The Four AM Decision

I was born into a world that made sense. Kyiv, 2005. The kind of childhood where time moves in circles - aikido practice, computer games with friends, school that felt easy because everything felt easy. I was good at being a kid. Good at making friends. Good at moving through a world that seemed designed for moving through.

Then my knees betrayed me at twelve. Growing too fast, they said. The body outpacing itself. Days where I couldn't walk. The dojo became impossible, and with it went the structure I'd built my life around.

What I found instead was a screen. A Ukrainian YouTuber named Aleksey Shevtsov, filming the streets of Los Angeles. I watched those videos until I could recite them. The palm trees, the light, the impossible geometry of a city that felt like it existed in a different universe from mine. Then Venya Pak—another Russian who'd learned English and made it to LA. If he could cross that distance, why couldn't I?

So I started learning English. Tireless, obsessive. Switched all my media. Stopped living in Ukrainian and started living in the language of the place I'd never been.

Somewhere in those months, I found a Rudy Mancuso video - "One Man Band." I bought a keyboard. Six months later, I could play Für Elise. But then I found Chopin's Nocturne Op. 48 No. 1, and something broke open. Modern music suddenly felt shallow, like swimming in a pool when you'd discovered the ocean. Romantic-era composers understood something about depth, about the architecture of feeling. I wanted to live there.

My social world contracted. Not from losing friends, but from becoming selective. I started taking long walks alone. Fifteen years old, feeling the specific loneliness of someone who's outgrown their context but hasn't found a new one. I ran. I biked. I taught myself Ballade No. 1, Chopin's Revolutionary Étude. At music school, I was getting a classical education, but really I was educating myself - learning that discipline could be a refuge.

Then COVID. More isolation, more work on myself. The world shrinking to the size of a practice room.

Then February 24th, 2022. The first days of the war, I wasn't scared. Isn't that strange? Shock has its own anesthesia. But as days accumulated into a week, into ten days, the reality settled in: I could die here. Not heroically, not meaningfully - just randomly, a teenager in the wrong place when metal fell from the sky.

My family didn't want me to leave. I understood. Leaving felt like betrayal, like abandonment, like admitting defeat. But at 4 AM on one of those days—I don't remember which one, they'd blurred together - I decided enough was enough.

I googled "English-speaking countries." Denmark appeared. I'd never thought about Denmark in my life.

By 4 PM that same day, I was on a train from Kyiv to Lviv. Twelve hours sitting in a corridor between seats because there were no seats left. Everyone was leaving or trying to leave or helping someone leave. The sound of the train, the bodies pressed together, the strange silence underneath all the movement.

But the hardest part wasn't the train. It was walking to the station in Kyiv, hearing bombs in the distance, each step taking me away from everything I knew and toward complete unknown. It felt right and terrifying in equal measure. The kind of decision that cleaves your life into before and after.

Lviv: sixteen hours in a line in -7°C cold. Another twelve-hour train to Poland. Three days in Przemyśl, volunteering to translate, trying to figure out how to get to a country I'd chosen 3 days earlier. On the third day, I got sick. Fever, headache, the kind of sick where your body is telling you it's done with this journey. I boarded a twenty-four-hour bus to Denmark anyway.

Twelve hours before arrival, it occurred to me I had nowhere to sleep. I made a Facebook post. A stranger named Igor - now one of my closest friends - saw it and picked me up at København H. Gave me food, tea, a place to sleep. Found me a host family.

Those first two weeks, I lived in a penthouse in Teglholmen. So far from the corridor of that train it felt like a different dimension. Igor showed me the city. I rested. I existed in this strange liminal space between the life I'd left and whatever came next.

Then my mother and sister found a way to Denmark. We moved in with Pernille and Jens in Valby for three months. Through Igor, I found churches where I could practice piano - because even in displacement, especially in displacement, I needed that anchor. Music school had taught me technique, but survival was teaching me why technique mattered.

We got our permits. Moved to Nordvest. I found work as a barista, started learning Danish. Five months in Denmark, seventeen years old, building a fourth language because what else do you do when you've already learned that worlds can end?

Around this time, I met Steffen. One of those friendships that arrives exactly when you need it, teaching you things you didn't know you needed to learn.

But school was harder to figure out. The immigrant Danish classes weren't enough. I applied to Nørre Gymnasium's pre-IB program, got in, realized after three months it wasn't right. I was burning for business - I'd always known I needed to build things, create things, make things happen. Through connections, I found Niels Brock DIG. Got in after the grundforløb.

Then the loneliness returned. Everyone spoke Danish. No one particularly wanted to speak English. In Ukraine, I'd been the most popular kid in school - easy friendships, natural social skills. In Denmark, I was just the guy from Ukraine. Another immigrant. Background noise.

I remember sitting in class those first weeks, understanding the assignments but not the jokes, following the lesson but not the social currents. Watching groups form around shared references I didn't have, cultural touchstones I'd never encountered. It wasn't that anyone was cruel. They were just... living their lives, and I wasn't part of them.

So I focused on what I could control: school, piano, the gym. I found Anna, a piano teacher who understood my individualistic approach to playing. By this point, I'd narrowed my world to the composers who mattered most - Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, the ones who understood that emotional richness and complexity could coexist with directness and honesty. They didn't hide behind cleverness. They felt everything and put it all into the music.

First year of high school was lonely. But I trained at Fitness World (now Puregym) with obsessive consistency. Worked on Danish with Steffen. Let school be easy because it was. Waited.

Second year, we moved to our own apartment on Østerbro. I switched to SATS, started training 5.7 times per week - a rhythm I've maintained ever since, something I'm genuinely proud of. I loosened up, made some friends, attended masterclasses. My style changed. I was growing, finally, into the person I'd been trying to become.

Third year was the best. My natural social skills reasserted themselves. I worked at two startups, learned the ecosystem, met people building things. Left both when I realized I wasn't quite ready - that I needed something more than moving offices and setting up computers for cash. I needed to build something real.

I finished Niels Brock with an 11.1 average - enough to get into BSc International Business. Started working at Alice.tech, learned for three months through the autumn and into December.

Now it's winter break. I've built a webshop for my mother. I'm building more things. And on the good days, when the light comes through my apartment window in Copenhagen and my hands find their way across the keys, I play Nocturne Op. 48 No. 1. Eight years after I first heard it. Eight years after watching those Los Angeles videos, after my knees failed and I found piano and COVID locked down the world and a war started and I made a decision at 4 AM that changed everything.

The piece that showed me depth was possible. The piece I heard at fifteen while feeling lonely, knowing something existed beyond the surface but not how to reach it. Now I know. Depth isn't where you start. It's what you build through all the trains and border crossings and lonely practice rooms and learning languages and being invisible and becoming visible again. It's what happens when you decide at 4 AM that you'd rather step into the unknown than stay somewhere that's ending.

I think I'm finally ready to be a founder.

Not because I have the perfect idea or the perfect timing. But because I've learned what it means to build something from nothing. I've done it with languages, with music, with an entire life in a new country. I've learned that you don't wait until you're ready - you become ready by starting.

Los Angeles still glows in my imagination - maybe it always will. That dream hasn't disappeared; it's transformed. Because Copenhagen taught me something better than a dream city: that you can lose everything familiar and still find yourself. That discipline is freedom. That the unknown isn't the enemy - staying small when you're capable of more is the enemy.

The boy who couldn't walk at twelve learned to run. The teenager who fled at seventeen learned to build. The kid who thought music was an escape learned it was actually training for everything else - patience, precision, the ability to hold complexity and emotion in the same phrase. The ability to keep practicing even when no one's watching, even when progress is invisible, even when you're alone in a foreign country wondering if you made the right choice.

Every morning at SATS. Every evening at the piano. Every late study at the CBS library. Every line of code, every conversation in Danish, every moment of building something that doesn't exist yet. It's all the same discipline. The same decision I made at 4 AM: to move toward something rather than away from it.

I'm ready now. Not because the journey's over, but because I finally understand: the journey was always the point. And the best part? I'm just getting started.

Written on 1 of January 2026