Inside My Multilingual Obsession

Last year in France, I was sitting in a small café — the kind where the chairs wobble slightly, and the waiter pointedly ignores your best attempts at French — talking to a multilingual from England, a gentle man named Andrew. He stirred his espresso with the calm seriousness of someone about to reveal a private truth, then looked up and said, “I don’t have other hobbies. I don’t play golf or watch football matches. That is who I am. I learn languages.” The sentence was so simple, yet it struck me with the clarity of a bell. There was no performance in it, no intellectual vanity, no attempt to impress. It was simply the truth of a man who had found the one activity that made his mind feel most alive.

And it stayed with me long after, because I recognized myself in it. I don’t have other hobbies, not really. I admire people who do — people who knit scarves, who run marathons, who collect old coins, who bake sourdough with the devotion of medieval monks. I often fantasize about improving my poor piano skills, imagining myself playing Chopin with the emotional depth of someone who has suffered greatly. But if the choice is between a Polish class and a piano class, I will choose Polish every single time. If the choice is between learning French conditionals or mastering a perfect mousse au chocolat, I will choose the conditionals. If the choice is between reading a grammar book or going to a yoga class, I will choose the grammar book — and then complain about my stiff back afterwards. The truth is embarrassingly simple: I prefer language learning to most things in life.

Our Hungarian teacher asked us today whether we have any holiday plans for this year. Two students replied, almost shyly, “This is our holiday,” referring to the simple joy of learning Hungarian in Debrecen. As they said it, I felt something settle inside me — the recognition that language learning is also my holiday and will be my future too, perhaps all the way until I reach a hundred. Sure, I enjoy lying on the beach, reading thrillers, swimming in warm water, even drifting on a luxury ship with a drink in hand. Any pleasure is welcome. But nothing, truly nothing, can compete with the strange, electric satisfaction of language learning.

Because when I feel myself becoming more fluent in another language, the joy is sharper, deeper, more enduring than any reward a clean, restful afternoon under a blue sky could ever offer. It’s not just pleasure; it’s purpose. It’s not just rest; it’s expansion. It’s the quiet thrill of knowing that my mind is stretching, opening, reaching toward another way of being in the world.

And then there is the constant, delightful chaos of comparing languages — the kind of cross‑linguistic comedy that turns my learning into a private sitcom. For example, Slovenian showed me how a perfectly innocent sentence can become scandalous the moment it crosses a border: a man telling a woman she is zgodna, simply meaning she woke up early, would be offering an entirely inappropriate compliment about her body in Croatia. Hungarian showed me that the word for “my husband” (férjem) sounds uncannily like “holiday” (Ferien) in German, as if marriage and vacation were secretly conspiring behind our backs. And Polish showed me that trudny means “difficult,” while in Serbian trudna means “pregnant,” which makes the Polish sentence Mam trudności (“I am having trouble”) sound, to my Serbian ears, like a dramatic pregnancy announcement. These tiny collisions make me laugh in the middle of class, reminding me that languages are not just systems but personalities, each with their own quirks, mischief, and accidental jokes.

That is why Andrew’s sentence in that little French café stayed with me so stubbornly. Because after all the classes, all the jokes, all the tiny revelations — after Slovenian taught me how innocence can turn scandalous, after Hungarian taught me that matrimony can sound like a vacation, after Polish taught me that difficulty can masquerade as pregnancy — I finally understand the quiet certainty in his voice. He wasn’t describing a hobby; he was naming a way of being. And somewhere between Debrecen and Bordeaux, between my grammar books and my stiff back, between my thrillers on the beach and my stubborn devotion to verb conjugations, I realized that I am shaped by the same truth. This is my holiday, my craft, my pleasure, my compass. Learning languages is the one activity that makes my mind feel most alive — and I hope it will accompany me, faithfully and mischievously, all the way until I reach a hundred.

Before and After the Scroll

I’ve been reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, and one point he makes with striking clarity is his recommendation that children avoid social media entirely until at least sixteen. Even then, he treats sixteen not as a celebratory threshold but as the bare minimum — like the age at which one is technically allowed to drive, though no one believes the roads are safer for it. His argument made me pause and look back at my own relationship with social media, wondering whether it has shaped my life in any truly consequential way or whether it merely hovered at the edges, like a faint background noise I never quite noticed.

In many respects, I was fortunate. I belonged to what now feels like the last cohort before the “anxious generation,” the final wave of childhood that unfolded without the constant hum of notifications and algorithmic seduction. My early digital life was almost pastoral in comparison: I got my first computer at seven, my first phone at fourteen, and my first smartphone at eighteen — an age when one is theoretically capable of making decisions, though not necessarily good ones.

When I created a Facebook account at sixteen, the platform was still a kind of digital village square. My entire online world consisted of classmates, school gossip, and the occasional blurry photo from a birthday party. It was small, local, and almost quaint — like a provincial town before the arrival of a highway. Later on, there was a period when I was genuinely addicted to Facebook. Checking this platform several times per day became a reflex, a way to fill the micro‑silences of life. In 2016, though, I deleted my Facebook account and never returned, as if closing a door that had been left ajar for too long.

Unfortunately, I repeated the cycle once more when I created an Instagram profile in 2020, only to delete it a year later. Instagram felt like Facebook’s glamorous cousin — beautiful, curated, and somehow more exhausting. It wasn’t just the material things that made me feel inadequate; it was also the emotional tableaux, the family portraits, the mothers and fathers smiling in soft afternoon light. Instagram has a way of making you long for things you never had, or never had in that particular way. And I realised, with a mixture of humour and self‑preservation, that I don’t have the constitution for a place where other people’s family dynamics come with filters.

Today, the only platform where I have an account is LinkedIn. I check it a few times a week, never compulsively, never with that familiar tug of dependency. As long as my relationship with it stays this measured and non‑habitual, I consider it perfectly acceptable — a tool rather than a temptation, a digital filing cabinet rather than a psychological battleground.

The only digital relationship I’m still unsure how to navigate is YouTube. I spend a considerable amount of time on the platform, fully aware that its recommendation system keeps me inside filter bubbles and echo chambers. YouTube feels particularly dangerous in this regard: It doesn’t simply show us what we’ve already watched — it anticipates what we already believe, like a psychic with a questionable moral compass. The algorithm nudges us toward videos that confirm our worldview, reinforcing our assumptions rather than challenging them. It’s the intellectual equivalent of eating only hummus and guacamole: tasty and familiar, yet suspiciously lacking in vitamins. And while I’m conscious of this dynamic, I haven’t yet figured out how to manage it in a way that feels genuinely healthy. YouTube is the one platform that still seduces me — not with social validation, but with the illusion of knowledge, the promise of endless learning that sometimes turns into endless scrolling. It is, in short, my digital vice: respectable enough to justify, dangerous enough to worry about.

However, I have to be honest: I’m not entirely convinced that my offline intellectual life is the heroic alternative I sometimes pretend it is. Yes, I read about five books per month, but I mostly read books I already suspect I’ll like. I attend lectures, but usually the ones that align neatly with my existing interests, my familiar intellectual terrain. In other words, I curate my offline world with the same careful selectivity that algorithms perform online — only I do it manually, with the smug satisfaction of someone who believes they are above algorithmic influence. It’s a comforting illusion, but an illusion nonetheless.

Sometimes I wonder how much genuine breadth I possess. I like to imagine myself as a wide‑ranging, open‑minded person, strolling through the world with philosophical curiosity and a willingness to be surprised. But if I’m honest, I’m more like a well‑trained homing pigeon: I reliably return to the same intellectual rooftops, the same historical periods, the same moral questions, the same authors whose ideas feel like home (e.g., Jonathan Haidt). My “open‑mindedness” often resembles a beautifully decorated room with the windows politely closed.

And so I ask myself: How open-minded am I, really? How much wideness and openness will I ever possess? Perhaps the offline world is not inherently more expansive — it simply flatters us by letting us believe that we are the ones in charge of our selection. The algorithm is replaced by preference, the feed by habit, the echo chamber by taste. It’s all very dignified, very analogue, very human — but not necessarily more diverse.

Still, there’s something charming about this self‑awareness. It’s comforting to know that even without algorithms, I am perfectly capable of building my own little echo chambers. And perhaps that is its own form of openness, the willingness to see the limits of one’s curiosity, to acknowledge them with humility, and to keep nudging them outward, even if only by a few centimetres at a time. In the end, Haidt’s warning about early exposure to social media circles back to a greater truth: Whether online or offline, the real challenge for everyone is recognising the algorithms in our minds. And if we can see that — if we can name our own tendencies, laugh at them, and gently push against them — then maybe we are doing better than we think.

The Shoes We Change, The Roles We Keep

During my BA degree ceremony last May, something caught my attention and stayed with me. To my surprise, the event was almost entirely female; only a few men appeared among the graduates. And then I noticed a small choreography unfolding with perfect coordination: Every woman arrived in comfortable shoes, switched to high heels for the hour of the ceremony, and slipped back into ballerinas the moment it ended. The transformation was so synchronized it felt almost ceremonial in itself — as if the heels were part of the academic regalia, worn briefly for the ritual and then quietly retired.

As for me, I arrived in my very worn‑out ballerinas and stayed in them, fully committed to the idea that comfort is a human right. And I want to be completely honest here: I’m not immune to vanity. I had perfect makeup, carefully arranged hair, and a new dress purchased specifically for the occasion. I wanted to look polished, and I did. Yet high heels, at least for me, are instruments of suffering disguised as footwear.

Watching the other women perform their synchronized shoe ritual — ballerinas for arrival, heels for ceremony, ballerinas again for survival — I couldn’t help thinking the heels must have been torture for them too. Otherwise, why not simply arrive in them, stay in them, and glide out triumphantly at the end of the day? Instead, the moment the ceremony ended, the collective sound of heels being abandoned was almost liturgical. It was like witnessing a mass exodus from pain.

What struck me most was the unspoken agreement that this was simply what one does at a ceremony. It reminded me how many rituals of femininity operate like inherited scripts: No one writes them, yet everyone seems to know and follow their lines. The heels weren’t just shoes; they were props in a performance of adulthood, professionalism, and femininity, all compressed into a single hour. And the fact that every woman switched back immediately afterward revealed the truth beneath the performance: the ritual mattered more than the comfort, but only for as long as the ritual lasted.

In that sense, my worn‑out ballerinas felt like a small rebellion — not against beauty, but against the idea that beauty must hurt. I didn’t feel less elegant for choosing comfort; if anything, I felt more myself. And watching the other women slip back into their flats, I sensed a shared relief, a collective exhale that said more than any words I heard that day.

And I want to be very clear: None of this is meant as moralizing. I’m not standing above anyone in my ballerinas, declaring myself liberated while other women are trapped. I participate in my own forms of self‑conditioning — my hair, for instance, was held together by an entire ecosystem of tiny clips, pins, and sprays that kept it perfectly in place throughout the day. It took me twenty minutes in the evening to dismantle the whole construction, pulling out each little piece one by one like I was undoing a miniature scaffolding. All that was unnecessary bother for the sake of beauty.

I do plenty of things that aren’t strictly necessary but feel socially expected, aesthetically pleasing, or simply habitual. So this text isn’t criticism of any woman who wore heels that day. If anything, watching that synchronized shoe ritual made me realize how many small negotiations we all make with our bodies, our comfort, and our sense of belonging.

And so when I think back about that day — the nice dresses, the diplomas, the synchronized shoe ritual — I realize that the ceremony reminded me how easily we step into roles that ask us to endure discomfort for the sake of appearances, and how quickly we abandon those roles the moment the ritual ends. The heels came on, the heels came off, and in between, an entire act of femininity unfolded in miniature — brief, wordless, and complete.

The Things I Carry Into My Expertise

The Covid pandemic made one truth feel unavoidable: In moments of crisis, people really should listen to experts. Yet the longer I worked as a health professional — specifically one trained without a single course in nutrition, which we can agree is foundational to human health — the more I understood why so many people doubt expertise in the first place. Because very often, expertise is questionable.

My own education showed me how easily a system can produce professionals who know intricate molecular pathways of chemicals and can recite the mechanisms of biological agents, yet know almost nothing about food and drinks — the substances people consume far more often than pills or vaccines. It was absurd, and it made me sympathetic to the skeptics.

Now I study history, and at a recent conference I met a journalist who told me, almost casually, “But you don’t need to be trained as a historian to be a historian.” She was speaking about herself — she had studied something entirely different, yet was researching the Holocaust — and I could imagine that her background sometimes leads people to question her competence. Still, the moment she said it, I felt a wave of anger rise in me.

I wanted to tell her that she was wrong — that historians receive rigorous training, that the university has shaped me in ways no amount of self‑directed reading could replace. I wanted to explain that her education, however valuable, cannot simply stand in for the formation of a real historian: someone trained to think historically, to analyze sources, to understand context, to work with archives, to navigate historiography, to recognize methodological pitfalls. But even as these arguments formed in my mind, I also knew I could not say to what extent they hold true for the discipline as a whole. There are motivated teachers, rigorous classes, and students who learn to interrogate sources with genuine sophistication; at the same time, there are countless examples that complicate any sweeping claim.

So in that moment, I realized that — however wrong the journalist may be in her assessment of what it takes to be a historian — she also did have a point. History education, as it currently stands, is simply not as good as it could and, in my opinion, should be. Many people graduate without any real understanding of the empirical side of the field. We know, to an extent, where to find sources and how to present and cite them, but we often know almost nothing about how to analyze them. We can quote a document, but not interrogate its silences; we can summarize a source, but not examine its conditions of production, its intended audience, its rhetorical strategies, or the power structures that shaped what was recorded and what was omitted. In other words, my impression is that we lack the intellectual discipline required to transform evidence into knowledge.

And the issues go deeper. Too many students finish their degrees without grasping that our work is oriented toward objectivity: the slow, disciplined effort to separate what can be known from what we might wish were true. History is not a stage for personal desires, nor a venue for performing what feels morally satisfying. It is certainly not activism. It is a discipline built on method, evidence, and interpretive restraint — the willingness to let sources unsettle our assumptions rather than bend them to our preferences. When those foundations are weak, the boundary between trained historians and enthusiastic amateurs becomes blurry.

The fairest way to illustrate this problem is to use my own example. Although I’m enthusiastic about history in general, my personal motivation lies in researching the Holocaust. Certain powerful experiences from my childhood taught me to care deeply about Jewish history and about what happened — and continues to happen — to Jews. And precisely because of that emotional connection, I have to remind myself constantly that Holocaust victims were human beings, not symbols. Their lives were not raw material for moral lessons, political arguments, or personal identification; they were individuals embedded in specific social worlds, shaped by contingencies, choices, constraints, and contradictions. To study them responsibly requires resisting the temptation to treat the past as a reservoir of meaning for the present. It demands the discipline to let evidence speak in its own register, even when it challenges the narratives I find comforting.

This is where proper training matters. Without it, emotional investment easily becomes moral storytelling; with it, emotional investment becomes a source of sensitivity. Holocaust victims were individuals with the full spectrum of human complexity, and that is how they must be researched. Some were loving parents; some were difficult spouses; some were politically progressive; some were deeply conservative; some were wealthy industrialists who exploited their workers; some were impoverished laborers. Their social positions, their flaws, their virtues, their conflicts — all of this is part of their history just as much as their persecution, their suffering, and their resistance. To study them honestly is to acknowledge their humanity in its entirety, not to flatten them into desired archetypes. And this — this ability to resist simplification, to hold complexity, to treat sources with discipline rather than sentiment — is exactly what universities should be teaching. When they don’t, the line between trained historians and well‑intentioned amateurs becomes dangerously thin, as both groups operate without the methodological rigor that keeps history from collapsing into narrative comfort.

Overall, I have a deep appreciation for expertise. Universities are my favorite places, and I want to defend both pharmacists and historians with equal vigor. I believe in training, in method, in the slow accumulation of knowledge. And I should say clearly that parts of my own education have been excellent — rigorous, demanding, and formative in ways I still rely on every day. Those experiences are precisely why I know how transformative good education can be, and why I wish there had been more of it.

That is also why certain encounters unsettle me. When health‑care professionals confidently tell me that red wine is “healthy,” or when journalists insist that Holocaust research can be done by amateurs, I’m reminded that expertise is only as strong as the education that produces it. And when that education is uneven, incomplete, or careless, people begin to doubt experts not out of ignorance, but because the experts themselves reveal the cracks.

Perhaps the clearest example comes from my former neighbor in my hometown — herself a doctor of law — who didn’t trust me when I told her which people were, beyond any doubt, not reliable sources for Covid information. It wasn’t a matter of opinion; it was a matter of training. She could recognize a weak legal argument instantly, yet she couldn’t recognize a weak physiological one — and she didn’t trust me when I did. That moment crystallized something for me: Expertise is not universal, and competence does not migrate automatically from one domain to another. A person may be highly trained in one field and entirely untrained in another, yet still assume that intellectual skill is transferable by default. But expertise is not a general trait; it is a highly specific form of literacy, built on the slow accumulation of methods, concepts, and habits of mind that do not generalize simply because someone is intelligent or educated.

I understand where people’s doubts come from. After all, I’ve seen the cracks from the inside — in health care, in historical training, in the way institutions sometimes fail to teach what truly matters. My neighbor’s confidence outside her field wasn’t an anomaly; it was a symptom of a broader problem in how we think about expertise itself. And yet, despite these cracks, I still don’t know what the solution is. How do we create a balance in which people trust experts in their own domains, yet remain aware that expertise is not a universal passport? How do we cultivate respect without naïveté, skepticism without cynicism, and a public understanding that experts are, like all humans, only as strong as the systems that produced them?

At the moment, I don’t have an answer. I only know that expertise is both essential and imperfect, and that living with this tension — without collapsing into blind trust or blanket doubt — might be the most honest position we can take. After watching people assume their competence travels with them into fields where it absolutely does not, I’ve come to think that the real challenge is learning to inhabit this middle space. It is a space where we acknowledge the limits of experts without dismissing their value, where we respect the disciplines we rely on without pretending they are infallible, and where we accept that trust must be earned not by credentials alone, but by the rigor of the systems that shape them.

I Miss School

Let me start this post with a confession: I miss school. Not university — school. Those four years of grammar school in Subotica were a strange, glittering chapter of my life, one I didn’t always enjoy, but one in which I was, for the most part, simply able to be myself. It was the last time in my life when the world still seemed small enough to understand.

Subotica only has two grammar schools, although only one teaches in three languages — and that’s the one I attended. Back then, the choice was simple: a language‑based track or a science‑based track. I chose the first one, to the great annoyance of my parents, who were convinced that chemistry and physics were the only respectable companions for a teenager with ambition. I, however, preferred literature, languages, philosophy, and history. It was my first small act of academic rebellion, and perhaps the first sign that I would eventually end up in the humanities, no matter how many molecules my parents hoped I would memorize.

Our class was full of people with privileges: adolescents whose parents were doctors, judges, dentists, and university professors. They arrived at school already fluent in the quiet confidence that comes from growing up around dinner‑table debates. My parents, however, came from a very different world — one with much lower educational status, yet with a fierce determination to catch up by making sure I stepped in for all the limitations they carried. I wasn’t just their daughter; I was their proof that the family story could be rewritten.

The ambition of my parents was something hardly any family in town possessed. Most people were content with what they had, or at least resigned to it. My parents, however, were determined to outrun their past — and the proof stood right in the middle of Subotica’s city center. When I was nine, they designed and built the largest house in the neighborhood: a modern, shiny, angular structure that looked as if it had parachuted in from another country and landed, slightly confused, among the 19th‑century Austro‑Hungarian facades. From our living room, the City Hall rose directly before us — Subotica’s great Art Nouveau jewel, its copper spire and stained‑glass windows catching the light in a way that made the whole building seem to glow, even on the dullest days.

We lived on one of the old, calm streets of the town, the kind lined with enormous charm; yet our modern house, with its grandeur and unapologetic visibility, fractured that charm, standing there as an architectural declaration that my parents would not remain who they had been: farmers’ children from a nearby village. For them, privilege wasn’t inherited; it had to be constructed — brick by brick, ambition by ambition, and, quite often, through me. Their house was a monument to their determination, but also a reminder that I was expected to continue the project they had begun.

And so, at school, I knew I had no other choice but to shine. I became the best pupil in class, ranked every year among the top ten in history in the entire country, and threw myself into so many extracurricular adventures that the official curriculum felt like a polite suggestion rather than a rule. I wrote and edited the school newspaper, kept a blog, taught myself Spanish and German, and read the entire Dostoyevsky opus, one novel after another. Looking back, I sometimes wonder how I had the time and energy.

In hindsight, I see clearly what I didn’t do: I didn’t volunteer for charity work, join the Red Cross, or contemplate any grand notion of purpose. No — my aim back then was astonishingly simple: be the best version of myself and get away from my parents. That was the whole blueprint.

Purpose? Meaning? Contribution to society? Those were luxuries for people who weren’t sprinting toward the nearest exit. My version of teenage idealism was a very specific kind of freedom: the hope that excellence might one day buy me a different life.

Of course, I didn’t go out in the evenings, I didn’t drink, and I didn’t have anything that resembled an average teen life. While other teenagers were discovering nightlife, I was reading through the night — more, even, than my parents ever demanded. My adolescence was a long, self‑imposed competition in becoming a better version of the person I had already been the week before. Every day felt like an audition for a future I hadn’t yet defined. It wasn’t joyless at all — just unusually focused, as if I had mistaken high school for a four‑year personal development boot camp.

And this is where my school offered its greatest comfort. Because despite the fact that I was — most likely — an annoying, competitive nerd, many people in my class genuinely liked me. More than that: They treated my intensity not as something strange or isolating, but as something admirable. They made it clear that being motivated was not only acceptable — it was, in their eyes, a really cool thing to be. In that old‑fashioned, multilingual school in Subotica, surrounded by teenagers who could have easily been mean to me, I found people who didn’t just tolerate my ambition; they respected it. Sometimes, they even celebrated it. And that, more than any grade or competition, is what made those years shine.

When the environment responds to our effort in a positive way, we don’t just stay motivated — we expand. Something in us relaxes, opens, and dares to grow a little further. In that school, every time my classmates cheered me on, and every time a teacher trusted my abilities, it felt as if the world were quietly saying, go on, you can do even more. And so I did. Encouragement became its own kind of fuel, far more powerful than discipline or ambition alone.

One time, I remember, a history teacher asked me questions I didn’t know because I hadn’t prepared any of the material we were covering. It was about the battles of the Second World War, and it was mortifying. I wanted to know these things — truly — and I felt ashamed for not having studied. It was the first and only time I sat there with an empty mind, aware that my long‑term Miss Perfection reputation was about to collapse in real time. I could almost hear the crack. For a moment, I wasn’t the girl who ranked among the top ten in the country; I was just a teenager who hadn’t opened her book.

My body began to shake. I simply wasn’t ready to let the teacher down. Or to let myself down. The room felt suddenly too silent, too full of eyes. And then — almost imperceptibly — something shifted. One of my classmates noticed my distress. He didn’t study; he didn’t know the answers; he had absolutely no strategic reason to intervene. But he stepped in anyway, courageously, telling the teacher to ask him those same questions. He was volunteering for humiliation purely to protect me from falling. It was one of those small, unforgettable gestures that teenagers sometimes make — impulsive, loyal, and strangely noble — the kind that stays with you long after the grades have faded.

Not everything was ideal about this period, of course. Beautiful moments existed alongside a few annoying teachers and a handful of jealous classmates. At home, life was shaped by pressure — pressure to choose a field that wasn’t the humanities, because my parents believed it sounded more impressive to tell friends their daughter dealt with numbers and formulas rather than emotions, and because they quietly hoped the pharma business might one day elevate their wealth even further. There was also pressure to be thinner, so most evenings dissolved into quiet fights about calories and my weight. The closest I ever came to rebellion was buying chocolate with the money my grandfather slipped into my hand, a small and admittedly unhealthy attempt at being a real adolescent.

All of this made me dream, almost constantly, about the moment I would leave Subotica for good. That longing only deepened as a few friendships turned sour, and my first boyfriend revealed himself to be an early lesson in emotional red flags rather than anything resembling affection. Together, these experiences shaped a world where kindness and discomfort lived side by side, where contradictions and disappointments intertwined with the strange tenderness of being young.

Sometimes, when adulthood becomes too complicated — when responsibilities multiply, when ambition turns into exhaustion, when the world feels too large and too indifferent — I find myself longing for that small, bright universe again. Subotica’s classroom was a place where every challenge came with the quiet reassurance that someone was standing beside me. In hindsight, I miss the version of myself who grew alongside others, carried forward by daily jokes and the ease of collective support.

From Molecules to Memories: Why I Switched Fields

Work has been on my mind lately. When I worked in a pharmacy, the definition of work was simple, almost insultingly so: Work was the time between unlocking the door in the morning and locking it again in the evening. It was the hours for which I received a generous salary, the hours during which I stood behind a counter and handed out boxes of things that promised the illusion of control.

And yet, this neat division — work here, life there — bothered me more than I ever admitted at the time. I didn’t like how I felt at the end of the day: relieved, grateful that another shift had finally ended. I didn’t like that the last ten or fifteen minutes felt unbearable, as if time itself had developed a limp. Those final customers were always the most annoying ones, the ones who arrived with complicated questions, vague symptoms, or a mysterious inability to read opening hours. I wanted them to leave; I wanted to leave; I wanted the whole messy world of the pharmacy to evaporate so I could go home and not think about work for even one second.

Except, of course, the inner separation never actually happened. At home, I replayed scenes from the pharmacy like a director who couldn’t stop rewatching her own mediocre film. I questioned my decisions, doubted my instincts, wondered whether I had done the right thing or the wrong thing or the catastrophically wrong thing. Working in a pharmacy means always feeling guilty — guilty for what you did, guilty for what you didn’t do, guilty for what you might have done if you had been a better version of yourself. It is a profession built on the quiet suspicion that you could have done more for human health.

Take aspirin, for example: Any decent pharmacist should ask why someone wants it, what else they’re taking, whether they know the side effects. In theory, you should deliver a miniature TED Talk on responsible NSAID use. In reality, though, pharmacists do none of this. Not because they don’t care, but because it is emotionally exhausting and annoys people — especially in Vienna, where the average customer has the patience of a startled pigeon. No one has time for the aspirin interview: not the pharmacist, not the customer, not the universe. And since people are not used to being questioned when buying aspirin, they often get defensive. “Why are you asking me this?” their eyes say. “Do I look like someone who can’t handle an aspirin?”

On the other hand, not asking means you’re not doing your job. You’re not protecting people from medication overuse, not preventing interactions, not catching the subtle signs that something more serious might be going on. So you stand there, trapped between two equally unappealing options: annoy the customers or fail them. It’s a lose‑lose situation, the kind that makes you want to crawl under the counter and pretend to be a box of chamomile tea.

Looking back, I realize that what bothered me wasn’t the work itself but the way it divided my life into two incompatible halves: the part where I performed competence, and the part where I replayed my failures. And although working in the pharmacy did have one beautiful aspect — getting to know all the layers of society and forming unlikely connections with people I would never have met otherwise — the moment I stepped out of that career, I knew I wasn’t going back. The affection for certain moments and certain people was real, and I carry it with me, but affection alone cannot redeem a kind of work that made me feel like I was constantly falling short, constantly failing to improve people’s lives in the way they hoped or needed. Pharmacy gave me glimpses of humanity at its most vulnerable, but it also left me with the heavy, unshakeable sense that whatever I did was never quite enough — and no amount of fondness can outweigh a life lived under that kind of emotional gravity.

And I want to be as fair and responsible as I possibly can about this subject: Pharmacists make small contributions every day, helping people in countless ways — calming anxieties, offering advice, catching mistakes, guiding someone toward the right medication. I did all of these things regularly. But my problem was that I never felt I was doing all the things I could do to help. I always felt caught between what I should do and what people would tolerate, between the ideal of care and the reality of impatience, advertising, and the quiet pressure of small enterprises as well as big industries. That constant sense of falling short, of not doing enough, became its own quiet frustration — one that followed me home and refused to let me rest.

What feels right about my current path in history is not whether I feel like I am making a difference (I certainly do), but that this difference finally feels enough. That is why even the smallest contribution feels so meaningful: a clarified source, a conversation that encourages a student, a piece of research that adds a new layer of understanding. For the first time, my work expands the world without caveats — it builds something, opens something, illuminates something.

And yes, perhaps my papers will not be widely read, and perhaps the difference I make for society will always remain small. I truly don’t know what the future will bring for me as a historian. But what matters to me is the feeling that I am giving myself fully to what I believe is right — that I am not holding back out of fear, or shrinking out of obligation, or living in a way that makes me feel I am letting someone down. If the impact remains tiny, then let it be tiny; at least it is completely honest, and at least it is completely mine.

Perhaps this clarity about knowing what I want now also comes from understanding what I didn’t want before. I was never interested enough in biochemistry to go deep, to become the kind of researcher who spends years chasing molecular pathways with genuine passion. And for all the other career paths in pharmacy, I simply never felt I could give myself fully to the work. The meaning was partly there, but never sufficient — never strong enough to justify the emotional weight the job demanded. Once I realized that, the decision to leave felt less like a departure and more like a quiet return to myself.

History, with all its pros and cons, never feels like work to me — not only because it feels enough, but because I am endlessly, almost comically, interested in human behavior, both past and present. That’s why I can commit between Monday and Sunday, from dusk till dawn, without ever feeling the need to escape from it. It feels like play, like joy, like something I’d do anyway, even if no one paid me a cent. It feels like slipping into a space where curiosity is its own currency, where attention becomes a form of affection, where the hours pass without resistance and without the slightest sense of sacrifice. When I scan old photographs, it feels like touching the past with my fingertips, as if I were briefly borrowing someone else’s memory; when I teach, it feels like watching ideas wake up in real time, stretching their limbs, blinking into the light. So far (and I truly hope it won’t change), history has never asked me to split myself into versions or to carry guilt home at night. It simply invites me to show up — fully, curiously, foolishly — and rewards me with the quiet miracle of doing something that feels right in my bones. Money is just a bonus, although a necessary one. The real payment is the feeling that I am exactly where I should be, doing exactly what I was meant to do.

The Person I’ve Been Looking For

It has now been about six months since I began writing this blog, and I find myself wanting to pause for a moment and reflect on what this regular, public self‑check has meant — or how it has quietly reshaped me. A good friend, who also happens to be one of my most loyal readers, once asked how I wasn’t afraid to share my personal histories and vulnerabilities with the world. “People write private diaries for this purpose, you know,” he said, with the gentle concern of someone imagining me baring my soul to a crowd of strangers holding popcorn.

And no — fear has never been the issue. I don’t write anything here that I wouldn’t be able to say in any comfortable public space. But there is another reason, a primary reason, why this blog exists at all: This blog makes me accountable.

I have tried keeping diaries many times, but the problem is that I am not regular. I write one day, feel proud of myself, and then promptly forget the diary exists for the next ten. My diaries have always been like neglected houseplants: full of potential, but ultimately abandoned after the first enthusiastic watering. A blog, however, is a different creature. Here, I know there are individuals — not many, but they exist — who read my texts. I know I owe them new material. I know someone out there is waiting for the next post, even if they are reading it while half‑asleep on the tram.

And that changes everything. Suddenly, I have a structure. A rhythm. A deadline. A tiny audience that keeps me honest. This blog has become the literary equivalent of going to the gym only because someone is expecting me to show up. It holds me accountable in a way a private diary never could.

And blogging, I believe, is genuinely good for me. It keeps me in closer conversation with myself, and it makes me braver in ways I never expected when I first started. Something about showing up here twice a week — even on days when inspiration is hiding under the bed — has strengthened a part of me I didn’t know needed strengthening. It’s as if this blog has become a small but persistent personal trainer for my inner life: encouraging, demanding, occasionally annoying, but undeniably effective.

Writing regularly has also made me more honest. Something shifts in the mind when thoughts are placed in a public space. The mind begins to sort itself differently. Pretending becomes tedious. Self‑deception becomes clumsy. Skipping the parts that matter becomes almost impossible. A blog is a strange mirror: It reflects not only what is written, but the discipline required to keep showing up. It reveals the truth of my inner life, but also the truth of my habits — the fact that I am capable of consistency, that I can return to myself week after week, that I can build a small ritual out of words. In that sense, the blog is a quiet accountability partner, one that simply waits, patiently, for the next sentence to arrive.

I love rereading all my texts. I love going back and seeing who I was three months ago, as if I were visiting an earlier version of myself who left little notes on the door. So far, not once have I felt embarrassed by anything I wrote or thought, nor have I stumbled upon a sentence that makes me wince and whisper, “Milice, what were you thinking?!” Everything still feels true, still feels aligned with the person I am now. Who knows, though, what the future will bring? Perhaps one day I will read these entries with the affectionate amusement reserved for old photographs (where the hairstyle is questionable).

I’ve also noticed that titles with a more personal note tend to attract the most clicks, even when the texts themselves aren’t necessarily the most intimate. Apparently, the readers come for the personal — or at least for the promise of it — which reassures me that honesty is not a mistake here. If anything, it seems to be the quiet engine of this whole project, the thing that keeps people returning, curious to see which corner of my inner world I’ve decided to illuminate next.

Overall, I believe that starting this blog was one of my better ideas. I love taking the time to write, and I genuinely enjoy noticing how I’m getting better at it — slowly and steadily. There is something deeply satisfying about watching my own voice take shape, week after week, as if the act of writing were sharpening a tool I didn’t know I possessed. This blog has become a small creative ritual, a place where I meet myself regularly, with curiosity, discipline, and the occasional joke.

And dear reader, if the journey has brought someone all the way to this paragraph, I want to say something simple: I intend to keep going. This little ritual of mine has become too meaningful to abandon. I will continue posting, as always, every Wednesday and Saturday, without exception, without delay, and without the dramatic flakiness that my diaries once knew so well. There is something comforting about this rhythm — a small lighthouse in the week, shining on two predictable days. And as long as there is someone out there reading, even quietly, even occasionally, I will keep showing up here, with new thoughts, new stories, and the same steady commitment to putting the words together.

I’ve always loved words more than anything else. They have been my most loyal companions — patient, forgiving, endlessly rearrangeable. They never mind when I return to them late, or when I arrive with a sentence that limps a little, or when I need three attempts to say something simple. They simply wait, like small lanterns, ready to illuminate whatever corner of my inner world I’m brave enough to explore.

Perhaps that’s the real reason I keep showing up here. Not just for the readers, not just for the rhythm, not just for the accountability — but for the small, luminous moment when I meet myself on the page and think, Ah. There she is. The person I’ve been looking for.

Teaching as a Way of Being

When I was a child, teaching wasn’t a dream or an ambition — it was my favorite game. I played it every single day, sometimes twice, sometimes three times, depending on how much imaginary homework my imaginary students had failed to do. I would stand in front of my invisible classroom, feet planted, shoulders squared, as if twenty or thirty silent, expectant faces were turned toward me, waiting for the lesson to begin.

The “board” was a Snow White picture hanging on my wall — Snow White herself smiling benevolently in the woods, perhaps wondering why she had been recruited into compulsory education. I covered her face with blank A4 sheets, arranging them with ceremonial precision, as though the paper itself carried authority. The subjects never mattered. Serbian, Maths, Music — I loved them all with the same uncomplicated loyalty. I wasn’t pretending to be a teacher of any particular discipline; I was pretending to be a teacher, full stop. That was the whole point.

Sometimes I paused mid‑sentence, pretending to wait for a question from the back row. Sometimes I nodded gravely at an imaginary student who had finally understood the difference between a high note and a low one. Sometimes I scolded the invisible troublemaker in the third row, who, in retrospect, was probably my own attempt at narrative tension. The room was quiet, but in my mind it hummed with life. I didn’t know it then, but I was rehearsing for a future that would feel uncannily similar.

And maybe that’s why, more than twenty years later, when I walked into my first real classroom, the moment felt strangely familiar — almost like stepping back into that childhood room. The faces were real now, the questions were real, the stakes were real, but the feeling was the same. Something in me recognized the space. I knew, with a quiet certainty, that there was no chance I would mess things up. How could I? I had been practicing since before I could count to a hundred (which didn’t stop me from confidently teaching Maths to a group of imaginary students).

For me, teaching is not about performance or competence. It is about students — and about how deeply I want them to feel what I have felt since I was a small, enthusiastic girl: that choosing education over not choosing education is one of the most wonderful things a person can do. That learning is freedom. That curiosity is joy. That a classroom, when it’s alive, is one of the most beautiful places a human being can occupy. I want students to feel the electricity of ideas, the way a thought can leap from one mind to another like a spark crossing a gap.

The first year went well. The students gave me warm, generous feedback at the end, the kind that should have made me feel proud. And I did feel proud. Just not in the way I expected. Because even though the classes were successful, I hadn’t yet achieved the one thing I truly wanted: that moment at the end of the hour when I say the class is over… and nobody moves.

I wanted my students to stay. Not out of obligation, not out of politeness — but out of genuine curiosity. I wanted to see them gather in small clusters, still talking, still thinking, still turning the ideas over like stones in their hands. I wanted the room to remain alive even after I stepped out of it. I wanted to witness that rare alchemy in which learning becomes self‑sustaining, where the teacher is no longer needed.

That didn’t happen in the first year. They listened, they learned, they thanked me — and then they left. And every time the door closed behind them, I felt a small ache, the kind that comes from knowing you’ve reached the surface of something but not yet its depth. It was like cooking a beautiful meal and watching everyone eat politely, compliment the seasoning, and then leave before dessert. I wanted dessert. I wanted the lingering. I wanted the aftertaste.

So I did the only thing that made sense: I took every pedagogical class I could find. Not because I doubted my ability to teach, but because I wanted to learn how to create an atmosphere in which students don’t want the class to end. I wanted to understand how to build a space where curiosity becomes self‑sustaining, where the hour is not a container but a spark. I wanted to learn how to make the room feel like a place where ideas behave like unruly citizens — loud, opinionated, impossible to dismiss.

This extra investment really helped me. In my second year, things were different — not dramatically, not every week, but enough for me to feel the shift. And then, on a few occasions, the thing I had been longing for finally happened: The moment I said the class was over… nobody moved.

The students stayed. Not because they were shy, not because they were waiting for instructions — but because they were still discussing the topic with each other. Still thinking. Still turning the ideas over. Still alive in the space we had created together. It was the kind of moment teachers dream of, the kind that makes all the administrative emails and broken microphones worth it.

The first time I witnessed that my methods were working, it felt almost magical. I stood there, watching them, and realized they didn’t need me anymore. They were there for each other — listening, questioning, expanding each other’s thoughts with a seriousness that didn’t feel heavy but bright. I told them three times that they could leave, but nobody cared. Even though it was Friday, even though it was time for lunch, about thirty-five curious minds were still gathered around the source I had given them, still arguing gently, still discovering.

And the best part — the part that made my chest feel too full, as if someone had quietly slipped an entire second heartbeat inside it — was that they were behaving like one entity. The kind that argues passionately, interrupts each other mid‑sentence, leans forward with shining eyes, and forgets entirely that the person speaking is someone they met five weeks ago. They weren’t performing curiosity for me, offering the kind of dutiful nods students sometimes give when they suspect the teacher is expecting them to do. No, they were living the spark for themselves, with the unselfconscious intensity of people who have forgotten they are in a lecture hall at all.

It felt like watching a flock of birds take flight — that sudden, collective lift, that effortless coordination, that sense of something larger than the sum of its parts. Except these weren’t birds; they were students discussing the topic with a depth and sincerity that made the room feel sacred.

In that moment, I finally admitted to myself the truth I had been carrying around for decades, like a small, folded note in my pocket: Teaching isn’t something I do. It’s something I am. A way of being in the world. A way of listening so closely that I hear the shape of someone’s thought before they finish speaking. A way of loving that has nothing to do with sentimentality and everything to do with attention. A way of staying awake to the fragile, luminous miracle of people trying to understand something together.

And standing there, watching thirty-five students behave like one, I realized that the imaginary classroom of my childhood had never been imaginary at all. It had been a rehearsal for this — for the moment when the world finally caught up with the game I had been playing all along.

The Moment I Stopped Fearing Public Speaking

Last Thursday, at the student conference of the Centre for Teaching and Learning in Vienna, something quietly extraordinary happened to me. Andreas and I presented our project on the scientific writing of first‑semester history students — a modest little study with fourteen texts, ten linguistic markers, and two beginners who still laugh at how long it took us to define things that now seem self‑evident. But beneath the academic routine of slides, timing, and methodological explanations, something shifted. I gave the first public speech of my life in which I was not even remotely nervous. Not the tiniest tremor in my voice, not the familiar flutter in my chest, not the involuntary choreography my body usually performs when German and public speaking collide. I spoke slowly, calmly, as if I had been presenting at conferences since childhood, perhaps even since infancy, like a prodigy of PowerPoint.

On the way home, I kept asking myself where this unexpected serenity had come from. I know myself — or at least I thought I did. I am someone whose voice sometimes shakes, whose hands sometimes betray her, someone who has spent years negotiating with German in public spaces. And yet, there I was, explaining our methodology with the composure of someone who had just returned from a meditation retreat in the Alps.

The answer, I realized, is simple: I trust this project. I trust it completely. I know it works. Yes, the criticism about not describing the sample was absolutely correct — and I accepted it with the grace of someone who knows that constructive critique is a sign of seriousness, not failure. But I also know that our project has everything it needs to grow into a publishable study: a unique sample, an interesting corpus, relevance across several domains, and a methodology that is simple, transparent, and surprisingly elegant. Our analysis is clear, our preliminary results resonated with everyone in the room, and — perhaps most importantly — Andreas and I worked together like actual researchers, not like two students improvising their way through a deadline.

We met regularly, discussed every step, questioned each other’s ideas without ego, and trusted each other enough to say, “I don’t think this works,” or “Let’s try your version instead.” We had the kind of collaboration people write about in acknowledgments: respectful, curious, patient, and occasionally very funny. At one point, we even developed a completely unplanned side‑project — a comparative ethnography of Starbucks branches across Vienna — because apparently nothing sharpens methodological clarity like switching cafés.

And through all of this, we had a supervisor whose intellectual generosity made us want to do our best simply because someone believed we could. A supervisor who came to support us, who listened, who added thoughtful feedback, and who then joined us for lemonade after the conference — the kind of small, human gesture that quietly says: I’m here with you, not just above you.

My favorite part of all this is that we never tried to impress anyone. We didn’t arrive with grand theories or heroic hypotheses. We arrived with fourteen texts written by beginning history students who kindly allowed us to analyze them. We chose a linguistic approach, defined ten markers, grouped them into parent categories, and developed writing patterns that are precise enough to compare texts without drowning in complexity. Nothing about this process is flashy — and yet it took us months to think it through. Months of refining definitions, adjusting categories, and discovering that simplicity is sometimes the hardest thing to achieve.

And of course, like any study, ours will have its blind points, its unfinished corners, its inevitable limitations — the quiet places where we still don’t know enough, still haven’t looked closely enough, still need to return with sharper tools and clearer eyes. Fourteen texts are a beginning, not a panorama; ten markers are a scaffold, not a full architecture. There is so much we have yet to understand, so many patterns that will only emerge once we expand our ideas and test our assumptions against new material. We are far from the full picture, and we know it. But strangely — beautifully — that doesn’t unsettle me. It feels right. It feels like the honest stage of a project that is growing exactly as it should. And even with all the work ahead, I believe in it one hundred percent, with the kind of conviction that makes limitations feel less like obstacles and more like invitations.

That, I think, is where my calmness came from. I knew exactly what I was saying and why. I wasn’t presenting borrowed theories or inherited data. I was presenting our work — something we built from scratch, piece by piece, with care, curiosity, and a surprising amount of joy. I felt proud of us, proud of our supervisor, proud of the friends who sat in the audience and smiled at us like we were giving a TED Talk, and proud of the future that suddenly felt very close.

This project taught me more than I expected. I learned what it means to do research as a team — truly, fifty‑fifty. I learned how beautiful it is to think together, to share the struggle, to let go of responsibility because someone else is holding it with equal strength. And above all, I learned what humans can achieve when their minds and hearts work for each other. It turns out that collaboration, when done well, is not only productive — it is transformative.

Where My Story Refused to Shrink

There is someone I once called a friend, though the word has thinned over time, stretched too far across moments it can no longer hold. For years, I watched a pattern in her behavior, subtle enough at first that I could pretend it wasn’t there, then gradually so consistent it became impossible to ignore. She had a way of enlarging herself by shrinking the people around her, as if her sense of worth required a constant comparison. It was never loud or dramatic, but it was steady, and steady harm is often the most corrosive kind.

Despite the unease that followed me through our conversations, I kept choosing to believe in her. I believed she was more than the sharpness of her comments, more than the reflex to correct or diminish, more than the quiet hunger to be the one who knows better. I believed she carried the potential to grow into someone gentler, someone who didn’t need to stand on the edges of other people’s vulnerabilities to feel tall. That belief was sincere, even if it was slowly wearing me down in ways I didn’t fully acknowledge at the time.

I had trusted her with the full landscape of my childhood, the shadows and the light. I told her about the strictness at home, the rules that sometimes felt too heavy for a child to carry, but also about the small pockets of joy I learned to carve out for myself. I told her about the children who loved me with a generosity I didn’t always receive at home, how their warmth became a kind of refuge. I told her about my grandfather — the quiet shelter he offered, the way his presence proved that tenderness can exist even in complicated families.

I shared these things not as a confession but as an offering of trust, a way of saying: Here is the truth of where I come from, in all its contradictions. I told her that my childhood held beauty and difficulty in equal measure, that it was textured and real, not a single story but many overlapping ones. She had all of this, the mosaic in its fullness, the nuance laid out plainly.

And yet, she chose to flatten it into a single word.

The moment she said, almost casually, “I am sorry your childhood was sad,” something in me shifted. It wasn’t the familiar sting of her claiming she understood a topic better than I did, or the dismissive remarks about how my work would bore her. Those were irritating, but survivable; she didn’t owe me admiration or shared interests. This was different because it reached into a part of me she had no right to reduce.

Her words felt less like empathy and more like appropriation, as if she were placing a label on my life to reinforce her own sense of insight. It was a quiet rewriting of my story, a way of positioning herself as the one who sees more deeply, even when the depth she claimed was built on erasure. In that moment, I realized that this wasn’t just insensitivity but a way of claiming authority over my experiences.

The harm wasn’t in the word “sad” itself, but in the way she used it — as a verdict, not an observation; as a summary, not an attempt to understand. It was the ease with which she reduced something complex and lived to something convenient for her narrative. It was the way she spoke as though she knew my story better than I did, as though my own account of my life required her interpretation to become legitimate. It was the way she took the fullness of what I had shared and compressed it into something small enough to fit her worldview.

The grief came quietly, not as anger but as recognition. Recognition that I had been bending myself around her sharp edges for too long. Recognition that hope for her growth had become a form of self-betrayal. Recognition that staying close to her required me to accept a version of myself that was smaller, flatter, and less true than the one I actually lived.

There is a particular kind of sorrow that comes from realizing someone you cared about cannot meet you where you are. It is not the sorrow of loss alone, but the sorrow of clarity — the moment when you understand that the relationship was built on an imbalance you kept trying to ignore. It is the sorrow of seeing how much of yourself you offered in good faith, only to watch it be mishandled. It is the sorrow of knowing that the person you hoped she could become is not the person she is willing to be right now.

Stepping away was not an act of cruelty but an act of self-respect. It was the moment I understood that compassion does not require proximity, and belief in someone’s potential does not obligate me to endure their harm. It was the moment I chose to protect the integrity of my own story rather than let it be reduced for someone else’s comfort. It was a quiet triumph, the kind that doesn’t announce itself but settles into the bones.

There is strength in refusing to let someone else define your life for you. There is strength in recognizing when a relationship asks you to shrink in order to survive. There is strength in choosing distance not out of bitterness, but out of a commitment to your own complexity. And there is strength in acknowledging that your story — with all its contradictions — deserves to remain yours.

This essay is my way of naming that moment, of tracing the line between empathy and self-erasure. It is my way of acknowledging that my childhood, my life, and my voice deserve more than a single word. And it is my way of reclaiming the narrative she tried to flatten, returning it to the complexity it always deserved.

A Short Reflection on Writing Mentoring

This semester, as I complete the final module of Writing Mentoring, I find myself wanting to pause and take stock of what these past months have meant to me. For years, I hesitated to apply — despite several professors gently (and sometimes not so gently) insisting that I should. I always had a ready excuse: no time, too much studying, too big of an extracurricular commitment. In truth, I was afraid it would pull me away from my academic work.

In hindsight, I can say that none of these fears were justified. Writing Mentoring did not distract me; it sharpened me. It made my writing clearer, my teaching more confident, and my academic thinking more generous. It pushed me to articulate ideas I had previously only sensed, to explain concepts I had never tried to verbalize, and to trust that I could guide others through the very process that once intimidated me. And beyond the intellectual growth, it gave me something I did not expect: a small community of people I genuinely like, deeply respect, and with whom I suspect I may build friendships that last far beyond the university walls. (If not, I will at least have a group of people who can proofread my texts for the next decade, which is almost the same thing.)

But there is something even more important. For the first time since moving to Austria — and I say this with a mixture of gratitude and a little sadness — I became part of an institutional structure that was not only inclusive in theory, but inclusive in practice. Before Writing Mentoring, I honestly did not know what full inclusion looked like. I had seen gestures toward it, of course, and I do believe that university programs in Vienna strive sincerely for it. Yet, every now and then, I still encounter small moments of doubt directed at me — subtle hesitations, tiny pauses, things I notice only because I’ve experienced them too often. They are small, almost invisible, but they accumulate; they teach you to brace yourself, to prepare explanations in advance, to anticipate the moment when someone might question your competence.

Writing Mentoring, however, was different from the very first day. It believed — truly, wholeheartedly — in every single person who walked through its doors. It believed in their potential, their voice, their capacity to grow. And for the first time, I felt that where I come from did not matter in the slightest. No one questioned my ability to teach academic writing in languages that are not native to me. No one treated my background as a limitation. Instead, it was simply part of who I am — a detail, not a deficit. I did not have to prove myself twice or translate myself into something more palatable. I could simply be present, competent, and trusted.

That is the greatest gift Writing Mentoring has given me: the experience of belonging without having to negotiate for it. The quiet, steady certainty that I am trusted. The realization that inclusion is not a slogan but a practice — one that requires patience, humility, and a genuine belief in every student. It taught me that institutions can feel human, that structures can be warm, and that academic spaces can be places where people are not only evaluated but also encouraged, supported, and seen.

And so, as I finish this last module, I feel grateful. Grateful for the skills I gained, the friendships I formed, the confidence I discovered, and the small but transformative proof that institutions can, in fact, be places where everyone is welcomed — regardless of background, biography, or the imperfections we bring with us. Grateful, too, for the unexpected sense of home I found in a program I once feared would overwhelm me. It turns out that sometimes the things we avoid the longest are the very things that change us the most.

Home as a Choice, Not a Birthright

There is a strange certainty people carry about belonging, as if it were something fixed, inherited, sealed into the passport we receive at birth. But belonging is not a birthright; it is a sensation, a settling, the quiet way a life begins to fit around us. I grew up in Serbia, yet it is Austria that became my home — not by coincidence, but by alignment. Serbia remains a place I love, but it is no longer the place where I belong.

This has nothing to do with ranking countries or weighing their worth. I don’t believe in that kind of hierarchy. Austria gives me financial stability, and I cherish its media landscape because it still reflects the fact that I live in a functioning democracy. Serbia, on the other hand, offers something I value just as deeply: people whose hearts open quickly, whose instinct is to welcome rather than to assess. It is a place where strangers become familiar with astonishing speed, a place untouched by the poison of anti‑migration narratives. Both countries give me something real. Both matter. But only one of them feels like home — simply because my family, the family I chose and built, lives in Austria. That is where my life has taken root.

And here is the paradox I keep circling as both a student and a person: I know, intellectually, that nations are “imagined communities” — constructs held together by stories, symbols, and shared fictions. I can trace the genealogy of nationalism, cite the literature, explain how identities are produced and reproduced through institutions, rituals, and narratives. I can dismantle the idea of the nation with academic precision. And yet, even with all that knowledge, I cannot pretend that nations do not matter. They do. They shape the conditions of our lives, the possibilities available to us, the emotional landscapes we inhabit. They are imagined, yes — but imagined with consequences.

It is easy, in theory, to say that we could organize the world differently. That borders are arbitrary, that citizenship is exclusionary, that the nation‑state is an imperfect container for human belonging. All of that is true. But I have no better proposal for how to structure the world at this moment. None of us do, not really. We critique the system while living inside it, aware of its constructedness yet unable to step outside its gravitational pull. We can pretend we are rational about all of this — that our scholarly distance protects us from sentiment — but how rational are we, truly? Even the most rigorous academic is not immune to the quiet tug of place, memory, safety, and attachment. Even scholars carry a pulse beneath their theories.

It is a peculiar kind of patriotism, this affection for a country I wasn’t raised in — a loyalty that grew quietly, almost shyly, over time. I arrived in Austria at eighteen, at the fragile beginning of adulthood, when everything in me was still unformed and searching for a place to land. And Austria became that place through the slow accumulation of safety, structure, and possibility. It is the country where I learned how to be an adult, how to build a life, how to trust institutions, how to imagine a future without bracing for impact.

My attachment to Austria is not nostalgic; nostalgia belongs to Serbia. It is not inherited; my roots are elsewhere. It is something more deliberate: a loyalty shaped by the life I built here, by the people who became my family, by the stability that allowed me to grow into myself. It is a patriotism born not from childhood memories, but from the quiet recognition of where I feel safe and seen.

I did not inherit this home. I grew into it. And in that growth — slow, deliberate, and deeply human — I found a kind of patriotism that has nothing to do with flags or anthems. It is the patriotism of gratitude, of choosing a place because it chose me back, of recognizing the soil in which my life finally learned how to bloom.

It is the contradiction I have learned to live with: Even as I understand nations as imagined communities, I still feel the gravitational pull of the one that formed me, just as I do for the one that allowed me to become myself. I can question the rationality of national attachment, dissect its constructedness, and trace its genealogy with scholarly detachment, yet I continue to inhabit its emotional architecture. The mind may know that nations are inventions while it also remembers where protection was felt, as if safety itself were a form of unconscious citizenship that no critique can dissolve.

As a scholar in becoming, I am not exempt from the very forces I analyze; perhaps none of us are. Perhaps the task is not to transcend these contradictions, but to acknowledge them — to accept that imagined things can still be real, and that countries and nations matter, no matter how critically we think about them.

Freedom, With Small Mistakes

When I stepped into the study of history, I did so with a single, steady purpose: to take pleasure in my work. To savor each moment spent with what I had longed for but never believed would be mine. I entered the field like someone stepping into a long‑awaited room — quietly, reverently, half afraid that someone would tap me on the shoulder and say, “Sorry, wrong door.”

And when impatience rises, as it sometimes does, I return to the principle that brought me here: I am here for the process. For the slow, deliberate joy of learning. For the satisfaction of doing what I love, even when what I love is occasionally exhausting, confusing, or written in handwriting that looks like a spider attempted calligraphy during an emotional crisis.

The privilege of having spent ten years in a field that never felt like mine — pharmacy — is that it taught me to value what I have now. Not because the money is better. It isn’t. But that is precisely the point. I am not here for numbers. I am here for the audacity of choosing purpose over certainty, curiosity over salary, and the quiet miracle of doing what once felt impossible. I am here because I wanted a life that felt like my own, not a life that merely paid well.

And yet, last year, something shifted. It was subtle at first — like a draft in a room you thought was sealed. I began demanding too much of myself, treating even the smallest missteps with disproportionate severity. My inner voice grew sharp, almost punitive: “You’ve given up so much to be here — how can you allow yourself anything less than perfection?” It was a standard no one could meet, least of all the person who needed kindness the most.

I became the supervisor I never had — the one who stands behind your chair, breathing heavily, asking why you didn’t foresee the unforeseeable.

Over time, I realized I had been moving in a circle of my own making. Whenever feedback wasn’t what I hoped for, or when I didn’t get the jobs I wanted, even small disappointments felt sharper than they should have.

I kept insisting that it wasn’t about ego. I’ve never thought of myself as someone with a fragile ego. I don’t crumble when someone disagrees with me. I don’t need applause to function. I know I don’t have to prove my intelligence or worth to anyone.

And yet, something in me reacted as if failure carried a deeper threat.

So I asked myself, as honestly as I could: What is it that makes me so afraid of failure? Was I wrong about myself? Or was something older, quieter, and more persistent shaping my reactions?

That’s when I returned to therapy. I went back to a psychologist I had seen once before, someone who had helped me untangle similar knots. I hoped she might help me understand what was happening beneath the surface. Why did a single critical comment feel like a small earthquake? Why did a rejection letter feel like a prophecy?

After more than a year of working with her, I think I’ve finally uncovered part of the truth. I came to understand that my fear of failure was never really about competence; it was about survival. Deep down, I believed that every mistake could endanger my chance of becoming a free person. And freedom — the freedom to exist as myself without calculation or caution — was the thing I craved most fiercely as a child. It was a longing shaped by emotional instability, the kind of urgency children in safer homes never have to carry. From very early on, I knew that mistakes had consequences that reached far beyond the moment itself; even small missteps could result in my mother withdrawing from me entirely, sometimes refusing to speak to me for days. That silence taught me that errors were dangerous, that love could be suspended without warning, and that safety depended on vigilance.

Seeing this clearly didn’t make the fear vanish, but it changed its shape. It helped me separate the present from the past. It reminded me that mistakes no longer threaten my independence, and that the life I have built is sturdier than the child in me once believed.

Slowly, this understanding began to shift the way I relate to myself. I noticed how often I treated work as a test rather than a space I was allowed to inhabit. I saw how much of my ambition had been shaped by fear rather than desire — fear of repeating the life I grew up in, fear of depending on anyone, fear of being trapped again in dynamics I once fought so hard to escape.

And with that realization came a gentleness I had never granted myself before. I could finally tell myself that I am no longer the child who had to earn her freedom through perfection. I already have a life that is mine, a life that does not collapse when I make a mistake.

I don’t know how close I am to liberating myself from every childhood fear. Maybe I will always be the person who shakes while delivering a speech and cries over small mistakes. But even if that’s true, I’m grateful that I know how to feel these things differently now. The tears no longer come from panic or the sense that everything is at stake. They come from a softer place — from caring, from being human, from wanting to do well without believing that my entire future depends on it.

I’ve begun giving myself room to breathe. Room to forgive myself for not knowing something immediately, for being in the middle of learning. I’ve begun offering myself the grace I so easily offer others. I’ve allowed myself to return to the work — the way I did when I first began, when curiosity mattered more than performance, and when the joy of learning was enough.

I am returning to the version of myself who entered this field with wonder rather than dread, with excitement rather than pressure, with the quiet conviction that the process itself is the reward.

And perhaps that is the real liberation: not the absence of fear, but the ability to keep moving, keep learning, keep loving the work — even when the child in me still trembles from time to time.

The Snore That Held a Country Together

There was a story my grandfather used to recount hundreds of times. So many times, in fact, that I knew the rhythm of it by heart — the pauses, the emphasis, the way his eyes lit up at the same moment every single retelling. It was one of those stories that belonged as much to the performance as to the memory itself. He never changed a detail, never altered the sequence, never modernized the punchline. It was as if the story had fossilized inside him, polished smooth by repetition, and he carried it like a small stone in his pocket — something to take out and turn over whenever the mood struck.

The story itself was simple, almost absurd in its simplicity. During his army service in Slovenia, he shared a room with men from all over Yugoslavia — different regions, different languages, different religions, all thrown together in the same cramped barracks. It felt like an accidental anthropology experiment: Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, Bosniaks, Montenegrins, Slovenes, Macedonians, Albanians, Hungarians, Roma — and many others — all balancing overlapping identities, my grandfather among them, himself something in‑between. All of them young, exhausted, and trying to figure out how to live alongside one another without losing their minds.

My grandfather always described the barracks as a place where privacy went to die. You slept shoulder to shoulder with strangers, you heard every cough, every sigh, every whispered prayer. You learned who talked in their sleep, who cried at night, who wrote letters home every day, who hid cigarettes in their boots. You learned people’s habits before you learned their names. And in that strange, compressed world, even the smallest irritation could feel monumental.

One of these men snored every single night with such force that nobody in the room could sleep. It wasn’t ordinary snoring; it was the kind that rattled the metal bed frames and made the windows vibrate. According to my grandfather, it sounded like a tractor engine trying to start in the middle of winter. The men tried everything — shaking him, nudging him, shouting his name, even clapping loudly near his ear — but nothing worked. The snoring continued, relentless and unapologetic. Exhaustion was turning them all into slightly unhinged versions of themselves.

So, in their sleep‑deprived desperation, they came up with a plan that was equal parts ridiculous and naïve. They decided that the only thing powerful enough to interrupt the snoring was the shock of something forbidden. One night, after whispering and giggling like schoolboys, they gathered the courage to put a tiny piece of pork in the man’s mouth — not out of malice, but out of the kind of delirious logic only young, tired men can produce. They would never have forced him to eat something that is forbidden in his religion if they had seen another solution; it was simply the only idea their exhausted minds could conjure at the time, a desperate attempt to reclaim a few hours of sleep.

And I should say this clearly: I don’t eat pork either. I don’t eat any meat at all, and the thought of someone putting it in my mouth without my permission makes my whole body tense. But I also understand the desperation of a room full of sleepless people, the way exhaustion can make even the gentlest souls behave strangely. It doesn’t make the act noble — just human, flawed, and shaped by circumstance.

According to my grandfather, the snoring stopped. Instantly. Miraculously. As if the man’s subconscious had a built‑in alarm system for religious boundaries. Everyone slept. The next morning, the man woke up refreshed, blissfully unaware that he had been the subject of a midnight intervention. The others, bleary‑eyed but triumphant, exchanged glances that said: We survived the night. We did what we had to do.

My grandfather always told this story with a mixture of mischief and tenderness — not to mock the man’s faith, but to marvel at the strange, chaotic intimacy of living with people who are different from you. For him, the story wasn’t about pork or snoring at all. It was about coexistence: the way people from different backgrounds learned to navigate each other’s habits, irritations, and sacred lines. It was about how, in the strange laboratory of the Yugoslav army, young men learned tolerance not through theory, but through proximity — through the messy, human, sometimes ridiculous reality of sharing a life with strangers.

He always emphasized that the man who snored was deeply respected. The snoring was just one of those things — an involuntary quirk that became a communal challenge. And the “solution,” absurd as it was, became a story not of humiliation but of survival, of improvisation, of the strange ways people adapt to one another when they have no choice but to coexist.

Every time my grandfather told it, he ended with the same soft laugh, the kind that said: People are complicated, but we somehow made it work. It was a laugh that held nostalgia, affection, and a quiet pride in having lived through a time when differences were not erased but negotiated — sometimes clumsily, sometimes hilariously, but always with the underlying belief that living together was possible.

And maybe that’s why he told the story so often. Not because of the snoring, not because of the pork, but because it captured something essential about the world he appreciated most — a world where coexistence wasn’t an abstract ideal but a daily practice, shaped by patience, improvisation, and the willingness to see the humanity in the person snoring next to you.

The Soft Violence of Rewritten Histories

I recently watched and read The Housemaid. I know I’m about to spoil parts of the story, so if you’d prefer to meet it untouched, this is the moment to gently look away.

There is a character in this story who lingers with me — someone who moves through the world with a polished, almost luminous charm. To most people, he appears gracious, attentive, endlessly considerate. But beneath that surface lies a quieter, hidden cruelty, a part of himself he reveals only when he believes no one is watching. The contrast is unsettling: the public self that glows, and the private self that wounds. It made me think about how many people walk through life wearing masks that fit so seamlessly they begin to resemble skin.

Watching him made me think of my mother. Their stories are not the same, and I do not want to collapse them into one another. But there is a familiar rhythm in the way charm can coexist with harm, in the way someone can be adored by the world and still be difficult — even devastating — to the people closest to them. My mother has always been someone who gathers admirers with ease. People see her warmth, her generosity, her quick laughter. They see the version of her that she offers to the world, and they love her for it. And I understand why. That version is real — just not the whole story.

When I was a child, she never wanted to play with me. She would tell me that parents don’t play with children, and that I was selfish for asking. I remember feeling confused, because my father played with me constantly — building little worlds out of nothing, inventing stories, laughing in a way that made the room feel lighter. But our play always ended the moment she appeared. It was as if joy itself had to retreat when she entered the room. I learned early that some people struggle with happiness they did not create. I learned that a child’s brightness can sometimes illuminate shadows adults would rather not see.

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Now, many years later, I am not speaking with my parents. The reasons are layered, complex, and far too long for a single text. But I believe in telling these stories — not to dwell on pain, but to remind others that choosing what protects you is not betrayal. That stepping away from harm is a form of courage. That you are allowed to build a life where your memories are not constantly questioned.

What I want to reflect on here is something small, almost delicate: My mother plays with children now. She plays with every child of my cousins. She kneels down to their level, laughs with them, invents games, offers the kind of warmth she once withheld from me. And every time I see it, something inside me tightens — not out of jealousy, but out of a strange, bewildered tenderness. It is a peculiar thing to watch someone become gentle in a way they never were with you. To see them offer freely what you once begged for. It feels like watching a door swing open for others that was always locked for you, no matter how softly you knocked.

And yet, alongside that tenderness, there is unease. Not because she is kind — kindness is a good thing — but because this new gentleness exists without any acknowledgment of the past. I do not assume her intentions. I do not claim to know what she feels. But I know how it lands in me: as a quiet rewriting, a soft rearranging of the story. A version of events that makes my absence look inexplicable. After all, how could there be a reason for a daughter not to speak to her mother when this mother is so wonderful with children?

What unsettles me is not her behavior itself, but the way it can be interpreted by others as proof that my memories must be mistaken. It becomes a subtle contradiction of my lived experience — not through confrontation, but through performance. And that is a difficult thing to witness. Not because I begrudge her gentleness, but because I know what it feels like when your truth is overshadowed by someone else’s charm.

Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like if my mother’s newfound softness were directed toward me. If she reached out with honesty. If she said, even once, I hurt you, and I see that now. But I also know that even if she did, it would not undo the past. Childhood is not a place we can revisit with new rules. The wounds formed there have their own timelines.

Healing, for me, has come not from her magic transformation, but from my choice to step away. From building a life where I no longer have to doubt my own perception to maintain someone else’s comfort. So, when I see her laughing with children now, I let the moment be what it is — a small sweetness, perhaps, but one that does not require anything from me. I can wish her well without rewriting my past. I can hope she is gentler now without pretending she always was.

I used to think that justice required consequences. And although consequences are ideal — and although we should not stop asking for them if that is an option — the truth is that they rarely arrive in the ways we hope. The world is not arranged to reward integrity or to punish cruelty. What we can do, therefore, is work toward a fairer world while remaining honest about the limits of our influence. Justice, in that sense, becomes less a matter of external outcomes and more a practice of inner clarity: the commitment to act with integrity even when the world does not respond in kind.

Also, I’ve come to understand that the most powerful tool against harm is not retaliation but transformation: the deliberate, tender act of teaching ourselves to shine in all the corners where we were once taught to shrink. I can imagine that many people would shake their heads at this, insisting that “justice” is the wrong word for such an inward shift. And yet I think it is the right word — precisely because it offers a form of consolation that the external world so often withholds. In many situations, it is the only kind of justice available to us, and the only one capable of restoring our sense of coherence and dignity.

With distance, I can see my mother clearly — not as a villain in a simple story, but as a profoundly complex human being who struggles in her everyday life. I know she carries her own wounds, her own fears, her own tangled knots of insecurity and longing. I know that life has not been easy for her, and that she moves through the world with burdens I will never fully see. None of that excuses the harm she caused, but it does illuminate the landscape from which her actions emerged.

Understanding her complexity does not rewrite my past, but it softens the sharpness of the narrative. It reminds me that hurt often comes from people who are themselves hurting, and that cruelty can be a clumsy expression of fear, confusion, or unhealed pain. And in my humble opinion, the most radical answer to such pain is joy. Not joy as performance (or toxic positivity), but the deep, steady kind that grows from accepting ourselves and appreciating everything that grows from this nourished self‑love. It is the joy that comes from building a life rooted in honesty, kindness, connection, and self‑respect. The joy that does not depend on anyone’s remorse, recognition, acceptance, or change.

I feel a quiet triumph knowing that I became someone who does not need anyone’s act of self-reflection to move forward — someone who can feel a great deal of empathy, understand human complexity, and still choose to stay away from those who do not make me feel safe. Someone who can hold compassion without abandoning discernment. And from that place, I choose joy not as denial, not as naïveté, but as an act of defiance and self‑creation — a way of saying that someone else’s actions (or inactions) will not determine the brightness of my life.

The Quiet Collision of Past and Present

When I recently visited the former ghetto of Terezín (Theresienstadt), I expected to encounter a museum. What I did not expect was to encounter a town that is still alive. I imagined memorials, curated exhibitions, perhaps a structured narrative guiding visitors through the past. Indeed, I found all of these, but I also found people living in the very buildings where prisoners once slept, suffered, and waited for deportation transports.

This coexistence of ordinary life and extraordinary violence unsettled me more than any museum could. It was not exclusively staged, mediated, or softened for visitors. It was simply there — the past and the present layered so thinly that they seemed to touch.

As I walked through the streets, I felt this layering not only intellectually but physically. My body moved through the same spatial coordinates that others had once inhabited under radically different conditions. I crossed cobblestones worn by footsteps of those who knew they might never return. The experience became a form of embodied historical awareness: history not as something observed from a distance, but as something encountered through movement, proximity, and sensation. The space itself carried a memory that my body could not ignore.

The moment that crystallised this tension came during lunch. As I ate, I became acutely aware of the contrast between my comfort and the deprivation that had once defined life in this place. It was not guilt that I felt, but a sharp awareness of asymmetry — of how easily the present can overwrite the past, and how important it is to resist that erasure. The simple act of eating, something so ordinary, suddenly felt charged with historical weight.

What made the experience so powerful was precisely that a large part of it was not arranged for me. The town did not solely perform memory; it also existed. And in that uncurated existence, the past felt more present, more intrusive, more insistent. The authenticity of the place — its refusal to convert itself entirely into a museum — created a kind of moral and sensory friction. It demanded attention.

This raised questions I could not easily answer. How do people live in a place so marked by suffering? What does it mean for a site of atrocity to become a home again? And what does it mean for visitors like me to step into that space, carrying both historical knowledge and present-day privilege?

Perhaps the most unsettling realisation was that the past does not disappear simply because life continues. Instead, it lingers — in the architecture, in the atmosphere, in the way our bodies respond to the space. Terezín made me aware, more than I am usually aware, that history is not behind us. It is around us, woven into the fabric of the present, shaping how we move, feel, and understand ourselves.

This experience forced me to inhabit the tension between memory and normality, between what once happened and what now happens. It asked me to remain unsettled, to resist the comfort of forgetting, and to acknowledge that the past is not a closed chapter but a presence that continues to demand my attention.

A Mind Built for Brighter Worlds

There is a woman I admire in a way that feels almost mythic, as if she wandered into my life from a different genre — not the one the rest of us inhabit, but a rarer, more luminous category of existence. I remember the first time I met her with the clarity of a scene that insists on becoming a memory: the angle of the light in the lab where we met, the faint hum of conversation around us, the way she spoke with that quiet, devastating precision that only people with rare intellectual voltage possess.

Some people reveal themselves slowly. She revealed herself in a single breath.

It wasn’t anything dramatic. She didn’t diagnose a rare disease on the spot or casually derive an equation that would make a physicist weep. It was subtler — the way she listened, the way her mind seemed to move with the elegance of a well‑written proof. But more than that, it was her enthusiasm for the lab we were part of, the kind of bright, instinctive devotion that seemed to come to her as naturally as breathing. She belonged there in a way that felt effortless, almost inevitable.

I didn’t. And I think I knew that long before I was willing to admit it to myself.

She had a sense of direction I didn’t have — a certainty about where she fit, what she wanted, what kind of work lit her up from the inside. I remember watching her and feeling this quiet heaviness settle in my chest, the kind that doesn’t announce itself but simply arrives and sits down. I didn’t feel what she felt. Not about the lab, not about the materials, not about anything in that pharmacy building in the Althanstraße. And I wasn’t yet ready to face the truth that I simply wasn’t in the right field — that whatever spark she had, I didn’t have it in me, and I didn’t even know where to look for it.

She made the world seem slightly more coherent simply by being in it, and I felt, for a moment, like someone standing just outside the circle of light — close enough to see its warmth, but not close enough to feel it.

From that moment, I carried a quiet certainty: This woman is meant for something extraordinary. Not in the sentimental, motivational‑poster sense, but in the concrete, scientific, “one day a committee in Stockholm might need her phone number” sense.

And yet, life — with its talent for irony — led her down a path that looks nothing like the one her mind seems built for.

She married. She has children. She works in her field. All beautiful things. All meaningful. But from the outside, I sometimes feel as though I’m watching a world‑class pianist play lullabies on a toy keyboard while the Steinway sits untouched in the next room.

Of course, I say this with humility. I am not inside her life. I don’t know the architecture of her happiness, the private negotiations she makes with herself, the dreams she has set aside or the ones she still carries like small, glowing embers.

But I do know this: She is not in the doctoral program that would challenge her. She is not in the laboratory where her mind would ignite. She is not surrounded by colleagues who would look at her and say, “You belong here. You are one of us. You are the future of this field.”

Instead, she is surrounded by people who love her in a different register — a domestic, familiar, everyday love. Her husband, for instance, seems to adore her, though perhaps in the way one adores a person who reliably knows where the scissors are. He sees her as his wife, the mother of his children, the person who remembers birthdays and buys the right brand of yogurt.

And that is a kind of love — a real one. But it is not the same as seeing her as the woman whose mind could redraw the boundaries of medical knowledge.

Sometimes I imagine an alternate version of her life — not a fantasy, but a plausible parallel timeline. In that world, she is in a lab in Zurich or Paris, wearing a white coat, surrounded by people who speak the same intellectual language she does. She is radiant in that world. She is alive in the way only people who are doing the work they were built for can be alive. She is arguing, discovering, failing, trying again. She is exhausted in the best possible way.

But in this world — the one we inhabit — she is living a life that is not full in the direction of her greatest gifts.

And so I feel this gentle ache. Not a judgment. Not a criticism. Just a quiet sorrow that the world may never see the full magnitude of her brilliance.

I wish — selfishly, perhaps — that she had the space, the encouragement, the intellectual oxygen she deserves. I wish she could shine at the wattage she was built for. I wish the people around her could see what I see: a mind that could change the world, if only the world made room for it.

But I also know that lives are complicated, and choices are layered, and happiness is not a single path but a constellation of them. And maybe — just maybe — she is shining in ways I cannot see, in corners of her life that are invisible to me.

Still, whenever I think of her, I feel the same thing I felt the first time I met her: This woman is extraordinary. And I hope, with all the tenderness in me, that one day she will feel that truth reflected back at her — not just by me, but by the life she lives.

Degrees Don’t Define Us

A week ago, I received my Bachelor’s diploma in History — a moment I was lucky enough to share with people who have walked beside me through different chapters of my life. It was lovely, meaningful, and full of warmth. There is something undeniably sweet about seeing your name printed on official paper, even if the paper itself is just a slightly fancier cousin of what any office printer could produce. The ceremony, the applause, the hugs — all of that felt real, grounding, almost ceremonial in a way that surprised me. For a brief moment, it felt as though the years of reading, writing, doubting, and persevering had crystallized into something tangible.

And yet, if I am honest, the degree itself does not carry the weight people often assign to it. I hesitate to say this aloud, because I know how much effort goes into earning a degree, and I don’t wish to diminish anyone’s achievement, including my own. I wrote the essays, survived the deadlines, and even pretended to understand Derrida on days when my brain was operating at the level of a sleepy houseplant. I navigated seminars, footnotes, and the occasional existential crisis that comes free of charge with any degree program. But even with all that, I cannot pretend that academic titles are the ultimate measure of a person’s worth.

When I think about contribution, I think of my grandfather. He was a farmer. He could not read or write. His knowledge lived in his hands — in the way he made wine and schnaps, in the way he cared for his animals, in the way he rose every morning at five without complaint. (Meanwhile, I rise at five only if I’m catching a flight.) He was the most consistent person I have ever known, and he never needed a diploma to prove it. His competence was measured in harvests, not credits; in the trust of his animals, not in academic supervisors. His life was a rhythm, a steady pulse of work and care and responsibility, the kind of rhythm that shapes a person from the inside out.

And the idea that a degree makes someone “more valuable” than him is something I simply cannot accept. If someone tried to argue that point with me, I would politely disagree — and by “politely disagree,” I mean I would stare at them with the same expression my grandfather used when someone suggested adding water to wine. A look that says: I hear you, but you are deeply, profoundly wrong. A look that contains a lifetime of quiet certainty, the kind that doesn’t need to raise its voice to be convincing.

If anything, this diploma reminds me that education is only one form of knowledge, and academic achievement only one form of contribution. The world is built just as much by people like my grandfather — people whose lives never appear in university records, yet whose dignity, labor, and love shape everything around us. They are the ones who keep communities alive, who feed us, who repair what breaks, who pass down wisdom that cannot be footnoted. Their knowledge is embodied, lived, and transmitted through gestures and habits rather than citations and conferences.

My diploma may grant me access to certain spaces, and my voice may resonate with some audiences, but it is a farmer’s hands that laid the foundation for all of it. His work created the stability from which my opportunities grew. And if I ever forget that, I hope someone stops me — long before I start believing my own importance, long before I mistake academic fluency for moral superiority. Humility, after all, is also a form of intelligence.

In the end, this degree is a milestone, not a hierarchy. A celebration, not a certificate of superiority. It is a reminder of how many different kinds of intelligence exist in the world, and how many of them never sit in a classroom. Some are learned through books, others through soil. Some through theory, others through repetition, patience, and the quiet courage of showing up every day.

And honestly, I just wish my grandfather were here with me. Because even now — diploma in hand, surrounded by scholars — he would still hold more wisdom in the creases of his palms than most people ever manage to learn. His lessons came through rhythm and routine, through the quiet certainty of someone who knows the world by working with it, not theorizing about it. If I carry anything forward, I hope it is that kind of groundedness — the kind that keeps ambition humble and gratitude close, the kind that reminds me that knowledge is richest when it is shared, lived, and rooted in something deeper than achievement.

The Mirror I Didn’t Recognize

In late 2009, I went on a trip to Switzerland. Even now, I’m not entirely sure who funded it — maybe Switzerland, maybe the EU; I’m fairly certain it wasn’t my home country, Serbia. The whole thing felt slightly mysterious, as if someone somewhere had decided that a group of teenagers from Serbia needed to be exported for a few weeks and exposed to fresh air, mountains, and European values. The purpose of the stay was for us to meet pupils from Switzerland, to interact, to learn about tolerance from one another. Even that part I didn’t fully grasp before we left. I hadn’t realized there would be workshops from morning until evening, or that we would spend entire days talking about what tolerance actually means, how it works, and why it matters.

The first day we arrived, they handed us an A2 sheet of paper and asked us to write down our opinions about Swiss people. I still remember what we wrote: only the most positive things — that they were polite, kind, self‑aware, the sort of answers you give when you’re trying to be both diplomatic and genuinely appreciative. We were guests, after all. We were raised to be grateful, to behave, to show our best selves when abroad. And besides, we didn’t really know anything about Swiss people beyond clichés about chocolate, watches, and punctuality. So we wrote what we thought was expected of us, what felt safe and generous and harmless.

But when we saw what the Swiss pupils had written about us, the shock hit with a force I can still feel in my body today. Not everything was negative; they also wrote that we were nice, for example. But scattered among the compliments were words that felt like small blows: that we were gangsters, that we strutted around with Gucci bags, that we got facial operations. It was such a strange mixture of stereotypes and misunderstandings that I didn’t know whether to laugh or to disappear into myself. Mostly, I just felt exposed — as if someone had held up a mirror I didn’t recognize. A mirror that reflected not who we were, but who we were imagined to be.

My first instinct was to remind myself who I actually was: certainly not a gangster, certainly not someone parading around with a Gucci bag, and certainly not someone who would ever consider a facial operation. None of it resembled me in the slightest, and yet there it was — written in thick marker on an A2 sheet of paper, as if someone had taken a quick snapshot of us from a distance and mistaken the blur for the whole picture. It was unsettling to see yourself through the eyes of someone who had never spoken to you, never sat next to you, never heard your voice. It was unsettling to realize how quickly a stranger can decide who you are.

These kids were twelve, and they were honest about their prejudices. There was no malice in it, just the unfiltered certainty of children who had absorbed stories about “the Balkans,” with or without ever having met anyone from there. They weren’t trying to hurt us; they were simply repeating what they thought they knew. And yet, standing there in that bright Swiss classroom, looking at those words written in thick marker, I felt something shift — a small, sharp awareness of how easily people can be misread when seen only from a distance.

Later that day, during one of the workshops, a facilitator asked us to talk about how it felt to read those descriptions. I remember sitting in a circle, the Swiss kids on one side, the Serbian kids on the other, and feeling a strange mixture of defensiveness and embarrassment. I didn’t want to seem overly sensitive, but I also didn’t want to pretend that the words hadn’t stung. When it was my turn to speak, I said something polite and vague, something about misunderstanding and cultural differences. But inside, I was thinking: Is this really how we look to them? Is this what they see when they hear the word “Serbia”?

Fortunately, other pupils from Serbia were more honest than I was. One boy said, simply and bravely: “I felt hurt by these words. I don’t think of myself as a gangster, and I prefer not to be called that.” His voice didn’t tremble; he wasn’t dramatic. He just told the truth. And somehow, that truth opened the room.

What surprised me most was how quickly the Swiss kids apologized once they realized the impact of their words. They were genuinely confused that we were hurt. “But we didn’t mean it badly,” one girl said, her face flushed with worry. “We just thought… that’s how it is.” And in that moment, I understood something that no workshop could have taught me: that prejudice often comes wrapped in innocence, that stereotypes can be passed down like bedtime stories, and that people can repeat them without ever questioning their origins.

The rest of the week unfolded in a gentler way. We played games, visited museums, and slowly replaced the caricatures with real faces, real voices, real personalities. By the end of the trip, the word “gangster” had become a running joke among us — not because it was funny, but because humor was the only way to soften the sting. And yet, even as we laughed, I carried the memory of that first day with me, the shock of seeing myself misrepresented so confidently by people who barely knew I existed.

Looking back now, I realize that the trip did teach me something about tolerance, though not in the way the organizers intended. It taught me that tolerance is not just about accepting others; it’s also about confronting the stories we inherit, the shortcuts our minds take, the assumptions we don’t even realize we’re making. It taught me that being seen inaccurately can be painful, but it can also be illuminating. And it taught me that sometimes, the first step toward understanding is simply acknowledging that we don’t know each other as well as we think we do.

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.