Black on white.
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