Confessions from a Former Hilltop Warrior

Recently, I found myself in a situation where someone refused to engage in a dialogue simply because I expressed an opinion that didn’t match their own. It was a small moment, almost trivial on the surface, but it felt like a miniature version of something much larger that seems to be happening everywhere these days. And it made me pause — not to judge them, but to look at myself.

Because if I’m honest, I’ve done the same. There were moments when I was so convinced of my own correctness that I treated disagreement like a personal insult rather than an invitation to think. At the time, I felt gloriously righteous — the intellectual equivalent of standing on a mountaintop with the wind dramatically blowing through my hair. In hindsight, of course, I can see that I was not standing on a mountaintop at all. I was standing on a very small hill, waving a very small flag, and mistaking stubbornness for clarity.

And the truth is: I was wrong. Not because dialogue is always possible — it absolutely isn’t; some conversations are emotional minefields, and some people are simply not safe to talk to — but because in the situations I’m thinking of, dialogue was possible. I just didn’t take the opportunity.

And that’s the part that matters. Because when we stop listening to one another, when we retreat into our fortified little islands of certainty, we lose something essential — not just the chance to understand others, but the chance to evolve ourselves. And evolution, as far as I can tell, is rarely comfortable, but always necessary. Even if it sometimes requires admitting that the hill we were defending so passionately was, in fact, just a bump in the landscape.

Listening to one another does not mean abandoning our convictions. It simply means allowing reality to be larger than our own perspective. I still believe, for example, that getting vaccinated against Covid was the best decision I could make at the time, based on the information I had and the responsibility I felt. And yet — although I disagree with the decision itself — I can genuinely understand why some people chose not to get vaccinated. Their fears, their doubts, their sources of information, their personal histories: All of that makes sense once you actually listen. Understanding their reasoning doesn’t change my own position, but it does change the way I see them. It turns disagreement into something human rather than something hostile.

Perhaps the most humbling part is this: Only now, after feeling what it’s like when someone refuses to engage with me because they believe they stand on higher moral ground, do I begin to truly understand how painful and alienating it must have felt for those who chose not to get vaccinated. I don’t have to agree with their decision to recognize the sting of being dismissed, reduced, or morally categorized. If anything, I hope this experience softens me — makes me slower to judge, quicker to listen, and more capable of meeting other human beings where they actually are, rather than where I think they should be.

And somewhere in all of this, I’ve realized something else: Moral righteousness is a very comfortable place to stand. It gives us the illusion of height, of clarity, of moral altitude. It whispers that we are the reasonable ones, the informed ones, the enlightened ones. And the dangerous part is that this feeling is available to everyone, no matter what they believe. It’s a universal human temptation — a psychological all‑you‑can‑eat buffet where the price of admission is simply the conviction that we are right.

But moral righteousness, seductive as it is, doesn’t build a better world. It builds distance. It turns conversations into monologues and people into symbols. It makes us forget that being right is not the same as being wise, and that certainty is often just fear wearing a confident mask. It reassures us that we are standing on higher ground, even when the “higher ground” is nothing more than a slightly elevated patch of ego.

There are so many complicated issues that demand nuance and genuine understanding, and I’ve come to realize that simply dismissing another point of view — even when it contradicts scientific evidence — doesn’t resolve anything. It only deepens division and, in the worst cases, fuels the kind of hostility that can spill over into real‑world harm.

If anything, the world becomes a little less dangerous, a little less brittle, when we remember that listening is not a concession but a form of courage — the courage to let reality be bigger than our pride.

The Stranger Who Told the Truth

About a decade ago, I decided to renovate my tiny apartment in Vienna. My mother, in her usual entrepreneurial spirit, suggested inviting a pair of men from Subotica whom she knew could “do the job properly.” So she summoned them — quite literally — to take a six‑hour bus ride across borders. Both she and I waited for them at the station like we were greeting dignitaries, not two exhausted men with toolboxes.

There were two of them: one was loosely related to us (the Balkan category of kinship where “he married my mother’s cousin” counts as family), and the other looked vaguely familiar in the way people from your childhood sometimes do — like a face you once passed in a hallway but never stored in the permanent archive.

Since they arrived on a late Sunday afternoon, we decided to take them into the city center, to show them Stephansdom and the other obligatory Viennese highlights. While we were walking, I chatted with the vaguely familiar one, trying to place him. He had that look — the “I know you from somewhere” look — but my brain refused to cooperate.

Then he suddenly stopped, turned to me, and said, with the confidence of someone delivering a plot twist:

“Come on, Milice… do you really not know me?”

I stared at him the way one stares at a math problem that insists on being unsolvable.

He laughed. “We went to school together! We were in the same class.”

And just like that, the fog in my head began to lift. Yes — there had been someone with his name in my class. I couldn’t remember ever speaking to him, but I remembered the outline of him, the silhouette of a boy who sat somewhere in the room while I was busy surviving.

And of course, I felt embarrassed. I pride myself on remembering people. I like the feeling of recognition, of continuity, of being someone who pays attention. Yet here I was, walking through Vienna with a man I had apparently shared six years of schooling with — and my brain had filed him under “miscellaneous.”

But he thought it was funny, and I was — frankly — relieved. Instead of being offended, he laughed with the ease of someone whose ego doesn’t bruise at the slightest touch. In that moment, I started to feel a quiet respect for him. He didn’t turn my forgetfulness into a drama or a wound; he didn’t punish me with coldness or pride. He simply shrugged it off and made it clear I shouldn’t feel bad for not recognizing him right away. It was such a small gesture, but it revealed something rare: a person who doesn’t need to be remembered in order to feel like someone. And then, of course, I felt even worse — not because he made me, but because his grace highlighted how little attention I had paid to his existence back then.

But my failing memory is not the only reason I’m sharing this encounter.

A few days later, the three of us were having breakfast — my mother, this man, and myself — when my mother spotted what she clearly thought was the perfect opportunity to make me small again. She enjoyed doing it in front of an audience, especially one she assumed would naturally align with her: someone my age, someone from my hometown, someone who shared the same classrooms and corridors of childhood. In her mind, he was a witness who could validate her version of me.

She delivered the line with that familiar, practiced smile — the one she uses when she wants to wound without appearing to.

“Milica has always been a little awkward at school,” she said, as if offering a charming anecdote rather than a tiny incision.

I knew exactly what was coming next. I had lived through this scene too many times to count. She expected it to land the way it usually did — as an insignificant joke, a socially acceptable diminishment, the kind people politely laugh at because it’s easier than confronting the person who made it.

And I braced myself. Because I knew the script. I knew how these moments unfolded. I knew how quickly people aligned with her, how effortlessly they slipped into her rhythm. Most people didn’t even realize they were participating in something cruel; they just followed her lead, laughed along, nodded, confirmed her version of me without thinking. I had learned to expect it — the complicity, the silence, the way others would let her shape the narrative simply because it was easier than resisting it. I was already preparing myself for the familiar sting of being reduced in front of someone who had known me as a child.

But before I could even react, he calmly put down his cup of tea and said, “Oh, I absolutely disagree. Milica was the bravest and kindest person in our class.”

He said it with the ease of someone stating the weather, not performing a defense. No theatrics, no raised voice, no moral grandstanding — just a simple correction, delivered with the steadiness of someone who sees no reason to let a falsehood stand.

And in that moment, something inside me stilled. Because I had expected him — like everyone else before him — to take part in her little game. To laugh politely. To let her version of me settle into the air unchallenged. To choose the path of least resistance. I had grown so accustomed to people siding with her, consciously or not, that I didn’t even consider another outcome. I didn’t expect anyone to contradict her. I didn’t expect anyone to risk her displeasure. I didn’t expect anyone to see me clearly, let alone say it out loud.

But he did. Effortlessly. Without hesitation. Without fear.

And that was what stunned me most — not the compliment itself, but the fact that he refused to participate in her narrative. He refused to let her shrink me for sport. He refused to let cruelty disguise itself as humor. He refused to let the room tilt in her direction, the way it always had.

He simply told the truth.

And in doing so, he broke a pattern I had believed was unbreakable.

He was only the second person I had ever seen tell my mother she was wrong about me. A near‑stranger, someone I had barely registered in childhood, offered me a version of myself I had never been given at home: brave, kind, worthy of defense. It was disorienting, almost tender, to hear it spoken so casually over breakfast, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Perhaps that was what made it so powerful. He had nothing to gain by contradicting my mother, no stake in the family mythology, no need to maintain the fragile balance she always demanded. He simply told the truth — and in doing so, he revealed how much truth had been missing from the place where I should have been safest.

There is a particular bravery in contradicting someone who is used to being agreed with. A particular integrity in refusing to participate in a narrative that harms another person. A particular gentleness in offering a different version of someone — a truer one — especially when that truth has been buried under years of someone else’s commentary.

People like him don’t announce their courage. They don’t perform it. They don’t even think of it as courage. They simply refuse to let untruth settle into the air. They refuse to let cruelty disguise itself as humor. They refuse to let someone shrink another person for sport.

And often, they are the ones who change the room. Not by force, but by clarity. Not by confrontation, but by presence. Not by shouting, but by saying, quietly and without hesitation: “I disagree.”

It is astonishing how powerful those two words can be — especially when spoken by someone who has nothing to gain and no reason to intervene except that they recognize harm when they see it.

These are the people who restore your faith in the world a little. The ones who remind you that truth does not always need to be loud to be strong. The ones who show you that kindness, when paired with courage, becomes something transformative.

And sometimes, they are the people you barely remember — until the moment they step forward and reveal who they have been all along.

J’adore Eurovision

Since today is the 70th Eurovision Song Contest final — and the whole spectacle is unfolding in the very city where I live — I feel the occasion deserves a place on my blog. Let me start by confessing that I love Eurovision. And the word love is not used lightly here. It is far more than affection. J’adore Eurovision. I realized the depth of this devotion last year, when I didn’t even like Austria’s song, yet I kept thinking: If Austria wins, Eurovision comes to my doorstep. It was the purest, most unfiltered mixture of local patriotism and selfishness I have ever experienced. That’s the power of this ridiculous, glitter‑covered, always political, and sometimes musically questionable institution: It rearranges your priorities with the force of a small earthquake.

So where does all this love for a loud music competition come from? Because, rationally speaking, I know perfectly well that Eurovision has its issues. The same countries receiving the same predictable support year after year. Smaller nations with smaller budgets barely getting noticed unless they perform a miracle. The way the bookies shape the narrative long before the first note is sung. I’m not blind to any of that.

The more I think about it, the more I believe it has to do with a child who felt so lonely — so profoundly, achingly lonely in the world — that Eurovision became a kind of annual lifeline. It allowed me to dream. Not necessarily of attending the event in the arena (although that certainly has its charm), but of something much simpler and far more intimate: that one day, I wouldn’t have to watch the whole thing by myself. That maybe, at some point in my life, there would be someone sitting next to me on the couch, laughing at the same absurd staging choices, judging the same key changes, and sharing the same ridiculous excitement. Eurovision wasn’t just entertainment; it was a promise that having a real family — the kind who stays awake for something simply because it matters to me — might one day be possible. It was the quiet hope that somewhere in the future, there would be someone who didn’t roll their eyes, who didn’t tell me to turn the volume down, who didn’t treat my joy as an inconvenience. Eurovision carried that dream long before I had the language for it.

In my childhood home, I had to watch Eurovision in near‑silence. I wasn’t permitted to turn up the volume or sing along — any sound risked waking my parents, and waking my parents was a crisis I couldn’t afford myself to trigger. So I cheered for my favorites in whispers, conducting my own private Eurovision in the dark. I mouthed the lyrics, clapped in silence, and perfected the art of celebrating like a spy: all emotion, no noise. Looking back, it’s almost funny — this tiny, devoted fan crouched in front of a glowing screen, treating every key change like a state secret. But at the time, it felt like the only place where I could let myself dream, even if I had to dream quietly.

Since 2004, the year Serbia and Montenegro rejoined Eurovision (and the year I discovered the contest even existed), I haven’t missed a single semifinal or final. Not one. My viewing record is cleaner than my medical file. And the truth is: I genuinely don’t know what would have to happen for me to miss Eurovision. A natural disaster? A blackout? A meteor landing directly on my living room? Even then, I’d probably find a way to stream it on my phone under the rubble. If I ever do miss it, you can be absolutely certain it’s a health emergency — the kind where someone else has confiscated my devices and I’m lying in a hospital bed, protesting weakly while the nurses pretend not to understand the gravity of the situation.

Eurovision is my annual constant, my personal liturgical calendar. And I intend to keep it that way.

Fortunately, I don’t have to watch it alone anymore. I have people in my life who are willing to watch it with me — not just passively, not as background noise while they scroll on their phones, but actively. The kind of people who sit down with intention, who comment on the staging, who gasp at the key changes, who argue passionately about the jury votes as if geopolitical stability depended on them. People who understand that Eurovision is not merely a show but a seasonal emotional condition. And every time I watch it with them, I feel a small, private astonishment: The child who once whispered her cheers in the dark now has a living room of people who may not be true Eurovision enthusiasts, but who choose to pretend they are — for me. It feels like a quiet miracle.

Sometimes I think Eurovision became my first experience of hope — the small, stubborn kind that keeps a lonely child company. Every May, no matter how the rest of the year had gone, I knew there would be three nights when the world felt a little bigger, a little brighter, a little less indifferent. It was a ritual that didn’t require much. Just me, a television screen, and the belief that somewhere out there, millions of people were watching the same thing at the same time. It made the world feel connected long before I ever felt safe enough to connect to anyone in it.

And maybe that’s why my devotion never faded. Eurovision grew up with me — or perhaps I grew up around it — and it became a kind of emotional anchor. Through new countries, new languages, new jobs, and all the quiet reinventions that adulthood demands, Eurovision remained the one constant that didn’t ask anything from me except enthusiasm. It was the annual reminder that joy can be loud even when life is full of sorrow and that sometimes the most meaningful traditions are the ones we invent for ourselves.

But the real miracle — the one I would never take for granted — is that I no longer watch it alone. The child who once whispered her cheers now sits in a room where people gather not because they share her obsession, but because they care about her. They show up, they comment, they laugh, they pretend to be Eurovision experts for three nights a year, and in doing so, they give me something I once thought was reserved for the most privileged: a real family. And every time the opening theme plays, I feel that quiet shift inside me — the recognition that the dream I once had, the simple dream of sharing my enthusiasm with other humans, has already come true.

My Comfort Zone and I Are No Longer on Speaking Terms

There is a particular kind of bravery that doesn’t look like bravery when it arrives. In my life, it usually showed up disguised as exhaustion — the kind that settles into the bones after years of trying to make something work that simply refuses to fit. It looked like me sitting in my Vienna apartment during Covid times, staring at a cup of tea that had gone cold while I was busy reconsidering my entire existence. It looked like the quiet, unglamorous moment when I realized I had given something every possible chance — a profession, a family — and both still demanded that I shrink.

For ten years, I stayed in a field I kept trying to love. I gave it discipline, loyalty, and the kind of patience that would make saints feel underqualified. I kept telling myself that if I just worked harder, tried longer, or became more adaptable, the fit would eventually appear. But sometimes the bravest thing is not staying; it’s recognizing that persistence has quietly transformed into self‑erasure. Walking away from a decade of investment was not a gentle step outside the comfort zone. It was a tectonic shift of identity. It was admitting that the life I imagined at twenty — still partly believing in linear narratives and tidy arcs — is not the life that fits me anymore.

Leaving that field meant confronting the seductive logic of sunk costs: the belief that time spent is a debt that must be honored indefinitely. But the truth is simpler and far more difficult: No amount of past investment justifies a future of diminishing returns on your own humanity. Choosing to walk away was choosing myself over the version of myself I thought I was supposed to be.

And then there was the deeper rupture: going no contact with my family of origin. That was not leaving a comfort zone; that was leaving the idea of having one. It was stepping out of a story I was born into and writing a new one with my own hand, in my own language, with my own punctuation. I tried for years to nourish those roots — in ways most people will never understand. I tried with patience, with hope, with everything I had. But when even the act of trying became a form of self‑harm, I chose distance. I chose peace. I chose a life where love is not conditional on my silence, my compliance, or my ability to absorb other people’s emotional weather systems.

The mythology of family tells us that belonging is automatic and that home is a place you return to rather than a place you build. But sometimes the home you are born into is the first place that teaches you to shrink. Sometimes the comfort zone is nothing more than a familiar cage. And stepping out of it is not rebellion — it is survival. It is the quiet, steady insistence that your life deserves to be lived in a space where you are not required to disappear.

What still surprises me is not that I left the situations that asked me to shrink, but that each departure made the next one easier. I trained myself to recognize the early signs of misalignment — the subtle tightening in my chest, the familiar sense of being drafted into someone else’s emotional labor, the quiet dread that whispers, “Ah, we’ve been here before.” I learned that comfort is not always safety; sometimes it is stagnation wearing the costume of familiarity. I learned that leaving is not a failure but a form of self‑trust. And now, stepping out of the comfort zone is no longer a crisis — it is a skill. A practiced, embodied, hard‑won skill.

This is one of my greatest achievements: I have built a life where I do not stay where I am not met. I have made a habit of choosing growth over fear, truth over convenience, and self‑respect over inherited expectations. I have become someone who does not cling to the familiar simply because it is familiar. I have become someone who knows how to walk away — out of profound loyalty to my own becoming.

Leaving the comfort zone is no longer a rupture for me. It is a rhythm. A way of living. A testament to the fact that I trust myself enough to step into the unknown, again and again, because every time I have done so, my life has expanded — sometimes slowly, sometimes dramatically, sometimes with the comedic timing of a Balkan muttering “eto, vidiš” as the universe rearranges itself.

And that — that repeated choosing of myself — is a legacy of courage that few people ever build. It is the quiet, steady truth at the heart of all my departures: The comfort zone is not where I came from, and it is not where I am going. My life grows every time I refuse to shrink.

Christchurch and the Art of Carrying Lightly

There’s one place in the world that left a deeper impression on me than anywhere else: Christchurch, New Zealand. From where I stand, it might as well be on the opposite side of the planet — and in many ways, it is. I’m not planning to move there or reinvent myself as someone who says things like “I just feel more aligned with the Southern Hemisphere.” But I do want to understand why this place, of all places, stayed lodged in my mind long after I flew home.

Christchurch has a particular atmosphere — a kind of quiet resilience that doesn’t need to announce itself. This is a city that has been shaken, cracked, and broken more times than seems fair, and yet it keeps rebuilding with a calm, almost stubborn grace. You can see the scars everywhere: empty lots where buildings once stood, walls that still lean slightly, memorials tucked into corners. But right beside them, you see murals bursting with color, new architecture rising with optimism, people moving through their days with a gentleness that feels learned, not accidental. Christchurch doesn’t deny its past; it carries it lightly, like a reminder rather than a burden. And maybe that’s what struck me most — the way a place can break and still choose beauty, again and again.

At the Earthquake Museum, I spent hours listening to recorded stories from people who lived through the big quakes. Christchurch is well prepared for earthquakes, so the death toll is usually low — but not zero. And because of that, every tremor carries a flicker of fear. What surprised me most wasn’t the content of the stories, but the tone. Even those who had lost family members spoke with a kind of softness, a gentle humor, a lightness that didn’t erase the pain but somehow made space around it.

It made me realize something: It’s easier to forgive the earth for shaking than to forgive a person for hurting us. Nature has no motives, no malice, no choice. Humans do — or at least we believe they do — and that belief changes everything. When the ground moves beneath our feet, we don’t waste time wondering why it chose that moment or whether it meant to embarrass us. But when a person wounds us, we start spinning stories: what they meant, what they felt, what they should have done differently. We assign intention, and with intention comes blame, and with blame comes the long, slow sediment of resentment.

It’s strange, really — the earth can crack open beneath us and we call it fate, but a single careless sentence from another human being can feel like a deliberate act. Maybe that’s why the people of Christchurch can speak of tragedy with such lightness: Their sorrow has no target, and so it has room to soften.

And sometimes I wish something similar could happen between people who have spent years or decades tangled in their own painful histories. People who have hurt each other at different moments in time — sometimes knowingly, sometimes blindly, sometimes simply because they didn’t know how to do better. Relationships where the timeline of suffering doesn’t form a straight line but a knot. Where one chapter is marked by betrayal, another by silence, another by regret. And in each chapter, someone was wounded, someone was wronged, someone was left holding a story they were told never to put down.

None of this erases anything else, and none of it stands as justification. It only reveals how harm reverberates—crookedly, unexpectedly—through the corridors of time. I’m not trying to balance these experiences on a scale or pretend they are equal; I’m only naming the truth that human beings rarely wound each other in neat, mirrored lines. And when I speak of softness, I don’t mean the fragile kind of forgiveness that asks someone to swallow their own hurt or abandon what is right. I don’t mean turning away from necessary boundaries, or from defending one’s body when no gentler path remains. Softness is not the absence of justice; it is the refusal to let bitterness become the architecture of your inner world. It is the quiet understanding that carrying grief for too long doesn’t preserve the past — it slowly bruises the one who carries it.

In so many parts of life, memory is rarely just memory; it’s identity, it’s loyalty, it’s a kind of emotional currency. Across the world, people carry their pasts like passports, stamped with meaning, shaping how they move through the present. And once meaning hardens, it becomes almost impossible to set down. You can rebuild a fallen building. Rebuilding a story is far more difficult.

And this is where Christchurch returns to me again, quietly, like a lesson I didn’t know I was learning at the time. Because what struck me most about that city wasn’t just its resilience, but its willingness to rebuild without bitterness. The people there don’t deny the past — after all, they have a museum that records tragedies — but they don’t cling to it either. They don’t turn their tragedies into monuments of pain. They don’t build cathedrals of hurt. They build gardens, libraries, playgrounds — open spaces where people can gather and breathe. They build places where the past is acknowledged but not weaponized. And yes, they have it easier because nature is difficult to blame.

Christchurch stayed with me deeply: It showed me what it looks like when humans choose to move forward without erasing what came before. It showed me that healing doesn’t require forgetting — only softness. Only the willingness to let grief be grief, without turning it into a story about who is good and who is evil, who is victim and who is villain.

And maybe that’s the real reason Christchurch felt like the opposite side of the planet: not just geographically, but emotionally. It showed me a way of remembering that doesn’t require carrying metaphorical weight. A way of grieving that doesn’t require building walls. A way of living with the past that leaves your hands free — free to rebuild, free to reach out, free to choose beauty again.

Christchurch taught me that resilience isn’t loud, and it isn’t dramatic. It’s the quiet, almost invisible choice to keep moving toward lightness, even when the ground has shaken beneath you, and you know it will shake again, sooner or later. And maybe that’s the lesson I needed most — that even far from home, on the other side of the world, there are places that remind us we don’t have to hold everything so tightly. That our hands can open. That we can, too.

A Democracy of Better Judgments

I was reading a book recently in which the author claimed that every opinion deserves a place in a democracy, as if opinions were guests at a long table and the only requirement for entry was that they had arrived. The idea stayed with me, not because it persuaded me, but because it brushed against something old in me — the childhood belief that a thought becomes important simply because someone has it, that conviction alone grants authority, that certainty is a kind of moral credential. It felt strangely familiar, like a faint echo of the world I grew up in, where confidence was treated as evidence and sincerity as proof.

It reminded me of my mother.

She used to find miracle diets online — salted water cleanses, fruitless weeks, promises that biology could be rewritten in three days. And because she believed them, I was expected to believe them too. I was a teenager with a perfectly ordinary body, yet suddenly I was living inside rules I never chose. The house would shift overnight: new rituals, new prohibitions, new anxieties disguised as solutions. Even then, without the vocabulary for it, I sensed a truth that would take me years to articulate: An opinion can be gentle in theory and quietly violent in practice, especially when it lands on someone who cannot refuse it.

Those years taught me something about the architecture of influence. How easily a conviction becomes a household law. How quickly confidence can masquerade as credibility. How sincerity can be mistaken for accuracy. And how long it takes to unlearn the reflex of treating someone else’s certainty as my own. Ideas do not stay politely in the minds that generate them; they spill outward, shaping the air others must breathe. They become atmospheres, weather systems, climates of expectation. They can nourish, or they can suffocate.

That memory returns whenever I hear the claim that all opinions deserve equal respect. I think of how effortlessly a private belief can become a public burden, how a single unfounded idea can ripple outward into rituals, restrictions, and inherited fears. And I think of how many people live inside the weather systems of other people’s convictions, adjusting their lives to storms they did not summon. Some storms arrive loudly; others arrive as a drizzle that never ends, a slow erosion of agency disguised as care.

Karl Popper warned that tolerance has limits, though he imagined intolerance arriving openly, wearing its own name. Today it travels differently — through forwarded messages, confident voices on podcasts, the soft authority of “someone online said.” Harmful ideas rarely announce themselves; they slip in through the side door, familiar and unexamined, the way my mother’s diets once did. They arrive not as threats but as reassurances, as shortcuts that promise to spare us the discomfort of complexity. They appeal to our longing for certainty, for clarity, for a world that feels simpler than it is.

Democracy depends on disagreement, but not on the kind that corrodes the ground beneath it. A democracy that tolerates everything will not survive; a democracy that polices thought too aggressively will not survive either. The line between the two is thin, trembling, human — drawn not by laws alone but by the collective maturity of the people living within them. It is a line that must be redrawn again and again, with care, with humility, with an awareness of how easily ideas can harden into harms. It requires a citizenry capable of distinguishing between disagreement and destabilization, between critique and corrosion.

What I know is this: Ideas behave in the real world. They shape choices, and choices shape lives. Sometimes harm arrives like a storm; sometimes it gathers like rust; sometimes it spreads quietly through childhood kitchens and family rituals, through the soft repetition of “this is just how things are.” The mechanism is the same whether the idea concerns fruit or forests, diets or the climate: An opinion becomes a norm, a norm becomes a pressure, and pressure becomes a force that shapes the lives of people who never chose it. The transformation is subtle, almost invisible, until one day you realize you are living inside someone else’s logic.

Perhaps the most democratic act is not to honor every opinion, but to outgrow the ones that harm us — not through force, but through understanding. A culture becomes resilient when dangerous ideas no longer find fertile soil, when they are met not with outrage but with recognition: We’ve learned better. When the collective instinct shifts from defensiveness to discernment. When the public imagination becomes too mature, too informed, too ethically grounded for certain ideas to take root.

And this is where my mother returns. I did not outgrow her diets because someone banned them. I outgrew them because I learned to see them clearly — ideas that felt authoritative but were not true, ideas that shaped me before I had the tools to resist them. I learned that affection can coexist with harm and that the most dangerous ideas are often the ones that arrive wrapped in care.

Democracies face the same task. They must cultivate the capacity to distinguish between opinions that nourish a shared life and opinions that corrode it. They must learn to recognize when tolerance becomes complicity, when openness becomes vulnerability, when the desire to be fair becomes an invitation for harm to flourish.

The Difference Between Kindness and Complicity

I write often about kindness, about compassion, about the quiet work of trying to understand people. But it feels necessary to acknowledge that kindness is not always possible. There are people — thankfully a very small minority — whose patterns of behavior can end up causing real harm to those around them. I’m not speaking about “bad people,” but about behaviors that, when left unexamined, have real consequences. And I can explain what I mean by using the example of my mother.

I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I cannot diagnose her with a particular disorder, nor do I want to. I prefer to speak about behavior rather than labels. I use my mother as an example not to judge her as a person, but to describe the dynamics I grew up with. I can only speak from my own experience, and I do so with an awareness of her complexity and her humanity. And her behavior, as I experienced it, could be deeply wounding. There were moments when she bent rules or ignored them altogether, often in ways that left others — including me — feeling unsettled or dismissed. At the same time, she could be warm, generous, and outwardly altruistic. Sometimes her generosity came with expectations that weren’t spoken aloud. What looked like kindness could carry an emotional cost, even if she didn’t intend it that way.

And yet, I also know she did not wake up in the morning intending to harm. She was shaped by her own history, her own fears, her own unexamined wounds. Her charm was real, and so was her pain. But the coexistence of those truths does not erase the impact of her actions.

Because we saw her charm, we — the people around her — often enabled her to move through life as if none of the harmful things ever happened. She could openly share stories about disregarding rules at school or at work, and no one ever stopped her to say, “You know that was wrong, right?” Instead, the room laughed, or nodded, or let the moment pass. And in that silence, the behavior continued.

There were so many moments like that. She would sometimes make comments about my appearance in front of others — remarks she saw as harmless or humorous, but that left me feeling exposed. “Milica prefers natural beauty,” she’d say, mocking the fact that I didn’t pluck my eyebrows to her taste — and somehow feeling entitled to express her dissatisfaction publicly. The room would chuckle politely, not out of malice, but because no one quite knew how to respond. I would shrink, and she would walk away untouched. It was a pattern so familiar that it almost felt normal. And I know she didn’t see it as cruelty; she saw it as humor, as honesty, as a way of relating. She was also repeating the kinds of sexist expectations she herself had absorbed — ideas about how a girl should look, how a woman should present herself, what counts as “acceptable” femininity. But intention, even when shaped by culture, does not cancel impact.

What makes these moments so insidious is not their individual sting, but the way they accumulate into a social logic. A single “joke” can be dismissed. A handful can be excused. But when they repeat over years, across families, workplaces, and communities, they begin to form a worldview — not only for the person making them, but for everyone who witnesses them.

These jokes teach a lesson: that harm can be softened with a smile, that cruelty can be disguised as humor, that the discomfort of the target is less important than the comfort of the room. And when the room laughs, or stays silent, or politely looks away, it sends a message even more powerful than the joke itself: This behavior is acceptable here.

Patterns like these often persist not because anyone approves of them, but because people don’t know how to interrupt them. Silence becomes the default, even when no one intends to endorse the behavior. And this is precisely why it matters to stop enabling them. Not out of punishment, but out of clarity. Out of the recognition that kindness is not the same as permissiveness, and compassion does not require surrendering one’s judgment. When harmful behavior is left unchallenged, it becomes normalized. It becomes part of the air everyone breathes. It becomes the unspoken rule: This is just how things are.

But it doesn’t have to be.

I have seen this pattern outside my family as well. A colleague of mine behaved in ways I found quietly corrosive: a steady drip of small critiques directed at me, each one minor enough to dismiss on its own, yet cumulatively heavy. What made it more troubling was the complete absence of self‑reflection on his part, as though his perspective were the default and mine an inconvenience. When I finally addressed what I considered inappropriate, he didn’t respond with curiosity or accountability. Instead, his first instinct was to suggest that I had “misunderstood.” I recognized this not as an attempt to explore our different perspectives, but as a way of closing the conversation before it became uncomfortable.

Knowing that several perspectives of the same moment can coexist, I wasn’t even challenging the event itself. I was simply sharing how his behavior made me feel, offering him the smallest possible invitation to see himself through someone else’s eyes. And when I named that maneuver for what it was, he didn’t engage, didn’t reflect, didn’t even defend himself. He simply withdrew and began ignoring me, as though silence could erase the discomfort of being seen.

It was a clear illustration of the same dynamic I have encountered elsewhere: harm delivered in small doses, protected by plausible deniability, and followed by disappearance the moment it is confronted. A minor example, perhaps, but revealing in its clarity. I’ve seen similar dynamics in other settings too — situations where people move through the world without much encouragement to reflect on how their behavior lands with others. It’s not about blaming individuals, but about noticing the conditions that allow certain patterns to flourish.

Naming the behavior breaks the spell. Refusing to laugh breaks the pattern. Setting boundaries interrupts the worldview that has been allowed to grow unchecked. And when the majority stops enabling the minority, the balance shifts. The room changes. The silence no longer protects the harm; it protects the people who have been living under it.

This is not about condemnation. I have little faith in the moral usefulness of exile — intellectual or otherwise. I am, and will always be, in favor of dialogue conducted on equal footing, whenever such dialogue is possible. What I am speaking about here is something different: responsibility. The quiet, collective responsibility to ensure that harmful behavior does not become the norm simply because everyone else stayed silent. It is about refusing the kind of passivity that allows damaging ideas to settle into the cultural air unchecked. Not to punish, not to shame, but to draw a line — gently, firmly — around what we are willing to accept as ordinary.

And this is where the distinction between compassion and enabling becomes essential. Compassion asks us to see the full complexity of a person; enabling asks us to look away from the consequences of their behavior. Compassion acknowledges humanity; enabling erases accountability. One is rooted in clarity, the other in avoidance. And holding both at once — empathy without indulgence, understanding without surrender — is difficult, but necessary.

When we blur the line between the two, something predictable happens: The small minority whose behavior harms others ends up shaping the emotional climate for everyone. Not because they are powerful, and certainly not because they are the majority, but because the majority hesitates to intervene. People stay silent to keep the peace, to avoid conflict, to preserve the illusion of harmony — and in doing so, they unintentionally reinforce the very behavior that unsettles them. Silence becomes a kind of permission slip, handed out not by conviction but by discomfort.

Stopping this pattern does not require hostility. It requires honesty. It requires someone in the room to say, gently but firmly, “That wasn’t okay.” It requires refusing to laugh at the joke that isn’t a joke. It requires naming the manipulation instead of pretending not to notice. It requires understanding that boundaries are not acts of aggression; they are acts of clarity.

Kindness without boundaries can slowly turn into something that asks too much of us — a kind of self‑erasure rather than generosity. Compassion without discernment becomes complicity.

And the moment we stop pretending otherwise, the moment we stop excusing the “small” harms, the moment we stop laughing along — the balance shifts. The harmful patterns lose the quiet social permission that once shielded them. The majority regains its voice. And kindness becomes something real again, not something that can be weaponized or exploited.

Boundaries, in this sense, are not acts of cruelty. They are acts of ethical care. They protect the people who are vulnerable, yes — but they also protect the social fabric itself. They create a world in which kindness has meaning because it is chosen, not extracted. They ensure that compassion is not confused with permissiveness, and that forgiveness is not mistaken for forgetting.

And paradoxically, boundaries can even be a form of care for the person whose behavior is being confronted. Not because confrontation will magically transform them — some people may never change — but because clarity is the only honest response to harm. It refuses to participate in the illusion that everything is fine. It refuses to let someone drift through life without ever encountering the truth of their actions. It refuses to let the harmful minority define the emotional terms for everyone else.

When we set boundaries, we are not withdrawing compassion. We are protecting its integrity.

We are saying: Kindness is possible here — but not at the expense of truth. Compassion is welcome here — but not at the cost of someone’s dignity. Care is offered here — but not if it requires self‑erasure.

And when the majority begins to act from that place of clarity, the balance shifts. The harmful patterns lose the quiet social permission that once shielded them. The room becomes safer. The silence becomes honest rather than complicit. And kindness becomes something sturdy, something trustworthy, something that cannot be manipulated into serving the very behaviors it was meant to counter.

The Architecture of Attention

Very recently, a friend of mine wanted to fly back to Austria from Moldova. A simple trip, the kind you barely think about — a taxi, a boarding pass, a seatbelt that never quite lies flat. But before the flight, the entire airport was evacuated because of airspace violations and the kinds of threats Moldova is currently facing from Russia. My friend ended up standing outside for hours, in the wind, in the cold, in that strange emotional limbo where you’re not in danger exactly, but you’re also not not in danger. It’s the kind of uncertainty that makes your body behave like a badly tuned instrument: a little too tense, a little too alert, a little too aware of its own fragility.

When she messaged me about the situation, I did what any modern person does when confronted with something frightening: I opened my laptop and tried to find out more. I typed keywords into search bars with the confidence of someone who believes the internet is a benevolent oracle. But nothing came up. Not a headline, not a tweet, not even a blurry photo taken by someone with a shaky hand and a questionable sense of composition. Yes, there was general information about Moldova facing threats from Russia — but nothing about that particular day, that particular evacuation, that particular moment when hundreds of people were ushered out of an airport and into the open air like a flock of confused, mildly irritated birds.

I don’t know whether an event like this should be news. I’m not the authority on what deserves a headline. Moldova is a small country, and its airport is even smaller. I can imagine an editor somewhere shrugging and saying, “It’s not that big of a story.” And maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s just one more small tremor in a world full of earthquakes. But the absence of information did something to me. It reminded me — again, and not gently — of the limitations of my own worldview. If I didn’t have a friend from Moldova, this event would never have reached me. It would have happened, and I would have remained blissfully ignorant, scrolling through my day with the confidence of someone who believes she is reasonably informed about the world. It made me wonder how many other events happen daily — small evacuations, quiet crises, whispered fears — and I have no idea about them. How many stories never cross the invisible border of my attention. How many realities exist parallel to mine, never intersecting, never touching, never even brushing against the edges of my awareness. The media shapes our horizon. And our horizon, in turn, shapes our sense of what the world is.

We like to imagine that we live in an age of unprecedented access. That the internet has democratized information. That if something happens — anywhere, to anyone — we will know about it within minutes. But this is a comforting illusion, like believing that drinking wine is healthy. The truth is that the world is too large, too chaotic, too full of simultaneous events for any one person to grasp. We live inside a curated reality — curated by algorithms, by editors, by our own habits, by the gravitational pull of what we already believe. The news is not the world; it is a selection of the world. A tasting menu of global events, chosen by someone else’s criteria. And like all tasting menus, it leaves out more than it includes.

We forget this because the news feels omnipresent. It arrives on our phones, our laptops, our watches, our conversations. It interrupts us while we’re brushing our teeth. It barges into our morning coffee. It sits with us at dinner like an uninvited guest who insists on telling us about the latest catastrophe. But even the loudest news cycle is a whisper compared to the full volume of reality.

When I couldn’t find information about the Moldovan airport evacuation, I felt a strange mix of emotions: worry, frustration, and a faint, embarrassing sense of entitlement. As if the world owed me an explanation. As if every event should be documented, translated, and delivered to me on demand.

So I had to remind myself, once again, that the world does not owe me anything. And the fact that I expected to find information — instantly, effortlessly — says more about my relationship to the internet than about the event itself. I have grown accustomed to the idea that information should be available at the speed of a click. That the world should be legible, searchable, indexed, and archived.

The Moldovan airport evacuation was a small event in the grand scheme of things. But it cracked something open in me — a realization that my worldview is not a worldview at all, but a narrow corridor with windows on only one side. I know more about celebrity divorces than about the daily realities of people living in countries I’ve never visited. This is not a moral failing. It is simply the architecture of attention in the modern world.

But it raises a question: What does it mean to be informed? Is it knowing the headlines? Is it knowing the context? Is it knowing the stories that never make it into the headlines at all? Or is it something else entirely — a kind of humility, a recognition that our knowledge is always partial, always incomplete, always shaped by forces we do not control? Perhaps being informed is less about accumulating facts and more about cultivating a certain posture toward the world: a willingness to admit that we are always standing at the edge of something we cannot fully see. A willingness to accept that our understanding is stitched together from fragments, and that the stitching itself is invisible to us most of the time.

And crucially, acknowledging these limits does not mean drifting into relativism or shrugging at the idea of truth. Quite the opposite: Recognizing the boundaries of our own perspective can sharpen our commitment to truth — because it reminds us that truth is larger than any single viewpoint, any single narrative, any single news cycle. Humility is not the enemy of truth; it is the condition that makes truth approachable. It keeps us from mistaking our partial view for the whole landscape. It keeps us from confusing what is visible with what is real. It keeps us from assuming that silence means nothing happened.

Some empirical truths of the world — the warming of the planet or the quiet advantages of living in societies where the rights of the minorities are not theoretical but lived — do not shrink to fit the contours of our awareness. They continue, indifferent to whether we notice them. They do not wait for our attention, nor do they require our permission to be real. And knowing that — knowing that some claims are truer than others — can make us more careful, more attentive, more willing to listen for what lies beyond the reach of our usual sources. It can remind us that acknowledging the limits of our own knowledge is not a rejection of truth, but a way of honoring it: by refusing to confuse what we see with all that is, and by staying open to the vastness that exceeds our field of vision.

The media shapes our horizon, yes — but horizons are not walls; they are invitations. They remind us that there is more beyond what we can see, more than what is illuminated by the narrow beam of attention that is provided to us by the news. A horizon is a boundary that whispers, “There is something beyond me.” It is a line that both limits and beckons. It tells us that our understanding of the world is not a map but a sketch, drawn quickly, with missing corners and smudged edges. It tells us that every piece of information is a fragment of a much larger mosaic, and that the mosaic itself is always shifting, always incomplete, always under construction.

And maybe the most honest thing we can do — the most human thing — is to remember that our worldview is not the world. It is a window. A frame. A perspective. A carefully curated aperture through which we peer, believing we see everything when in fact we see only what fits inside the frame. The rest — the vastness, the complexity, the quiet tragedies and quiet joys — remains outside our field of vision, not because it is unimportant, but because it is unreported, unnoticed, unasked for.

And sometimes, it takes a message from a friend standing in the cold outside a Moldovan airport to remind us that the world is infinitely larger, stranger, and more fragile than the stories we are told about it.

The Quiet Practice of Tolerance

The event I am going to describe happened not so long ago, and it has stayed with me in the way certain moments do — because they are, in their own way, undeniably dramatic. My husband and I were standing in the underground, holding on to each other for balance as Vienna’s U1 lurched forward, unusually crowded for a late Friday afternoon.

Across from us sat a woman wearing an open‑face niqab. She wasn’t doing anything remarkable — just sitting, hands folded, eyes lowered, occupying no more space than her own body required. She radiated the kind of quiet presence that should have made her invisible in the best possible way: simply another person on a train, heading somewhere, minding her own life.

And then a man entered the train.

He saw her, and something in him snapped into place — as if he had been waiting for a target. He began harassing her immediately, telling her to stand up, insisting that someone dressed “like that” had no right to occupy a seat. His voice was loud, sharp, soaked in an Austrian dialect that made the insults sound even harsher, as if the language itself had been conscripted into his anger.

The woman didn’t react. She didn’t flinch. She simply stayed still, as if stillness could make her invisible, as if silence could protect her from the violence of being seen.

And the rest of the carriage — dozens of people — watched. That was part of the drama too: the collective silence, the way the crowd seemed to fold in on itself, each person hoping someone else would intervene, someone older, someone braver, someone fluent in German. Someone who wasn’t them. The air felt thick with the weight of unspoken calculations — fear, uncertainty, the desire to avoid conflict, the hope that the situation would resolve itself without requiring anything from us.

My husband and I were slightly too far at first, blocked by a cluster of young tourists who were pretending very hard not to hear what was happening. We kept hoping someone closer would step in. But no one did.

The man kept going, his voice rising with every second of her silence. Racist, ugly things poured out of him — the kind that make your stomach tighten, the kind that make you feel ashamed to be human. The woman remained still, and the stillness made the whole scene even more unbearable. It was the stillness of someone who has learned that reacting can make things worse. The stillness of someone who has been here before.

Finally, my husband pushed his way through the crowd. He didn’t have the German for a confrontation like this, so he used English — loud, clear, unmistakable. I don’t know if the man understood the words, but he understood the tone. He understood the stance. He understood that someone was no longer willing to let him perform his cruelty unchecked.

And just like that, the man deflated. Not apologetic — cowards rarely are — but startled. He muttered something, avoided eye contact, and at the next stop, he got off the train. The doors closed behind him with that soft pneumatic sigh that felt, for once, like relief.

What stayed with me long after the man stepped off the train wasn’t only the ugliness of his words, but the way a piece of fabric became the pretext for his cruelty. A niqab, a scarf, a hood, a hat — it doesn’t matter. Clothing is never just clothing. It is a language, a signal, a story. And for some people, it becomes a target — a surface onto which they project their fears, their prejudices, their fantasies of cultural purity.

But this dynamic is not limited to Muslim women or to religious garments. Discrimination based on clothing touches many groups, each in different ways, and each revealing something about the anxieties of the society around them. A young man in a hoodie can be treated as a threat. A woman in a short skirt can be blamed for her own harassment. A queer teenager wearing nail polish or a pride pin can become a target for hostility. A Roma woman in a long skirt, a Sikh man wearing a turban, a Jewish man in a kippah, a goth teenager in black eyeliner, a construction worker in dusty work clothes — all of them can be read, misread, or punished for what they wear. The specifics differ, but the underlying mechanism is the same: Clothing becomes a pretext for policing who belongs, who is “acceptable,” who is allowed to move through public space without being challenged. And in every case, the responsibility to intervene — to refuse the normalization of humiliation — remains the same.

I strongly believe that no one should be harassed for wearing a niqab in Austria, just as I believe I shouldn’t be harassed if I were to travel to any country around the world and wear shorts. The difference, of course, is that I cannot wear shorts everywhere. Some societies impose restrictions on personal autonomy that make such a choice for a woman impossible. Austria, by contrast, is a place where adults can generally dress as they wish — a place that aspires to tolerance, even if that aspiration is never guaranteed and always vulnerable.

And this is where the conversation about tolerance becomes real for me. Not in policy documents, not in parliamentary debates, not in abstract discussions about “values,” but in the cramped space of a Friday afternoon train. Because tolerance is not something a country possesses once and for all. It is something that must be enacted, protected, and renewed — constantly, quietly, often inconveniently.

Austria is, in many ways, beautifully tolerant. That’s why I am grateful to live here and never seriously consider moving to a place where personal freedoms are more restricted. Even the country where I grew up, Serbia, struggles with certain issues more than Austria — for example, the rights and safety of sexual and gender minorities. And while Austria is not a perfect sanctuary, it is a place where adults can generally dress as they wish, love whom they wish, and believe what they wish. That matters. But it is also fragile. It can be strained by public rhetoric that amplifies fear, or by individuals who convince themselves that harassing a Muslim woman somehow protects their cultural identity. Tolerance is not a natural resource; it is a practice. And practices can erode.

What I was reminded of that day is that tolerance doesn’t live exclusively in policies and laws, but also lives in people. It lives in the choices we make when no one is watching, or when everyone is watching but no one is acting. It lives in the moment when someone decides that another person’s dignity is worth defending, even if they don’t share the same language. It lives in the refusal to let cruelty pass as normal.

It also lives in restraint — in the ability to say: I don’t understand your clothing, but I don’t need to. It’s not my business. In the humility to accept that other people’s choices do not require our approval to be legitimate. In the recognition that autonomy means nothing if it only applies to people who look like us, dress like us, or make the same choices we would make.

This is why I care so deeply about dress codes. Because they are never just about fabric. They are about who gets to feel safe in public. Who gets to exist without explanation. Who is allowed to move through the world without being treated as a provocation.

Austria, at its best, understands this. But “at its best” is not a guarantee. It is a responsibility — one that belongs to all of us. To speak up when someone is being humiliated. To refuse the easy comfort of silence. To protect the fragile, everyday conditions that make living together possible.

A society that cannot bear the sight of a woman in a niqab is not protecting its values; it is betraying them. We cannot know her circumstances — why she dresses this way, what it represents for her, or what burdens it carries. And even if we assume the worst-case scenario — a woman constrained by patriarchal expectations — harassing her in public spaces will not empower her. It will only reinforce her marginalization and may lead her to disengage from democratic systems that fail to embody their own principles.

My insistence that we must protect Muslims from harassment does not stem from an endorsement of their religion, nor from a disregard for the very real challenges surrounding migration and integration in Europe. It rests on a basic commitment to human dignity—one that does not vanish simply because the broader political landscape is complicated. I can see that the topic is layered. I can also see that the European Union is continually negotiating how to balance openness with cohesion, tolerance with boundaries, and cultural diversity with social stability. None of these questions have simple answers, and acknowledging their complexity does not diminish the urgency of preventing discrimination. If anything, it underscores how essential that commitment is.

What stayed with me most about this episode is the realization that tolerance is shaped by the smallest human gestures — fragile, fleeting, and yet powerful enough to shift the atmosphere inside a train carriage. It is the quiet courage of standing near someone who is being diminished. It is the humility to accept that we do not need to understand a person, or even agree with their choices, in order to defend their right to move through the world without fear. It is the discipline of refusing the easy slide into indifference, the refusal to let someone else’s humiliation become background noise.

And so I think back to that woman on the U1 — her stillness, her composure, her refusal to shrink even as someone tried to make her disappear. I think of the man who targeted her, and of the crowd that hesitated. I think of my husband’s voice cutting through the carriage, not because he was fearless, but because someone else was being made small. And I think of how quickly the air changed once someone finally stepped forward.

What happened that day was not heroic. It was not cinematic. It was simply necessary. And perhaps that is the point. The health of a society is measured not only by its laws, but by the instincts of its people — by whether they allow cruelty to settle or whether they interrupt it, even clumsily, even imperfectly.

The ability to live side by side — in difference, in disagreement, in mutual incomprehension — is not a national trait. It is a choice. A choice made again and again, in moments that are inconvenient, uncomfortable, or frightening. A choice made on a crowded train, on an ordinary Friday, when no one expects anything of us except to look away.

What happened that day was brief. But its echo remains — a reminder that the world we inhabit is shaped, hour by hour, by the choices we make when the doors close and the train begins to move.

Reading With the Lights On

I did not grow up with a long list of heroes. My grandfather held that title effortlessly, simply by being the kind of person whose presence made the world feel steady. But if I had to name one more figure who shaped my childhood, it would be J. K. Rowling. She didn’t just write stories; she cracked open the idea of what a woman could be. In school, aside from one famous Serbian poet, women writers were completely ignored. Literature seemed to belong to men by default, as if imagination itself had a gender. But Rowling’s success showed me something different. Watching her, I began to dream bigger, to imagine that maybe I could write stories too — stories that mattered, stories that made people feel. For the first time, writing felt like a path I was allowed to walk, not a door I had to sneak through.

I was also the perfect audience for Harry Potter: a scared kid looking for a world that made more sense than the one I lived in. While some children read the books for fun, I read them like a survival manual. I carried them everywhere — under my pillow, in my schoolbag, and yes, even to the bathroom, where I perfected the art of “just one more chapter” until my family wondered if I had fallen in. Hogwarts wasn’t just a school of magic; it was a place where adults protected you, friends chose you, and courage actually meant something. Those books gave me a place to breathe, a place where the quiet child could imagine becoming someone braver, someone who might one day find her own version of magic.

And it wasn’t just escapism. It was structure. It was a world where rules made sense, where good and evil were clearly labeled, where justice — though delayed — always arrived. In my real life, things were rarely so tidy. Adults contradicted themselves. The world felt arbitrary, confusing, and occasionally cruel. But in Rowling’s universe, the moral compass pointed somewhere. Even if the characters were flawed, the narrative itself promised that meaning existed. For a child who often felt lost, that promise was intoxicating.

But growing up has a way of turning on the lights. In recent years, I’ve had to face the uncomfortable truth that Rowling’s political views and mine now sit on opposite sides of a very wobbly bridge. And I’m not interested in proving anything, nor in appointing myself the moral referee of the internet. This isn’t a denunciation of her. If anything, I’ve come to believe that turning against people — even when we disagree with them deeply — has never moved humanity forward. What I’m trying to understand is something quieter and more personal: how to hold a story that shaped me, now that I know its creator holds views that clash with my own. It feels a bit like discovering that the architect of your childhood treehouse has some questionable theories about gravity — the structure still stands, but you can’t climb it with the same innocence as before.

Once you let yourself look closely, the whole picture shifts, and the things you once missed begin to insist on being seen. Suddenly, the books reveal details I skimmed past for years: the Manichean worldview, the traditional gender coding, the neoliberal shine, the antisemitic shadows, the racism tucked into corners, the confident march of heteronormativity, the quiet hum of weight‑based prejudice, and the list goes on. It’s like returning to a beloved childhood coffeeshop only to realize that, with the lights turned up, you can see the crumbs on the counter, the sticky menu, and the barista who has very strong opinions about oat milk and is not afraid to share them. I find myself holding both affection and critique at once, like two mismatched mugs — one chipped, one beautiful — trying to make sense of the strange mix.

And there’s another layer: the grief of losing a sanctuary. When a story has been your refuge, questioning it feels like questioning the part of yourself that survived because of it. I sometimes catch myself defending the books out of sheer muscle memory, as if protecting them is the same as protecting the child I once was. But nostalgia is not a moral argument, and affection is not a shield against complexity. Growing up means learning to separate the comfort something gave you from the truth of what it contains.

Over time, something settled in me. I don’t need to condemn the books, nor do I need to cherish them the way I once did. I still love the child who pushed through B1 English just to read those books (and not wait a year for the Serbian translation), the child who devoured 500 pages in a single day because magic felt urgent, necessary, and entirely real. I still honor the way those stories held me when nothing else did. But I don’t need to carry them into every room of my adult life. They can remain where they belong — in the past that shaped me, not the future I’m choosing.

There’s a quiet dignity in letting something stay behind without bitterness. I don’t need to rewrite my childhood to align with my adult politics. I don’t need to pretend the books were flawless, nor do I need to pretend they meant nothing. They meant everything — then. And that “then” is allowed to stay intact, even if my “now” has moved on.

That’s the strange grace of growing up: discovering that old reverence can be cherished without being carried, that enchantment can be remembered without denying the unenchanted parts, and that the future opens more easily when the past is allowed to rest. Maybe that’s the quiet revelation at the end of this inner struggle: that stories can shape us, but they don’t have to define the limits of our understanding. That it’s possible to outgrow the worlds that once held us without losing the wonder they taught us. That sometimes, the best thing we can do is step out of the old narrative, and write a new one — one where magic is lived daily, in the way we choose to give, to imagine, to create, and to become.

The Privilege of Picking Cherries Slowly

The other day, in one of those meandering conversations with my husband that begin nowhere and end everywhere, I found myself talking about my first “real” job. Real in the sense that someone handed me actual money in exchange for my labor — an astonishing concept for a twelve‑year‑old who had no economic reason to be working. I was, by all accounts, a child with a full fridge and parents whose strictness was athletic and dietal rather than financial. The kind of household where you could refuse pocket money but not a mandatory jog.

It was 2005. I remember the year only because I spent the entire summer singing one Eurovision song on an endless loop. The job was cherry picking. Not metaphorical cherry picking — not the curated optimism of adulthood — but actual cherries, in an actual field, under an actual sun that seemed personally offended by my existence.

This was the pre‑smartphone era, the dark ages before podcasts and Bluetooth headphones. I owned a tiny MP3 player that held maybe twelve songs if you begged it, but naturally I had forgotten it at home. So my only entertainment during the slowest task known to humankind was… myself. My own voice. My own questionable pitch. My own determination to survive boredom through sheer, unhinged musical commitment.

Of course, if you’ve been reading me for any length of time, you know I wouldn’t dedicate an entire essay to the tragicomic state of my vocal abilities. There had to be something else beneath the memory — some hinge, some shift, some quiet ethical tremor.

And there was.

As I’ve said, I didn’t have to do this job. Even my strict parents — the same heroic figures who believed character was best built by waking a child at dawn to kick a ball for hours — did not require me to go cherry picking. This particular form of torture was entirely voluntary.

I signed up out of solidarity. My cousin Dragana actually needed the money that summer, though the exact reason has dissolved into the fog of memory. I think it had something to do with buying schoolbooks — those heavy, joyless bricks of knowledge that cost a small fortune and smelled faintly of despair.

So there I was, a sunburn‑prone sidekick on her quest for educational funding. I wasn’t there for the money. I wasn’t there for the cherries. I wasn’t even there for the experience, because no one in the history of humanity has ever said, “You know what shaped me? Picking fruit in 40‑degree heat.”

I was there because Dragana had to be. And at twelve, that felt like reason enough.

But childhood acts of solidarity have a way of revealing more than they intend. Somewhere between the heatstroke, the boredom, and my Eurovision soundtrack, something shifted. It dawned on me — slowly, the way realizations do when your brain is half‑cooked by July — that every single person in that field, except me, was there out of necessity.

While I picked cherries at my leisurely pace (further slowed by the fact that I ate half of every box), the others were racing. Competing. Moving with the kind of urgency that comes from knowing the math of survival. We were paid per box. A simple equation: more cherries, more money. And while I was busy serenading the orchard and contemplating the meaning of life, these people were working with a precision that made my “moral support” mission look almost comically naïve.

They weren’t there for character building. They weren’t there for cousinly solidarity. They were there because the next schoolbook, the next bill, the next meal depended on it.

It was the first time I had to confront the uncomfortable truth of my own lucky circumstances. I didn’t know poverty. Not really. Yes, my childhood had its own merciless curriculum — mandatory running activities, early‑morning ball‑kicking sessions, and parents whose motivational style bordered on military — but I had never experienced the kind of necessity that bends a person’s back over a field at dawn.

My parents used to remind me how fortunate I was. “At least you don’t have to milk cows every morning like your aunt and cousins,” they’d say, usually while dragging me to yet another training session I had not consented to. But because my parents were, in my adolescent opinion, delightfully unhinged, their warnings never landed. It all sounded like one more chapter in their ongoing saga of You don’t know how good you have it.

It wasn’t until I stood in that field myself — sweating, singing, and eating my way through half the cherries — that their words finally found a place to settle. Watching the others work with a speed I couldn’t imitate, I understood what necessity looks like when it’s not theoretical. When it’s not a parental lecture. When it’s not a story about someone else’s cows.

Only then, with my hands sticky and my pride slightly bruised, did I understand what my parents — who did know poverty — had been trying to convey all along.

The question now is: What do I do with this realization?

I can’t pretend I know what it means to fear for tomorrow’s meals. I don’t. I’ve never been poor in the way that rearranges your nervous system. The kind of poor where you count coins not out of thriftiness but out of survival. The kind of poor that sends you into a cherry field at dawn because the alternative is not paying the bills.

My worst financial moment was being an 18‑year‑old student in Vienna who couldn’t afford restaurant meals or spontaneous weekend trips. That’s a bit poor, yes, but it’s the kind of poor where you still have a roof, still have groceries, still have a future that feels intact. It’s the kind of poor where you complain about not affording sushi, not about not affording bread.

So no, I cannot claim to understand the lives of the people who picked cherries beside me. I cannot retroactively insert myself into their struggle. But I can acknowledge the gap. I can recognize the luck I was born into, even if it came wrapped in early‑morning sports trauma and parents who believed exhaustion was a character‑building tool.

And maybe that’s the point: not to appropriate someone else’s hardship, but to let the awareness soften you. To let it unsettle your certainty. To let it remind you that your life could have been different — much harder — if a few circumstances had shifted.

Realizing your own luck isn’t about guilt. It’s about humility. It’s about seeing the world more clearly, even if the clarity arrives carried on the memory of cherries, sunburn, and a Eurovision song you sang far too badly.

When I think back to that summer now, I don’t think of the cherries or the sunburn or even my soundtrack. I think of the strange, tender education I received without realizing it — an education in perspective, in the invisible scaffolding that held my life together while others had to build theirs plank by plank, box by box.

I still don’t know what it means to work because your survival depends on it. I can’t claim that experience, and I won’t pretend to. But I do know what it means to stand beside someone who does — to watch their speed, their focus, their quiet urgency — and to feel something shift inside you. A softening. A widening. A small but permanent recalibration of the world.

Maybe that’s all any of us can do with the realizations that arrive too early or too late: let them change the way we move through the world. Let them make us gentler with others, and a little less dramatic about our own inconveniences. Let them remind us that luck is not a virtue, and hardship is not a moral failing.

I went into that field to support my cousin. I left it understanding something about humanity.

In the end, the cherries were just cherries. But the lesson stayed.

The Dignity of Contradiction

I went recently to the Austrian State Archive. I had requested files from the Vermögensverkehrsstelle — and no, I’m not translating that name into English, because the German version already sounds deceptively polite to my ears. It has that bureaucratic softness institutions sometimes use to cushion the violence they administer. The word feels almost courteous, as if it belonged to a department that handled pension transfers or railway permits, not the systematic stripping of people’s lives.

This office was created by the Nazis, and its purpose was brutally simple: to ensure that all Jews — as well as all those whom the Nazis defined as Jews — registered their possessions. Everything had to be listed, item by item, as long as it wasn’t an object for “personal use,” like a toothbrush.

And then, inside this apparatus of forced enumeration, I’m looking at the files of two people whose “assets” weren’t even the result of their own work. The documents themselves don’t say this — they’re too narrow, too transactional, too committed to the fiction of neutrality. But I know it from elsewhere, from a descendant’s careful reconstruction of the family’s history: One person inherited these possessions from his uncle and the other from her father. That knowledge sits beside the archive like a quiet counterweight. The state demanded an inventory stripped of context, but the family story restores what the paperwork omits — the ordinary, intergenerational passing‑on of things that should never have required explanation.

And it’s precisely that ordinariness that unsettles me. Not because I find inherited wealth particularly noble — I don’t. Inheritance distributes luck as if it were merit; it quietly reinforces the idea that some people begin life already standing on a platform built by others. But here, in these files, the familiar discomfort of unearned assets is eclipsed by something far sharper. The Nazis took an inheritance — a family’s continuity, a lineage, a gesture of care — and reclassified it as evidence. They turned the most mundane form of intergenerational support into something to be catalogued, seized, and stripped away. What might elsewhere be a moral question becomes, in this context, a record of violence.

The injustice of inheritance is one thing. The bureaucratized theft of it — the state turning private grief and private legacy into paperwork for dispossession — is something else entirely. It is the difference between a moral discomfort and a moral rupture. Between inequality and annihilation. Between a system that quietly advantages some and a system that loudly destroys. And it’s in that rupture, in the gap between what something ordinarily signifies and what it became under Nazism, that another ambiguity emerges.

The archive itself reveals nothing about the private dynamics of this family; it only records assets. The more complicated truths come from elsewhere — from a book written decades later by the daughter of one of the two people in the file. In it, she describes how her grandfather — the father of the person whose assets I was tracing — had been violent toward his wife. In the end, both the husband and the wife died in the ghetto near Minsk, likely from starvation.

So I am holding two sources at once: the official Nazi file listing one family’s possessions, and the granddaughter’s later account describing the harm her grandfather caused inside his own home. Two incompatible registers — the cold administrative voice of the state and the warm, painful intimacy of family memory — suddenly speaking to each other.

This is where the past becomes something more than a repository of facts. It becomes a site of moral friction. A place where categories like “victim” and “perpetrator,” “innocent” and “guilty,” “deserving” and “undeserving,” begin to blur at the edges. History does not care about our desire for coherence. It simply presents what was recorded — the violence within a household, the violence of a regime — and leaves us to navigate the space between them.

There is a philosophical discomfort here that I cannot resolve: the fact that suffering does not purify, and wrongdoing does not disqualify one from being wronged. A man can be both harmful and harmed. A family can be fractured from within and then shattered from without. The archive does not adjudicate these contradictions; it merely preserves their traces. It is we, the living, who must sit with the dissonance.

Human lives do not fit into the moral categories we prefer. The desire to sort people into neat boxes — innocent, guilty, virtuous, monstrous — is itself a kind of bureaucratic impulse, a wish for clarity where there is only complexity. The Nazis perfected this impulse, turning it into policy, into law, into death. But the impulse itself is older and more ordinary: the wish to make the world legible by flattening it.

Holding these different sources, I am reminded that the work of history is not to impose coherence but to endure its absence. To sit with the discomfort of contradictions that cannot be resolved. To acknowledge that moral clarity is sometimes a luxury the past does not grant us.

And yet, this is precisely where the work begins.

Because the archive is not just a place where documents sleep. It is a place where our assumptions go to be unsettled. Where the past refuses to behave. Where the categories we inherited — victim, perpetrator, innocent, guilty — begin to dissolve under the pressure of real lives.

The more time I spend with these files, the more I realize that the ethical task of history is not to simplify but to complicate. Not to decide who deserves sympathy, but to understand how sympathy itself becomes distorted by the stories we prefer. Not to purify the past, but to let it remain as jagged as it was.

And maybe that is why I keep returning to these documents, even when they leave me uneasy. Because they resist the very thing the Nazis tried to impose: a single, totalizing story about who people were. These biographies, in their quiet way, ask me to do the opposite. To let the contradictions stand. To let the ambiguity breathe. To allow individual lives to remain as complicated as they were, even when the documents tempt me to simplify them.

This is the only ethical response I have: to refuse the comfort of a clean moral narrative, and instead to hold the fragments — the violence, the inheritance, the dispossession, the starvation — in all their unresolved, unresolvable tension.

But there is something else, too.

Sitting in the archive, surrounded by boxes — or in this case, not even a box, just a fragile bundle of papers — I realized that this refusal, this willingness to let the past remain complicated, is not merely an intellectual exercise. It is a form of living and shaping current societies. A quiet, stubborn act of refusing to flatten humans into neat categories. It is a way of saying: You were not always a victim, and you were more than the worst thing you did, and more than the worst thing done to you.

To hold a life in its contradictions — to include the ugly aspects of someone framed as a victim — is to return to it a dignity that bureaucracy tried to erase. It is to insist that a person is not the sum of their paperwork, not the inventory of their confiscated belongings, not even the moral footnote that later generations might be tempted to assign. It is to resist the seductive simplicity of judgment and instead choose the harder, slower work of attention. Because attention is a kind of moral labor. It refuses to let anyone be reduced to a single story, a single role, a single moment in time.

To hold complexity is not easy, but it carries the beauty of this work: In refusing to simplify the past, we learn how not to simplify the present. We learn how to see each other — not as categories, not as moral caricatures, but as the complicated, contradictory, unfinished beings we have always been.

What Mr. Darcy Taught Me About Character

One of my favorite literary characters of all time is Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. Many of you know who I mean: the man whose earnest, vulnerable marriage proposal was rejected with spectacular force — and yet his ego didn’t shatter. He continued being the kind of person I have always tried to embody: attentive, principled, quietly generous, and kind. What struck me then, and still strikes me now, is how astonishingly un‑egocentric he is. He is refused, and yet he never assumes that the world — or the woman he loves — owes him affection. He doesn’t treat her “no” as an insult to his existence. He simply absorbs the pain, reflects, and chooses to become a better human.

What I didn’t understand when I first encountered him — when I was young enough to think that romance was made of grand gestures and dramatic declarations — is that Darcy’s transformation is not theatrical. It is not a performance designed to win Elizabeth back. It is a quiet, internal shift, the kind that requires humility rather than spectacle. He listens to criticism without collapsing into self‑pity or retaliatory anger. He allows himself to be changed by the truth, not because he is weak, but because he is strong enough to let his pride be rearranged. That, to me, is one of the rarest forms of courage.

Fortunately, people like Mr. Darcy are not mythical creatures. They are not literary fantasies. They exist — perhaps not in abundance, but in sufficient numbers that you have a real chance of meeting them, if you’re willing to be patient and keep your eyes open. They tend to move quietly, without spectacle, without the need to announce their decency. And because they carry their ego lightly, they are easy to overlook unless you’re paying attention. They are often the ones who listen more than they speak, who apologize without being cornered, who do not treat affection as a prize to be earned but as a space to be tended.

They are the people who do not weaponize vulnerability, who do not treat intimacy as leverage, who do not confuse love with ownership. They are the ones who can say, “I was wrong,” without turning it into a melodrama or a self‑flagellating performance. They are the ones who can hear “no” without hearing “you are unworthy.” They are the ones who understand that affection is not a transaction, that closeness is not a conquest, that tenderness is not a weakness but a discipline.

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And here is the part I can reveal in quiet astonishment: The people closest to me tend to embody these qualities. My husband, my closest friends, the people I choose and who choose me back — they all carry their ego lightly. They know how to apologize without theatrics, how to listen without defensiveness, how to love without possession. They are not perfect, but they are willing to examine themselves. They are not flawless, but they are honest about their potential shortcomings. They are the kind of people who make criticism safe, who make vulnerability possible, who make relationships feel like places of rest rather than arenas of performance. Not because they belong to some special category of humans, but because they practice these qualities with intention.

And that intention matters. It means that when conflict arises — as it inevitably does — the ground beneath us doesn’t crack (unless we are hungry). It means that disagreements don’t turn into battles, and misunderstandings don’t metastasize into character assassinations. It means that love is not something brittle that must be protected at all costs, but something flexible that can stretch, bend, and reshape itself without breaking. It means that the people in my life do not treat closeness as a fragile artifact, but as a living thing that requires care, curiosity, and humility.

Having these people in my life is one of the great, quiet blessings of my life. Their presence makes the world softer. It makes conflict survivable. It makes love feel spacious and breathable, not something to be earned or defended. It turns ordinary days into gentle ones, and difficult days into bearable ones. It creates a life in which tenderness is not a rare event but a daily practice. And perhaps most importantly, it creates a life in which I do not have to brace myself. I do not have to anticipate harm. I do not have to translate myself into something smaller or safer to be understood.

Perhaps this is also why I can write with honesty — sometimes even with a kind of brave softness I didn’t know I possessed when I was younger. My courage does not come from believing the internet is kind; it comes from knowing that my life is filled with people who are. I am surrounded by humans who hold me with clarity, who read me in good faith, who remind me who I am when the world feels loud or distorted. So if anyone ever twists my words, misreads my intentions, or projects their own storms onto my sentences, I know I have somewhere to go. I have people who will steady me, who will say, “We know your meaning.”

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And that knowledge — that anchoring — changes everything. It means that honesty is not a leap into the void but a return to something familiar. It means that vulnerability is not a gamble but a continuation of a language I speak daily with the people I love. It means that I can write my truth, not because I expect universal understanding, but because I am held by those who understand enough.

It is a beautiful life. And perhaps the most beautiful part is this: It is not beautiful by accident. It is beautiful because of the people who choose to show up with humility, with generosity, with the courage to be changed. It is beautiful because of the daily, deliberate acts of kindness that accumulate into something like safety. It is beautiful because the people in it understand that love is not a performance but a practice — one that requires attention, patience, and the willingness to soften. It is beautiful, too, because it includes people who have the courage to cry when the moment calls for it — people who do not treat tears as a failure of strength but as an honest expression of being human, people who know that tenderness is not diminished by being seen.

Mr. Darcy has stayed with me all these years. Not because he is flawless or grand or dramatic, but because he embodies the simple, steady truth I have come to recognize in the people I love: that real strength is the ability to release hurt rather than cling to it. He was my first glimpse of what it looks like when someone carries their ego lightly — and my life, in its own quiet way, has shown me that such people are not confined to fiction.

When Generosity Becomes a Paywall

There is a plant‑based recipe YouTube channel I once adored — the kind of channel that made vegetables look flirtatious, and tofu appear to be on its own quiet journey of self‑discovery. They filmed tomatoes the way French cinema films longing. They made a head of cabbage look like it was about to reveal a secret. But I don’t watch them anymore. Not because the food stopped being beautiful, but because the creators built an app, placed their recipes behind a subscription, and slowly let the free content evaporate like steam from a pot you forgot on the stove.

They’re just one example, of course. A tiny leaf in a much larger forest of creators who begin with generosity and end with a paywall. And that’s why I’m writing this — because something about that shift, that quiet migration from open‑handedness to monetization, feels like a parable of our time.

Because here’s the thing: What they make is beautiful. Their recipes aren’t sugar‑free or salt‑free or joy‑free. They don’t pretend that deliciousness is a moral failing. They simply offer vibrant, colorful meals that help people eat fewer animals and more plants — not out of guilt, but out of pleasure. They are ambassadors of the vegetable kingdom. Diplomatic representatives of chickpeas. Peace negotiators between humans and broccoli. They remind us that a carrot can be a small sun, that a beet can stain your cutting board like a love letter, that a zucchini can be a quiet poem if you slice it thin enough.

And yet, watching their content shrink behind a subscription feels like witnessing a small philosophical tragedy: the moment when creativity, once shared freely, quietly puts on a price tag and hopes no one notices. It’s not evil. It’s not greedy. It’s just… the world we live in. A world where even carrots need a business model. A world where zucchini must justify its existence through “premium content.” A world where the humble potato, once a symbol of peasant resilience, now appears only after you’ve entered your credit card details.

But beneath the humor lies something heavier — a question about what happens to culture when everything becomes a transaction. When the commons shrinks. When generosity becomes a luxury good. When the internet, once imagined as a vast public square, slowly turns into a mall with inspirational quotes painted on the walls.

I’m not here to moralize. Truly. I’m not ascending some digital pulpit with a celery wand, preaching the gospel of ethics. It’s just that given the size of their audience, I genuinely believe a donation‑based model would work beautifully for them. They could still earn a solid income — perhaps with a slightly smaller team, perhaps with fewer weekly recipes, perhaps with a little less cinematic drizzle of tahini over roasted vegetables — but it would be enough. More than enough.

And under a donation‑based model, something lovely could happen: Those who can afford to pay would quietly support those who can’t. A small ecosystem of generosity. A reminder that not everything delicious needs to be locked behind a subscription. A world in which recipes — humble, colorful, plant‑based recipes — could remain what they were in the beginning: gifts passed from one kitchen to another, without a login screen asking for your credit card, your email, and your willingness to accept cookies.

But the question, of course, is what I would do in their place. I like to imagine myself choosing the noble path, the generous path, the “right thing over personal benefit” path — the kind of choice that would make my future biographer nod approvingly. But if I’m being honest, I can’t claim that with absolute certainty. I live in the same world they do, a world designed to whisper that we are always one purchase away from finally being complete. There is always something else to buy, something else to upgrade, something else we apparently lack. Even minimalism has become a subscription service: simplicity, now available on a payment plan.

And in a world calibrated to keep us slightly hungry — for convenience, for comfort, for the next shiny thing — who am I to swear I wouldn’t drift toward monetization like everyone else caught in its orbit? I’d like to believe I would. I’d like to believe I’d choose generosity over growth charts. But belief is not the same as proof, and I have never been tested by an audience of millions and a spreadsheet promising that a subscription model could pay for the education of my imaginary children, their imaginary braces, and their imaginary summer camps in the Alps.

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Perhaps this is why I study history. Not out of nostalgia, but out of self‑defense. History reminds me that other worlds have existed — worlds where knowledge circulated through monasteries, through oral traditions, through communal kitchens, through handwritten recipes passed from neighbor to neighbor. Worlds where the value of something was not determined by its monetization potential but by its usefulness, its beauty, its ability to nourish or delight or sustain.

At the same time, I don’t want to romanticize those earlier worlds. They had their own exclusions, their own gatekeepers, their own forms of scarcity. Knowledge was often confined to monasteries, universities, or the privileged few who could read. Recipes were lost as easily as they were shared. Creativity could vanish with a single fire, a single illness, a single generation that forgot to pass something down. The past was not a utopia of open access; it was simply a different configuration of limits.

The present, for all its monetized absurdities, has its own astonishing gifts. I love having the internet. I love that I can write a blog and send my thoughts into the world without asking anyone’s permission. I love that someone in another city, another country, another time zone, another life entirely, can stumble upon my words at two in the morning and feel a little less alone. Yes, I pay a subscription for the privilege — even my blog lives behind its own quiet paywall — but the fact that it can exist at all is something earlier centuries could not have imagined. The digital world may be flawed, but it has given us forms of connection, expression, and community that have never existed before.

That’s why the shift toward paywalls feels so bittersweet: Because it happens inside a system capable of such generosity, such openness, such improbable communion. It’s not the act of charging money that stings — it’s the quiet realization that the world has arranged itself so that charging feels like the only sensible choice. That what once flowed freely now has to justify its existence on a spreadsheet. That sharing openly is no longer seen as a contribution to the commons but as a strategic misstep. That even the people teaching us how to roast cauliflower — the gentlest corner of the internet — must now think in terms of revenue streams, conversion funnels, and subscriber retention.

Perhaps the real question isn’t why they built a paywall, but how we ended up in a world where the only thing that seems to scale is scarcity. Where abundance — of knowledge, of creativity, of recipes — is treated as a threat to profitability rather than a gift to be shared. Where the commons is allowed to shrink, not through malice, but through a thousand small decisions that turn what was once a public space into a private doorway with a login screen. A world where access replaces community, and where the simple act of sharing begins to look almost radical.

And maybe the gentlest form of resistance is simply to notice. To notice the moment when a recipe becomes a product. To notice the moment when generosity becomes a marketing strategy. To notice the moment when a carrot stops being a carrot and becomes “content.”

Because noticing is not passive. It is the first small act of reclaiming one’s own mind. It is the quiet refusal to let the logic of monetization become invisible, inevitable, unquestioned. Noticing is the beginning of discernment — the ability to see the world not only as it is presented to us, but as it actually operates beneath the surface.

And once you notice, you can begin to imagine alternatives. And imagination — stubborn, unruly, inconvenient imagination — is the first ingredient in every world that has ever tasted better than the one before it. Imagination is what interrupts the story we’ve been handed and asks, gently but insistently: Does it have to be this way? It is what allows us to see the difference between what is natural and what is merely normalized. Between what is inevitable and what is simply profitable. Between what we have accepted and what we might yet choose.

Imagination is not escapism; it is a form of intellectual dissent. It is the mind’s way of refusing to be fully colonized by the economic logic that governs everything from streaming platforms to soup recipes. It is the quiet rebellion of believing that other arrangements are possible — that abundance does not have to be feared, that sharing does not have to be punished, that beauty does not have to be optimized for revenue.

And perhaps most importantly, imagination restores scale. It reminds us that the world we inhabit — with its subscriptions, its paywalls, its monetized carrots — is not the final draft of human society. It is just one version, one configuration, one temporary alignment of incentives and anxieties. It can be revised. It can be rewritten. It can be seasoned differently.

Noticing is the spark. Imagination is the flame. And together, they create the smallest, softest form of resistance: the belief that the world can be more generous, and that we are not foolish for wanting it to be.

A Borrowed Ritual, A Real Love

Since today is Holy Saturday in the Catholic calendar, I found myself thinking about a small, almost private tradition I used to share with my grandfather. It wasn’t a grand ritual or a particularly pious one; it was simply ours, tucked into the quiet rhythm of spring afternoons in Subotica. In the early afternoon, we would walk to the church together and let the priest bless the food we had arranged in a basket — mostly meat and eggs, the things I no longer eat. The basket was always lined with a lace cloth that felt too ornate for the two of us, as if it belonged to a more devout household. But we used it every year, partly out of habit and partly because it made the whole thing feel like a real occasion. A touch of borrowed holiness never hurt anyone.

I was thinking about that today and wondering whether either of us ever truly believed that the food became holier because a priest had blessed it. If I’m honest, I don’t think we did. My grandfather believed in God more than I ever did, but even he never claimed that God was Catholic, or even Christian. His faith was quieter, more instinctive — a sense that something larger existed, but not something that required strict loyalty to any particular institution. He prayed in the Catholic way and went to the Catholic church because it was the only religious language he knew, the only structure that felt familiar. But he always made sure to clarify — implicitly, through his stories, through the way he spoke about Muslims and Jews with the same warmth he reserved for his Christian neighbors — that he wasn’t persuaded by Catholic doctrine itself. He treated religion the way some people treat old family recipes: You follow them because they’re part of your life, not because you think they’re the only correct way to cook.

And still, we loved that ritual. We loved walking through Subotica with our basket full of food, performing the role of convinced Catholics even though neither of us fully inhabited it. There was something almost theatrical about it — not dishonest, just lightly playful, as if we were participating in a tradition that belonged to everyone and no one at the same time. The blessing wasn’t the point. The faith wasn’t the point. The point was the two of us, side by side, moving through the city in a shared rhythm that belonged only to us.

I remember the details that didn’t matter at the time but feel precious now: how he dressed in his best suit and somehow managed to look like the most elegant man in town, even though the suit was a little too old and the shoes a little too polished. How I always had to slow my steps to the absolute minimum to align with his, matching my pace to the quiet rhythm of his aging body. How we sometimes had to stop when he struggled to breathe, and how those pauses — which I once treated as small inconveniences — now feel like tiny reminders that every second we had together was finite and therefore sacred. And how I never let him hold the basket — not because he asked me to, but because I felt a fierce, almost childlike need to protect him from anything that might tire him. He never protested. Not because he couldn’t carry it, but because he understood exactly what I was doing and allowed it, letting the kindness move through me like a shiver.

Inside, the church smelled of incense and damp stone, that unmistakable mixture of holiness and humidity that clings to old buildings. The priest would move from basket to basket with a seriousness that felt both impressive and faintly amusing, as if he were performing a ceremony whose gravity we respected but didn’t entirely share. My grandfather would bow his head just enough to be polite, but not enough to suggest he believed the ritual was transformative. It was a gesture of courtesy, not conviction — a small nod to tradition rather than an act of faith. I sometimes wondered whether the priest could tell, but if he did, he was gracious enough not to show it. Priests, after all, are trained professionals in the art of pretending everyone is more devout than they actually are.

That particular priest had a huge respect for my grandfather. I know it because he told me so once, when I ran into him in town. He spoke about my grandfather with a kind of gentle certainty, as if the recognition were obvious to anyone who paid attention. He saw him exactly for what he was: a man unafraid to be himself, unafraid to stand slightly outside the lines without ever making a performance of it. A man whose honesty didn’t need to be loud to be unmistakable.

After the blessing, we would walk home even more slowly, as if prolonging the moment. The food was exactly the same as before — no holier, no different — but the time felt fuller somehow, as if the ritual had carved out a small pocket of peace just for us. The walk back always felt like the real heart of the tradition: the quiet companionship, the shared sense of having done something together, even if neither of us believed in its theological purpose.

Looking back, I think the holiness was never in the food. It was in the time we spent together — in the quiet agreement that this small tradition mattered, not because it was religious, but because it was ours. The blessing was just a pretext. The real sacredness was in the companionship, the familiarity, the gentle choreography of a grandfather and grandchild pretending, for an afternoon, to belong to a faith they didn’t quite believe in but still somehow cherished. And maybe that’s what tradition really is: not certainty, not doctrine, but the simple act of returning to something together, year after year, until it becomes a kind of love — the kind that doesn’t need to be blessed to feel holy.

The Quiet Discipline of Returning to Yourself

Lately I’ve been thinking about the quiet discipline of writing — not the kind that arrives dressed for a dissertation defense, but the other kind. The kind that slips into the margins of your life: the late‑night paragraphs typed while half‑asleep, the notes‑app confessions you swear you’ll “organize later,” the thoughts that show up uninvited like a cat who has decided your lap is now its property.

A friend recently asked whether this habit — this constant, public journaling — actually makes a person intellectually stronger. I said yes. Then immediately wondered if I sounded like someone who owns too many notebooks and has opinions about pens. (I do.)

But the strength doesn’t come from repetition, as if writing regularly were some kind of cerebral gym work. It’s something subtler. When you return to yourself on the page again and again — not to perform, but to listen — your mind starts rearranging its furniture. You begin treating your inner life with the same attentiveness you bring to archives and testimonies, except with fewer storage systems and more cups of tea I forget I made while thinking too hard.

You start catching things that would otherwise slip past you: the intuition that flickers and disappears, the discomfort you’d rather pretend is “just being tired,” the insight that only becomes real once you’ve trapped it in a sentence like a butterfly under a glass.

Eventually, writing becomes a kind of inner listening — a way of hearing the thoughts that speak too quietly to catch in the noise of daily life.

And that, I’ve realized, isn’t a distraction from scholarship. It is scholarship. Just with fewer conferences and more pajamas.

Historians spend their lives tracing the forces that shape human behavior — ideology, fear, opportunity, memory, silence. But those forces shape us too. Pretending otherwise is adorable in the way that thinking you’re “not influenced by advertising” is adorable. Writing publicly and reflectively is my way of refusing that illusion. It’s how I keep track of the lenses I inherited, the ones I chose, and the ones I’m still trying to unlearn without accidentally inventing three new ones in the process.

There’s also something else — something softer. When I write regularly, I’m training myself to hold complexity without sprinting toward resolution like it’s a finish line. To sit with contradictions. To let questions breathe instead of smothering them with premature certainty. This is not a minor skill. The world is full of people who can analyze and critique. Far fewer can tolerate ambiguity without trying to stitch it into a neat little narrative.

And then there’s the courage: the everyday courage of thinking in public. Of revising yourself where others can see it. Of admitting that your earlier ideas were incomplete, or naïve, or written during a week when you were surviving on misplaced optimism. It’s the courage to stay porous rather than fortified, to let the world shape you even as you try to understand it.

So yes, I believe constant journaling makes you intellectually stronger. Not because it produces better arguments, but because it produces a better thinker: someone more honest, more attentive, more attuned to the subtle movements of her own mind. Someone who understands that clarity is not a destination but a practice. Someone who knows that the self is not an obstacle to objectivity, but one of its conditions — like a pair of glasses you can’t take off, only clean.

In that sense, writing isn’t just a record of thought. It’s a method of thinking. A way of staying awake to yourself. A way of ensuring that the person doing the research is as examined as the material she studies.

And if I’m lucky, this habit — this steady, unglamorous, occasionally chaotic practice — will help me build a future in which transparency isn’t a performance, but a way of being. A way of moving through the world with my eyes open, my mind alert, and my heart unguarded, even when my drafts resemble a foggy mirror I keep wiping with my sleeve.

A Lesson in Love Before Polish Class

In September of last year, I began learning Polish for the first time. I could easily spend hours rambling about the joy that rises in me every time I step into that classroom, or the linguistic acrobatics I perform comparing Polish to every Balkan language I’ve ever met. I could tell you about my classmates — this weekly constellation of curious, motivated souls who somehow make the accusative case feel like a team sport.

And of course, I could write an entire novel about our teacher, Barbara, whose love for Poland burns brighter than my combined affection for Serbia and Austria — which is saying something. If patriotism were an Olympic discipline, she’d be on the podium with a gold medal while the rest of us wave tiny flags from the audience. She teaches with the kind of passion that makes you forget grammar is supposed to be difficult; with her, even the trickiest consonant cluster feels like a puzzle you want to solve, and every vowel combination turns into a small bird singing its way through the lesson.

Each of these could be a story of its own. But that’s not what I want to write about today.

I want to share something quieter, something that happens every Tuesday evening just before I enter the Polish classroom. One of my classmates has a son who also learns Polish — though he’s far more advanced, a kind of linguistic older cousin we all secretly admire. His class with the same teacher ends about five minutes before ours begins. And on his way out, he always stops to greet his mother.

It’s a small moment — barely a handful of seconds — but every time I witness it, something inside me softens. On his face, there is this real, unfiltered joy; the kind you can’t manufacture even with the best intentions. He sees her, and he lights up from within. And honestly, I would probably do the same if I had a mother like his.

Because his mother isn’t learning Polish just for fun (though she fell in love with the language with the same intensity we all did). She’s learning it because her son’s girlfriend is Polish — because she wants her daughter‑in‑law to feel welcomed, understood, embraced. He, in turn, is learning Polish because his girlfriend is Polish. A whole family orbiting around love, doing things not out of obligation but out of wholehearted generosity. They’ve turned language learning into an act of pure, uncomplicated kindness.

And I am genuinely happy for them — moved, really, in a way that feels larger than the moment itself. But there is also a small, quiet jealousy that rises in me, like a shadow cast by a candle flame.

As someone who grew up with a mother who could not offer unconditional love, this tiny weekly scene hits me with the force of a revelation. Every Tuesday, in those few seconds between a man and his mother, I witness a kind of warmth I never had. A warmth that is simple, uncalculated, freely given. A warmth that doesn’t demand, manipulate, or twist itself into something else.

It’s just there — soft, ordinary, astonishing.

And maybe that’s why it moves me so deeply. Not because I begrudge them their closeness, but because I know what it means to grow up without that kind of safety. Because I can see, with almost painful clarity, how extraordinary it must be to have a mother who learns a new language just to make someone else feel welcome. A mother who loves her child without turning it into a performance.

There is something almost philosophical about it — the way love, when genuine, expands outward instead of curling in on itself. The way it creates space rather than consuming it. Watching them, I’m reminded that love is not a feeling but a movement, a gesture, a willingness to step beyond the borders of one’s own comfort. It is a verb long before it becomes a noun.

Every Tuesday evening, before I even say dobry wieczór to pani Barbara, I receive a lesson far more profound than vocabulary or grammar. A reminder that love is fluent in every language. That kindness can be conjugated in countless ways. That sometimes the most beautiful thing you can witness is simply a mother greeting her son, and a son lighting up as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

It’s a moment so small you could almost miss it, yet it lingers with me long after class ends. Maybe because it shows me something I never had: a kind mother. Or maybe because it reminds me that love doesn’t need grand gestures or perfect sentences — it only needs a willingness to give yourself to another human being without expecting anything in return.

And so, while I wrestle with nasal vowels and consonant clusters, this tiny ritual teaches me something far more important: that the heart, when open, speaks a language that requires no translation. That tenderness, when genuine, is its own form of fluency. That sometimes the most profound lessons arrive quietly, in the space between two people who simply care for each other.

Where Resistance Begins

Imagine a child who walks through school as though through a cold, unlit corridor — a place where cruelty drips slowly, steadily, into every break between classes. The bullying comes not in storms but in a constant drizzle, the kind that soaks you before you even realize you’re wet. Soon, the child begins to brace for it the way others brace for a fog that never quite lifts.

At home, they reach for comfort, for shelter, for someone to say, This is wrong. Instead, they are told to smile through it, to endure, to toughen up. As if tenderness were a flaw. As if sensitivity were an invitation to be hurt. As if the wound were the child’s fault.

At school, they try again — teachers, the school psychologist, any adult who might listen. But their words evaporate before they land. No one steps in. No one says enough. The silence of the grown‑ups becomes its own kind of violence.

And yet, in this landscape of indifference, one small light flickers: another pupil. A classmate who, every now and then, steps between the child and the pack. Someone who calls the bullies out, who refuses to let cruelty pass as normal. Their courage doesn’t end the bullying, but it punctures the darkness for a moment — a reminder that not everyone turns away.

But one lantern cannot light an entire hallway. The bullying continues, fed by the many who join in and the many more who watch. The child grows desperate. They have asked for help and received none. They cannot fight back; they are one against ten.

So the child invents a way out.

One morning, they simply stop going to school. They tell no one — not the teachers, not the parents, not even the brave classmate who sometimes intervenes. Each day, they pretend to leave for school and then vanish into the city’s quiet corners, hiding during the day. They are afraid, yes — but also strangely relieved. For the first time in months, no one is hurting them.

This fragile freedom lasts only a few weeks. Eventually, the adults discover the child’s absence from school. The child is dragged back into the very building they had fled, as though the walls themselves had reached out to reclaim them.

But something has shifted. This time, the teachers act. They summon the bullies’ parents. They speak to the class. They warn that expulsions will follow if the cruelty continues. And for once, the threat lands. The hallways soften. The air grows lighter. The daily violence recedes.

The child still walks carefully, still feels the echo of fear in their bones — but the world is no longer entirely hostile. There is, at last, a little room to breathe.

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I tell this story not only because it is mine — because I was that frightened child who finally gathered enough courage to vanish from school altogether — but because it leaves me with a question that has followed me into adulthood. Where does resistance begin, and where does it end? Is it still resistance when all you do is step out of harm’s way? When your only act of defiance is the quiet refusal to show up and be hurt?

When I stopped going to school, I didn’t imagine I was changing anything. I wasn’t trying to make a point. I wasn’t trying to be brave. I was simply trying to survive another day. And yet, my disappearance forced the adults to look at what they had ignored. It made the bullies face consequences they had never expected. My small act of self‑protection rippled outward in ways I could not have foreseen.

That experience taught me something I couldn’t have articulated then: Resistance doesn’t always look like confrontation. Sometimes it looks like retreat, like silence, like slipping out of sight. Which is why I reject the idea that resistance must roar to be real.

But having a broad view of resistance does not mean that anything done in its name is justified. Not every act that calls itself resistance is righteous, and not every blow struck against harm is free of harm itself. Survival is one thing; unnecessary violence is another.

And I also know this much: The courage born of freedom is not the same as the courage born of necessity. That girl — yes, a girl — who placed herself between me and the boys who circled like wolves possessed a bravery that still glows in my memory. Her courage was resistance in its purest form, a bright, unforced note rising above the noise.

But that does not make the quieter acts of self-protection meaningless. There is a courage born of choice, yes — but there is also a courage born of necessity, of the instinct to survive when survival is not guaranteed. And that courage, too, deserves its name. It is the courage of those who hide, who run, who refuse to walk willingly into the jaws of harm. It is the courage of those who say, in whatever way they can: You will not take everything from me.

Perhaps that is the truth at the heart of resistance: We rarely know what our actions will change. We only know what we cannot endure any longer.

Resistance, at least for me, begins in that moment — the moment a person quietly says no to the role the world has assigned them. It begins in the refusal to be the victim someone else expects. It begins in the trembling decision to step out of the line, to skip a day of school, to save one’s own life or dignity in the smallest way possible.

And where does resistance end? Perhaps it ends only where the human spirit ends. Perhaps it ends only when there is no one left to say no, no one left to remember, no one left to speak. Maybe resistance fades only when the last flicker of refusal is extinguished — when even the last voice has been pressed into silence.

But as long as someone survives — as long as someone tells the story — resistance continues. It echoes. It gathers. It threads itself through time like a thin, persistent current. It becomes part of the world’s memory, part of the invisible architecture that shapes what comes next.

I often return to that child hiding in the corners of the city, clutching fear like a secret. And I return to the girl who stood up for me.

Both of us, in our own ways, were resisting.

Not perfectly. Not gloriously. Not in ways that would ever make it into textbooks.

But resisting nonetheless — because sometimes the most radical act a human being can perform is simply to remain human in a world determined to strip that humanity away.

The Courage That Chose Me

In the middle of last year, I had an experience that left a deeper mark on me than I ever expected. It was early summer, one of those heavy, breathless days when even the air seems exhausted. I went to the university to take an exam — the last one of the semester, the one that was supposed to close those months with a quiet sense of completion. Everything pointed toward a simple, successful ending. But life, as it often does, had other plans.

The lecture hall was packed, nearly a hundred students squeezed into the room for the first sitting. The air buzzed with that strange mixture of tension and boredom that only exam halls can produce. I wasn’t nervous; not even the crowd managed to disturb my calm. I had studied well, and because the subject genuinely interested me, I felt prepared in a way that was almost peaceful — as if the knowledge had settled into me like sediment at the bottom of a clear lake.

There were five essay questions. The moment I read them, I knew I could answer all of them with ease. And yet, I couldn’t — not the last three.

As soon as I finished the second question, my body simply abandoned its duties. My stomach began to spin with the wild, merciless grace of a peregrine falcon in freefall, as if it had suddenly remembered an urgent appointment somewhere outside my body. Nausea rose like a tide determined to redraw the coastline of my dignity, and dizziness followed — a shimmering curtain lowering itself over the room. The fluorescent lights above me seemed to pulse, the edges of the world softening as if someone had smeared Vaseline across the lens of my vision. For a moment, I thought I might collapse right there beside my colleague, undone by Question Two.

Somehow, before the collapse arrived, I managed to raise my hand and tell the professor and his assistant that I was about to faint. I tried to sound composed, like someone making a reasonable request, but in truth, I was a breath away from losing myself entirely, sending out an SOS so large it could have been seen from the mountains. My voice felt like it belonged to someone else — thin, trembling, barely tethered to consciousness.

What happened next is the reason this memory stayed with me. Out of the crowd, a man — just another student taking the same exam — appeared beside me like an angel in disguise. He spoke gently, giving me small, steady instructions on how to stay conscious, how to breathe, how to survive the moment. His presence was grounding, like a hand pressed against the center of a spinning top. The professor’s assistant rushed over too, and for a few minutes the two of them seemed almost to compete in kindness, each trying to be the bigger angel of the hour.

The man, as he told me ten minutes later, was a trained emergency medical technician. That explained his calm, the quiet authority in his voice, the way he seemed to know exactly how to anchor me to the world. A situation like this had never happened to me before; I had never been the person who suddenly needed rescuing. If I was ever going to faint, throw up, or fall apart, I always made sure to do it at home. I had no idea how much comfort another human being could offer — how much relief a steady voice could bring when your own body is failing you in every possible way.

Twenty minutes later, I was in the emergency car, still half dead, being whisked off to the hospital. The world outside blurred into streaks of summer light, while inside I sat strapped to a stretcher, feeling like a wilted houseplant someone had forgotten to water. The paramedics spoke in calm, practiced tones, but all I could hear was the frantic thud of my own heartbeat, loud as a drum in a hollow room.

And yet, even while I was almost dying, the only thing truly worrying me was my grade. Would the professor give me a negative mark because I hadn’t answered the last three questions? Would I be allowed to retake the exam in September? It was the final exam of my BA program, and the timing mattered; I wanted to close that chapter cleanly, without loose ends or dramatic collapses. The absurdity of it didn’t strike me until much later — that I was lying in an ambulance, pale as paper, and still calculating academic consequences like some bureaucratic ghost.

The next day, when I was finally home and feeling much better, the shame arrived. Not because of the spectacle I had unwillingly staged — that no longer concerned me, because I hadn’t chosen to be sick. My shame was quieter, deeper, and far more revealing. There had been a man who didn’t care about his own exam; he didn’t mind the possibility of failing it if it meant helping me. Out of nearly a hundred students, he was the only one who stood up — and he stood up without hesitation. Yes, he was trained for situations like this, but training alone doesn’t make someone step away from their own future to help a stranger.

Of course I had to ask myself the uncomfortable question: What would you have done in his place? And the honest answer is that even with all the training in the world, I’m not sure I would have stood up. I’m not sure I would have risked a negative mark on my otherwise nearly perfect record. It’s easy to admire courage in others; it’s harder to admit how tightly we cling to our own small certainties. How often we choose safety over compassion, predictability over presence.

And that, I think, is what stayed with me. Not the fear of prolonging my studies or the embarrassment of collapsing in public, but the realization that courage is rarely convenient. It doesn’t wait for perfect timing or tidy circumstances. It simply asks you to choose: your comfort or someone else’s need. That man chose me — a stranger — over his own certainty. And ever since that day, I’ve been trying to understand what it would take for me to do the same. To stand up, to step forward, to be someone’s unexpected angel in a crowded room.

A Childhood Made of Borrowed Belonging

It was October 2000, and there I was: a small girl perched on her father’s shoulders, stretching upward like a hopeful sunflower trying to see over the heads of an entire city. Before us, the crowd seemed infinite — a living sea of singing, dancing bodies. The atmosphere was so jubilant that even the Catholics looked relieved, as if heaven had finally stopped playing hard to get and descended onto our little corner of northern Serbia.

Why was everyone so happy? Because Slobodan Milošević — until that day, president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia — had just been overthrown. I was seven years old and profoundly confused. I tugged on my father’s hair and asked, with the earnestness only a child can muster, what Milošević had done to deserve such a dramatic farewell. Was he really that bad?

My father paused, the way adults do when they’re trying to translate geopolitics into kindergarten language. “Well,” he began slowly, “he wanted to enter another room with his head through the wall. And that’s just not the right way to go about it.”

I considered this carefully. “You mean,” I said, “he should have knocked and waited for someone to open the door so he could enter?”

“Yes,” my father replied, relieved. “Exactly. He didn’t knock. He wanted to enter another room by force. That’s why we’re celebrating that he’s gone.”

To me, this explanation made perfect sense. In fact, it made so much sense that I decided, right there on his shoulders, that I was proud to be Serbian. After all, what nation wouldn’t glow with pride while celebrating the departure of a man who apparently tried to enter metaphorical rooms headfirst through the wall? Weren’t we, in that moment, the heroes of our own fairytale — the people who had finally said, “Sir, please use the door like everyone else.”

As I looked at the crowd — singing, dancing, overflowing with joy so bright it could have powered the streetlights of the entire world — I thought: These must be the good guys. These must be the people on the right side of history, the ones who know how to knock politely, the ones who gather in the streets not for war but for the sheer relief of someone finally leaving the building. In my seven‑year‑old logic, everything was perfectly clear: Heaven had descended onto northern Serbia, the villain had exited the stage, and my people were radiant, triumphant, beautifully alive.

There was only one small complication — strictly speaking, I wasn’t Serbian. My entire family belonged to an ethnic minority so tiny that even as a child, I understood our political significance hovered somewhere between “decorative” and “symbolic.” In Subotica and the surroundings, we mattered a little; but the moment we left these limits, we evaporated from the national map like a footnote someone forgot to include in the main text.

That’s why I preferred thinking of myself as Serbian. It didn’t matter that I was raised Catholic, that my dialect could be identified as non‑Serbian from an airplane, or that the traditions in my home overlapped with Serbian ones about as much as a hedgehog overlaps with a harmonica. Even today, I find it a little awkward when people ask me how Serbians celebrate Christmas. I don’t know. I never celebrated Serbian Christmas. But none of that concerned me back then. At seven, identity wasn’t about ancestry — it was about atmosphere. And the atmosphere that day was irresistible: loud, joyful, victorious. Who wouldn’t want to belong to the people who had just overthrown their own villain and were now celebrating as if history itself had thrown them a surprise party?

At school, I was never ashamed of my minority status, nor did I fear how my classmates might react, but I also never announced it with any particular enthusiasm. Why would I? I adored Serbian literature and Serbian history, both taught with such fervor that every lesson felt like an invitation to fall a little more in love with the country. I loved belonging — at least emotionally — to a nation that collected basketball world cups as if it were a casual hobby. My heart beat faster every time I saw the Cyrillic alphabet, as if the letters themselves were waving at me from across the page. I felt Serbian down to my bones. And Serbia (and Montenegro), in the early 2000s, felt like a country finally exhaling — a place with a decent prime minister, a fragile democracy taking shape, and a sense of hope so palpable that even a child could feel it humming in the air.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when the first real shock cracked my faith in the myth of nations, but I remember precisely what caused it: learning about the First World War. In class, our teacher used the pronoun “we” to describe the Serbians who had gloriously died defending “our” country. Yet the map in the textbook refused to cooperate. With the cold precision only school maps possess, it showed that my hometown — Subotica — sat firmly on the enemy side of the line. This meant that my ancestors were not individuals who gloriously died defending Serbia. My teacher’s ancestors, presumably, were also not Serbians who gloriously died defending Serbia. In fact, the ancestors of every single pupil in that classroom had potentially been shooting at Serbians during that war. Subotica belonged to the Austro‑Hungarian monarchy, and for the first time, I had to face the unsettling truth that borders are not natural divisions but human inventions — and that my national pride was therefore also an invention, a story I had accepted rather than a truth inscribed in my bones.

In the years that followed, I kept loving the same poems and the same alphabet that once made my heart flutter — but the innocence behind that love was gone. I began to understand that nations are fictions, and sometimes the story fits only because you never thought to question its seams. What I had taken for something ancient and instinctive — something “in my bones” — was, in truth, a feeling I had stitched together from school lessons, celebrations, art, and the warm illusion of belonging.

And yet, even after learning how arbitrary borders can be — how casually history redraws them, how indifferently they slice through languages, families, and childhoods — I didn’t feel betrayed. My pride didn’t vanish; it simply softened, loosened, changed its shape. I began to understand that what I loved had never been a nation, but the world that had formed me: the sounds, the gestures, the humor, the contradictions. A world stitched together from influences that refused to stay in their assigned boxes. A world always more beautifully complicated than any single name could contain.