One Sentence, Ten Years of Thinking

About ten years ago, someone I care about said something I have never forgotten. My cousin was frustrated after cleaning several rooms left untidy by Jewish‑American guests — I never asked how many rooms, how many people — and she said, “In that moment, I wished Hitler had finished his job.”

The reason this sentence shocked me was not the sentence itself — in 2016, I was well aware that antisemitism was still present in the world — but because of who said it. It came from someone very close to my heart, someone who used to spend her last Serbian dinars to buy me yet another Agatha Christie novel or take me to the cinema. The contrast between her everyday tenderness and the violence of that moment was unbearable.

I have spent the last ten years trying to reconcile that sentence with the generous person I know, trying to understand how it could have come out of her mouth at all. Because I do believe, very firmly, that she is not a hardened antisemite. I grew up with this woman. She never gossiped about people behind their backs, and she never treated anyone with disrespect. She is not the kind of person who would march down a street demanding political change in a region she knows nothing about. She is humble, almost to a fault — not someone who needs to be right, not someone who asserts herself or imposes her views. And yet she said this awful sentence. Why?

The best explanation I can offer for this specific moment is a mixture of ignorance and psychological relief. She was ignorant in the simplest, most literal sense: She had never met a Jewish person and knew nothing about Jewish life beyond the clichés absorbed from scattered, unreliable sources. She had never received anything to counter those inherited fragments. And when frustration overwhelmed her, those fragments surfaced in the worst possible way — not because she believed them deeply, but because they offered her a fleeting sense of release, a way to feel less small about a job that often left her tired, unseen, and undervalued. It was a terrible sentence, but it came from a place where ignorance and insecurity briefly intertwined, producing something far beneath her usual capacity for goodness.

And as much as I still feel shocked about her sentence, I genuinely don’t know what I would say in her position. It would be so easy to think that I know better because I am a better human, but I am not convinced that this is true. I am simply someone who got to know an actual Jew long before I discovered that antisemitism existed. And also someone who became interested in the Holocaust because Jewish survival and statehood gave me strength at a time when my childhood felt unbearably heavy.

But if I had never known any Jews, and if my childhood had not been shaped by moments of fear that made me seek out stories about achieving self‑determination, who knows what kind of opinions I would have developed. That is why I cannot be too harsh toward someone whom I know to be a gentle human in every other context. Her sentence was terrible, but it came from a void. And I understand that void because I grew up in the same environment, breathing the same air. The difference is only that a variety of factors reached me before ignorance could become words.

So when I look back now, I no longer see only the shock of that moment but also the weight of growing up in an environment where silence was louder than education and where clichés replaced facts and faces. My cousin’s sentence does not define her, but it does remind me how easily inherited fragments can surface when life feels heavy. It reminds me that ignorance is not innocence, but it is not always malice either. And it reminds me that the only way to change anything — in ourselves, in others, in the world we move through — is to speak when we know better, and to do so with the kind of self‑scrutiny that keeps us close to one another, even when we are shocked or angry, and allows honesty to land without wounding the very people we hope to reach.

What I See When Others Aren’t Looking

Some people move through the world with an emotional fluency that resembles empathy but is, in truth, its counterfeit. They know how to imitate concern with surgical accuracy — the warm look in the eyes, the softened voice, the perfectly timed sigh that signals care. They can perform tenderness the way an actor (or actress) performs a role: convincingly, strategically, and usually only when the performance benefits them. When admiration is the currency, when loyalty is the prize, when influence is at stake, their empathy becomes a tool sharpened by long use.

My mother is one of these people.

To most people, even to some who know her well (and should know better), she appears warm, attentive, and selfless. She presents herself to the world in the best possible light, and she does it with such consistency that most people never think to question it. They see the performance and assume it is the person. They see the mask and assume it is the face. And because she almost never slips in public, it becomes almost impossible to know who she truly is beneath the lovely person she projects.

But every mask has a weak seam — a place where the truth leaks through.

I learned this in a dentist’s chair when I was in my early twenties, gripping the armrests while a drill pressed into a nerve. My best friend Marc had come along for support, sitting quietly in the corner, watching the scene unfold. And in that sterile room, under the bright light, he witnessed something I had spent years trying to articulate.

According to him, it wasn’t subtle at all. It wasn’t a flicker. It wasn’t a shadow.

It was dramatic. It was overt. It was unmistakable delight.

He told me later that my mother looked thrilled. That each time I winced because of pain, her face lit up with pleasure, the kind people show when they’re watching a scene they enjoy. He said it was the kind of expression you don’t accidentally make. The kind you don’t slip into unless something inside you is genuinely entertained.

It was one of those rare moments when she revealed herself in public — who she really was when she believed no one was paying attention, when the mask loosened because she assumed the audience was safe.

That moment stayed with me because it explained so much.

It explained why she avoids witnessing suffering in front of other people. Not because it overwhelms her, but because it exposes her. Watching suffering — even fictional suffering — requires spontaneous emotional authenticity, and she knows she cannot reliably produce it. She knows that if she sits beside someone during a heartbreaking scene, her mask might falter. Her face might reveal what she actually feels — or doesn’t feel — and the illusion she works so hard to maintain could crack.

That is why she never watched Titanic with me. I begged, I pleaded, I tried everything. It was the biggest film of its time, and all I wanted was to share it with her. But she refused, insisting she “couldn’t bear all that suffering.” The truth was simpler: She couldn’t bear the risk of being seen. She couldn’t bear the possibility that her emotional absence — or rather, her pleasure in watching other people’s pain — might become visible.

And not so long ago, I saw the same pattern return.

I was at a dinner with a small group of historians, relaxed, talking, eating, nothing remarkable. And then one woman — someone I always found very friendly — said, casually, almost jokingly, that she could never be a Holocaust historian because of “all the Nazis.” The phrasing was strange, but it wasn’t the words alone. It was the tone. The mimics. The performative discomfort I grew up watching.

Something in me sharpened.

Not in judgment — in recognition.

Since that evening, I’ve observed this person more closely, more regularly. And what I found unsettled me: Every single pattern echoed my mother’s emotional choreography. The same selective softness. The same curated generosity when other people are present. The same avoidance of situations that require spontaneous empathy. The same lack of concern when no one is watching. The same hunger to be admired.

It is not up to me to make any diagnosis or assign pathology. But I do listen to my instincts now. I do trust the part of me that spent years studying micro‑expressions for safety. So I’ve quietly stepped back from this lady. Not with any confrontation — just distance. Space. A gentle refusal to ignore what I’ve learned.

Growing up inside that pattern leaves its mark. When someone today says something like “there are too many Nazis in that movie” or “that scene was too much for me,” I don’t leap to conclusions; I know perfectly well that people have all kinds of understandable reasons to avoid tragic or violent content. (And I also know that dealing with pain professionally is not synonymous with safety. Very early in my career, I’ve already met some Holocaust historians who don’t signal safety.) But because of how I grew up, because of what I learned to watch for, something in me always widens its eyes just a little. It is the quiet, reflexive vigilance of someone who lived eighteen years together with the worst version of emotional absence and knows how carefully and successfully it can disguise itself.

People who perform empathy can imitate almost anything: kindness, humility, generosity, even self-reflection and remorse. But they cannot always imitate what they do not possess when the moment demands it without warning. And so they avoid the moments that demand it. They curate their exposure. They choose their audience. They control the lighting.

In my opinion, the biggest problem regarding such individuals is not that they lack empathy. The biggest problem is that they know they lack empathy — and spend their lives hiding from the one thing that could reveal who they truly are. They build their identities around diversion and choreography, mastering the art of appearing gentle, caring, and giving. They become experts in emotional camouflage, always arranging the scene so that no one ever sees the moment when their face fails to match the feeling in the room. And because they know exactly what is missing inside them, they live in a constant state of pre‑emptive self‑protection, avoiding situations where authenticity might be required.

But the instant they feel safe, the instant they believe their social image is untouchable, and they can finally show themselves without consequence, the mask loosens — and the sadism comes out. And as my dentist story shows, their sadism also emerges in the small, unguarded moments: in the flicker of pleasure at someone else’s pain, in the ease with which they reveal themselves when they think no one is watching. What these people don’t account for is that some people are watching — with the precise, unblinking awareness of someone who has already survived them — and those people catch every slip.

Please Don’t Assume

One of the most difficult things in human interaction is resisting the urge to project our own experiences onto someone else’s life. Humans do this constantly — with enthusiasm, with confidence, and often with the absolute conviction that they are being helpful. It’s almost endearing, if it weren’t so quietly distorting.

Take one example from my own life. When I tell someone that I am not in contact with my family of origin, the most common response is an earnest, sympathetic, “That is a shame.” I understand the kindness behind those words; they are trying to express empathy. But what they are really doing is projecting their own experience — perhaps the experience of having a loving or supportive family — onto a situation that does not resemble theirs at all. For me, stepping away from my family was the best decision of my life. It gave me peace, clarity, and the freedom to grow into myself. I have gained far more than I have lost.

This is only one example among many. People often transfer what they know onto others, assuming that a familiar structure must carry the same emotional meaning for everyone. A family is a family, they think; a rupture is a tragedy; a silence is a wound. But every story deserves to be understood on its own terms. Every rupture, every distance, every silence has its own architecture. That is why I wish people would ask, “And how do you feel about it?” instead of assuming that any situation involving shared genes and broken contact must be tragic.

And yet — because projection is a two‑way street — I have to admit that I very often do the same. Indeed, now that I think about it, it’s entirely possible that when people say, “That is a shame,” they are not referring to the broken contact at all. Some people might be responding to the idea that I didn’t receive a loving family in the first place. In other words, someone may be expressing sadness for the absence of something they themselves consider fundamental — not assuming that I miss it.

This is why genuine curiosity matters so much. A simple “And how do you feel about it?” opens a space where reality can be understood instead of assumed — where two people can meet without the weight of each other’s histories shaping the conversation before it even begins.

And here is the tragicomic part I firmly believe: Avoiding projection is impossible. We are all doing it, all the time. We project our families (or the families we would like to have) onto other people’s families, our fears onto their fears, our hopes onto their choices, our wounds onto their silences. It is one of the most universal human habits — as natural as breathing and almost as unconscious.

However, every now and then, it’s worth pausing for a small psychological check‑in. A moment of humility. A quiet internal question: “Am I seeing this person, or am I seeing myself reflected in them?” It’s not easy, but it’s the closest thing we have to genuine understanding — the slow, deliberate act of clearing away our own assumptions so that someone else’s truth can come into view.

Why 99% of University Lectures Fail

“I want to be very clear,” a lecturer once said, “that providing PowerPoint slides is a service. It is something a professor does not have to do.”

I heard this statement a while ago, and it made me angry for days, although at the time I couldn’t articulate why. Today, with more calm and far more clarity, I can finally explain why an educator should never say — or even think — something like this.

However, before I begin with criticism, I need to clarify something I see now and didn’t see then. I genuinely appreciate when humans do not contort themselves into being liked or admired. Life has taught me that the ability to say something publicly, knowing it will irritate many, is a rare quality — a kind of moral backbone that far fewer people possess than we like to imagine. And if I had understood this at the time, if I had paused long enough to recognise that this person’s statement came from intellectual honesty rather than arrogance, I’m sure I would have been far less annoyed. I would have seen the courage instead of the provocation, the integrity instead of the irritation.

And yet, the irritation about the statement still remains, and I want to explain why. Let me start with the easiest part: This has nothing to do with the format someone uses for teaching. I remain absolutely convinced that excellent teaching can be performed without a single computer in the room. As a student, I rarely rely on PowerPoint slides myself; I depend on the lecture, on the spoken argument, on the intellectual movement of the hour, and I prefer to craft my own string of words out of what I hear. In that sense, I essentially agree with the statement on the purely technical level: Slides are not necessary, and no one should feel guilty for choosing not to provide them.

But the question of format is not the real issue here. The real issue lies elsewhere — in the attitude behind the statement, in the idea that offering something to students is somehow an optional courtesy rather than an inherent part of the job. And that is where the problem begins.

What I’ve noticed, after ten years of studying, is that many lecturers begin by complaining long before they ask themselves a basic pedagogical question: Am I truly giving something to the students — something useful, something they will still be able to use twenty years from now? From my point of observation, the answer, in most cases, is a clear and convincing no. The vast majority of educators are not putting in the effort required to make a student value what they are offering. They assume that the mere act of speaking in front of a room constitutes teaching, that the transfer of information is enough, that the responsibility ends with the lecture’s final slide or final sentence.

And yet, because there is that tiny percentage of people who do put in the effort, I know how transformative great teaching can be — how a single course, delivered with intention and courage, can alter the way a person thinks for the rest of their life. A few people — very few — have done that for me. They shifted the architecture of my mind, rearranged the way I understand the world, and left behind ideas that continue to shape me years later. Their lectures were not performances but turning points. They taught in a way that made knowledge feel alive, urgent, and personal, and because of them, I know that real teaching is not about information at all; it is about awakening. And once a person has been awakened by someone like that, they never return to who they were before.

Does that mean that every student will appreciate a fantastic delivery of content? No, of course not. Many students will still be lazy, and some will be genuinely prevented from attending the lecture and will rely on the notes other people made. That is simply part of the ecology of studying. But this reality does not diminish the value of excellent teaching. The point of teaching well is not to guarantee universal appreciation — that is impossible — but to ensure that those who are ready, willing, or able to receive something meaningful actually have something worth receiving.

When teaching is done well, even the students who miss the lecture or skim the notes will sense that something valuable happened — something they might return to later, something that could matter once life gives them the space to care. That is the quiet, long‑range power of the best pedagogy: It plants seeds even in the minds that are not ready to bloom.

And some of us know this power in its most urgent form. Some of us are forced to learn the hardest way that the greatest liberation a person can achieve is learning how to use their own mind. To think independently. To question authority. To refuse the narratives imposed on them — not out of rebellion for its own sake, not out of a childish desire to contradict, but out of a deeper need to distinguish between what is true and what is false. Because that, in my view, is the hardest task of all: to recognise truth even when the speaker is uncertain, and to recognise lies even when they arrive wrapped in care. It is a skill that dictatorships — including domestic ones — work tirelessly to suppress, because a person who can tell truth from falsehood cannot be controlled. And it is the skill that teaching, at its best, can restore.

To return to the lecturer who framed PowerPoint as a “service,” I have to say: no. Absolutely not. No aspect of teaching should ever be understood as a service, and if you teach well, whether or not you use slides is irrelevant — a detail, not a foundation.

Given the path my life has taken, I cannot see education as an ideal or an accessory; I see it as a survival skill. It is the difference between being trapped and being able to live. Teaching, in my view, is not a task but an act of profound human responsibility. It is the moment when one person’s knowledge becomes another person’s possibility. To reduce that to a “service” is to misunderstand the very nature of the profession — to mistake the vessel for the offering, and the performance for the transformation.

The Quiet Love My Mother Could Not Kill

The nights at my grandfather’s house were not simply sleepovers; they were small miracles stitched into the fabric of my childhood. Even now, when I close my eyes, I can feel the hush of those evenings — the way the world seemed to exhale and loosen its grip, as if granting us temporary passage into a gentler dimension. Christmas and Easter came only twice a year, but to me they felt like secret portals opening, revealing a universe where everything slowed, softened, and glowed with a kind of magic. In that house, time behaved differently. It pooled around us like warm light, and for a few precious hours, it felt as if the universe had briefly tilted in my favor.

I remember those nights in fragments. I remember my grandfather preparing the bath with a solemnity that made the ordinary feel sacred: the slow lowering of his hand into the water, the quiet concentration on his face, the way he invited me — a child with no real authority — to test the temperature with my small fingers, as though my judgment carried all the weight of the world.

I remember opening the door of his closet when he wasn’t nearby, inhaling the warm, familiar scent of his clothes and commanding myself to memorize it, already aware, even then, that time was a thief and that he would not always be there to anchor our hours.

I remember how we stayed awake until midnight, coaxing the evening to last, the way one lingers over a story they don’t want to end. We played game after game while the church’s late mass approached — a ceremony I only used as a convenient alibi, a pretext for remaining in his company. And I remember how he always let me win — so transparently that it was pointless to play anything together. And yet, I kept inventing new games, just to witness the gentle theatre of his love.

I remember how I shook him the moment his eyelids began to sink, as if my small, stubborn insistence could hold back the night, could keep him from drifting into a place where I could no longer follow. Looking back, I understand what I could not name then: He must have known that his house was the only place where I was allowed to be an ordinary child, unobserved, uncorrected, unafraid. So he stayed awake for me. He stretched the night as far as it would go, keeping the world gentle for one more hour, one more game, one more breath.

And now — with the clarity distance forces upon us — I find myself surprised by something I never questioned as a child: why I was only allowed to sleep over at his house twice a year, while I spent almost every weekend, every summer, every winter holiday at my grandmother’s. It is strange, almost unsettling, to realise how unquestioningly I accepted that imbalance. As a child, I simply lived inside the rules that were handed to me. But now I wonder whether I sensed the truth without being able to articulate it: how deeply my mother resented her husband’s father, how much she hated the way he refused to obey, refused to shrink himself, refused to become small enough for her comfort.

At the same time, I see another truth I never named as a child. All the gentle people in my mother’s orbit accepted her presents and listened, spellbound, to her charming retellings of events. They believed her stories, and even when parts of them strained credibility, they reasoned that someone so altruistic, so attuned to others, would have no motive to invent — what — a lie. Besides, they felt chosen, as if they had been invited into something luminous. She knew exactly how to give each of them the one thing they longed for: attention, admiration, a sense of belonging. And once she placed that gift in their hands, gratitude bound them to her — soft, unquestioning — as though loyalty were simply the natural price of being seen.

Very often, I believed my mother too. After all, why wouldn’t I? Most of the time, her version of events was close enough to the truth, and she was the closest human I had. Besides, aren’t a mother and her child meant to stand on the same side? So I reasoned that someone who usually took great care of me when I was sick would have no motive to invent a falsehood.

And even when the evidence contradicting her claims about my grandfather stood plainly before me, I told myself that perhaps he was, after all, at least some of the things she said he was — a bit problematic, a bit selfish, a bit careless. It usually took only one look into his loving eyes to know that each one of these statements was a lie. Nonetheless, at times, it was easier to bend reality around my mother’s narrative than to confront the possibility that the woman who brought me to the world was capable of cruelty without cause.

Or perhaps, in her worldview, she did have a cause. My grandfather was the only human in her orbit who didn’t play by her book. His simple, modest life was enough for him. And he was enough for himself. There was nothing she could offer that he needed, nothing she could do that would make him bend. He moved through the world with a quiet self‑possession that rendered her gifts unnecessary and her charm irrelevant. She could not dazzle him, could not recruit him into her theatre, could not make him feel chosen — because he had never felt unchosen to begin with. And unlike most people, he possessed the imagination to see her clearly: to recognize the performance, to understand the hunger beneath it, and to refuse the role she tried to impose.

Decades later, she would find her way to a cruel revenge, but in those years, in those two nights, he remained untouched by her illusions, unclaimed by her narratives, and stubbornly, almost defiantly free. His refusal was not loud; it was simply the steady presence of a man who did not need her story to feel real. And that, more than anything, was the one thing she could never forgive.

Looking back, I feel certain that he never asked to spend more time with me — not because he didn’t want to, but because he understood the cost. He knew that any request from him would give her a reason to manipulate. He had already seen how easily she could turn affection into leverage, how quickly she could twist a simple wish into a justification for punishment. And so he protected me in the only way he could: by never placing me in a position where my happiness could be used against me. His restraint was not indifference; it was a kind of love shaped by caution, by the knowledge that my world was governed by someone who treated tenderness as a tool.

And I didn’t ask to spend more time with him either. I rarely asked my parents for anything, and very early — far too early — I learned to hide from them how much I loved being with my grandfather. It felt safer to keep that truth folded inside me, untouched by their reach. I understood, in a way no child should, that longing could become a weapon in the wrong hands. So I trained myself to be careful.

When my uncle and later my parents came to pick me up after every sleepover, I performed happiness with the precision of someone who knew the stakes. I smiled, I chatted, I pretended that leaving my grandfather cost me nothing. I was determined not to reveal that — in reality — I was aching, already counting the long months until I could feel that kind of safety again. My silence was my shield, my small act of self‑protection. And in that silence, I carried the truth of us — the truth they never saw, the truth they never deserved to know.

So we both stayed silent and wise. We accepted the two nights a year that were permitted, and we made them luminous. We made them enough. Within the narrow space we had at our disposal, we gave one another everything we could, and those two nights became the happiest moments of my childhood — small, glowing sanctuaries carved out of a life that otherwise offered no such refuge.

I remember how my absolutely favourite moment always arrived the next morning, quiet and unannounced, like a small secret between us. I hated going to church — on Easter just as much as on any other Sunday — but for my grandfather, for the gentle pride that lit his face when I pretended to enjoy the mass, I put on a smile and went. So we went together, my hand threaded through his, the two of us moving through the cold morning air like a single, determined shape. And the moment I loved most came just after the service ended, when the doors finally opened, freeing me from the faithful Catholic I pretended to be, at least for the next four months.

I remember how his sister‑in‑law approached us every single time, her steps soft but purposeful, as though she were entering a familiar ritual. She greeted us both, then turned to me with that gentle, hopeful question: Would I like to come to her house for a piece of cake? And every single time, I answered, “No, thank you. I don’t want to leave my grandfather alone.” Somehow, I knew that those exact words made him shine. It was as if my refusal, small and polite, affirmed something in him, something tender and unspoken, something that made the morning feel briefly whole.

It was a small ritual, repeated twice a year, yet it felt like a secret language between us: a child’s loyalty offered freely, and an old man’s joy blooming in response. We both loved this lady for never failing to ask, for offering the same invitation despite the everlasting rejection she always received. Her question, my answer, his smile — together they formed a tiny constellation of tenderness. It remains one of those small, enduring lights that still travels with me, unchanged by time.

The Weight of Small Violations

A situation I was indirectly connected to this summer has stayed with me far longer than I expected. The facts themselves are simple: During a summer school, a man walked into a women’s bathroom in circumstances where he had no really good reason to do so. A woman who happened to be inside was understandably upset and reported the incident to the program director. His explanation — shared publicly in a group chat — was that he only needed water from the tap and chose that bathroom because it was closer than the men’s. Her perspective, at least in written form, remains unknown to me.

Because I don’t know either of them personally, I won’t comment on the case itself. But the situation has made me think about the world at large, and about the quiet, everyday dilemmas that arise when someone disregards rules that everyone else follows. What do we do when a person steps outside the shared framework that keeps communal life predictable and safe? How do we respond when someone treats boundaries as optional, while others treat them as essential?

I’m not speaking here about gender as the central issue, although — of course — gender shapes how certain situations are perceived and experienced. It would be naïve to pretend otherwise. There are cultural patterns, social expectations, and power dynamics that influence how men and women move through shared spaces, and those patterns matter. But what I’m really trying to address is something broader: the simple fact that people who disregard rules exist in every gender.

What interests me is not the man in this particular story, nor the woman who felt her privacy violated, but the larger question of how we understand those individuals who treat rules as optional while the rest of us treat them as the quiet architecture of communal life. Some people — regardless of gender — seem to operate with an internal logic that places their convenience above shared norms. They don’t necessarily intend harm; they simply behave as though the boundaries that structure social life are negotiable, flexible, or irrelevant to them.

And when someone ignores a rule that everyone else follows, it forces us to confront how fragile those agreements really are. It raises questions about how communities should respond, how individuals should protect their own sense of security, and how we navigate the tension between empathy for human fallibility and the need to uphold boundaries that protect everyone.

Here is the difficult part: I don’t believe that people who disregard rules necessarily learn a moral lesson when they are punished. In fact, I suspect that the opposite often happens. Instead of reflecting on their behaviour, they may feel misunderstood, humiliated, or singled out. And when someone already has a loose relationship with boundaries, that sense of grievance can make them even more dismissive of the norms that protect others.

Some people respond to consequences not with introspection but with resentment. They interpret accountability as persecution. They convince themselves that the world is unfair to them, that others are overreacting, that they are the victims of excessive sensitivity or rigid rules. And once a person adopts that narrative, they may become even more unpredictable — even more willing to bend or break the structures that everyone else relies on.

What troubles me is the possibility that enforcing rules does not always produce safer behaviour, but sometimes produces deeper alienation. It raises uncomfortable questions about how communities should handle individuals who do not respond to correction in the way we hope. It forces us to consider that some people do not change simply because they are told to, and that their sense of being “misunderstood” can make them more harmful, not less.

And yet, the alternative — saying nothing, doing nothing — is equally fraught. Silence can feel like complicity. It can leave vulnerable people unprotected. It can allow small violations to accumulate into larger ones. And perhaps most dangerously, it can create an atmosphere in which those who already disregard boundaries begin to assume that their behaviour is tolerated, or even invisible. When no one speaks up, the person who crosses a line may interpret the absence of resistance as permission. What was once an isolated lapse can slowly harden into a pattern.

Silence also has a corrosive effect on the people who do follow the rules. It teaches them that their discomfort is not worth naming, that their sense of safety is negotiable, that their boundaries are less important than someone else’s convenience. Over time, this erodes trust within a community. People begin to wonder whether the structures meant to protect them are real or merely symbolic. They start to question whether anyone will stand with them if something more serious happens.

And there is another dimension: When we remain silent, we often carry the emotional burden alone. We replay the moment, we rationalize it, we try to convince ourselves it wasn’t “that bad.” But the unease doesn’t disappear; it simply becomes private. Speaking up, even when it is uncomfortable, is sometimes the only way to prevent that unease from turning into resignation.

So we are caught between two imperfect choices: reporting someone who may not learn from it, or staying silent and risking the slow normalization of behaviour that should never be normalized. Neither option is clean. Neither guarantees safety. But acknowledging this tension — instead of pretending the answer is simple — is the first step toward understanding how communities can respond to rule‑breaking without either escalating harm or enabling it.

In the end, what stays with me is not the incident itself but the fragile balance we all try to maintain between caution and compassion, between protecting others and not hardening ourselves. We live among people whose inner logic we cannot fully see, whose boundaries do not always align with our own, and whose reactions to correction may be unpredictable. And yet we also live in communities that depend on shared norms to function at all. So, perhaps the best we can do is to act with integrity, to speak when silence would betray our values, and to remember that accountability is not about punishing someone into goodness but about preserving the conditions in which everyone else can feel safe. It is an imperfect task, but it is part of the quiet responsibility of living together.

I Don’t Worship Native Speakers

My Slovak friend recently asked me how to say “chickpeas” in Serbian. In that moment, it became painfully obvious that I had forgotten the word — just as I’ve forgotten so many others. And it isn’t only vocabulary. I lose track of grammatical expressions, syntax, idioms, the entire architecture of the language I grew up with. Anything that isn’t used daily dissolves over time.

This made me think again about how much I dislike the way people overestimate the value of a “first language” and underestimate the languages we adopt and cultivate later in life. I often hear people insist that their work must be reviewed by a “native speaker,” as if nativeness were synonymous with competence. I have always hated that expression — native speaker — because it sounds like a mystical priesthood, as if these people were born in a linguistic temple and blessed by the gods of grammar. And mother tongue is even worse: My mother never taught me the dative case. These terms suggest a kind of emotional purity that has nothing to do with how language actually works.

For me, the opposite is true: I would always rather hand my writing to someone who is sharp, attentive, ideally multilingual, than to someone whose only qualification is that English happened to be their first language. It would feel almost irresponsible if someone entrusted me with their Serbian text now — I would be the last person to catch their subtleties.

Languages don’t live in us because they were given at birth; they live in us because we use them, stretch them, inhabit them. And the ones I inhabit most deeply today are not necessarily the ones I learned first. Of course, there are small disadvantages to not having encountered a language as a baby — I will never have all the German articles in my bones, and certain English collocations will always feel slightly foreign, as if they were resting on the surface rather than rooted in the marrow. But these are minor imperfections, not failures. They are simply the traces of a linguistic life shaped by movement, choice, and experience rather than by origin.

Every tiny imperfection — the choice of the right article, a slightly awkward collocation — can easily be polished with the help of a dictionary. What cannot so easily be polished, however, is a person’s way of thinking and feeling. And this, in my view, is what truly matters. That is why the so‑called “nativeness” is not the criterion I look for in a lectorate. I look for multilinguality, emotional maturity, and intellectual competence — qualities that shape how someone reads, interprets, and understands a text. These capacities do not depend on which language was acquired first; they emerge from experience, curiosity, and the ability to inhabit more than one linguistic world.

Part of this way of thinking comes from the simple fact that I now know English and German far better than Serbian. These are the languages in which my thoughts form themselves without effort, the languages in which emotions arrive already shaped, already phrased. When I speak to myself — in moments of doubt, in moments of joy, in the quiet interior monologue that accompanies daily life — it is almost always in English or German. Serbian rarely appears there anymore; it feels like a room I once lived in but no longer furnish. This shift has taught me that linguistic belonging is not determined by origin but by habitation — by the languages we think in, feel in, and return to instinctively.

Of course, I sometimes feel a small sadness that Serbian has fallen so far behind, that a part of my linguistic past has grown quiet. Yet, I also know that this is simply the result of how my life has unfolded, how my daily world has shifted into other languages. And if I am honest, I would rather spend my time learning new languages, opening new cognitive and emotional spaces, than trying to revive or perfect a Serbian that no longer feels like the center of my life. What remains of it is tender, but it is no longer where my thinking happens, and I have made peace with that.

And when I do miss Serbian — which happens from time to time — I return to my all‑time favourite Serbian poem, Santa Maria della Salute. It reminds me of the beauty this particular language can hold, the cadence and tenderness that once shaped my sense of aesthetic feeling. Nonetheless, the encounter with the poem is different from habitual use; it is a meeting with something exquisite, not a return to a living linguistic world. It feels like visiting an old house whose rooms I no longer inhabit. I step inside, breathe its atmosphere, remember what it once meant to me (spoiler: everything) — and then step back into the languages where my life currently unfolds.

My linguistic life has followed the path of my actual life — elsewhere. The languages I inhabit now are the ones that have carried me through adulthood, through friendship, through work, through the daily negotiations of identity and belonging. Serbian remains a soft echo in the background, a language of childhood and memory, but not of daily thinking and feeling.

What I have learned from my lived experience is this: We become the languages we live in. They shape our inner landscapes far more than the ones we inherit. And I embrace that evolution not as a loss, but as a testament to the many worlds a person can learn to call home.

Anne Frank Didn’t Need the Holocaust to Matter

I have been thinking lately about Anne Frank — the girl who wrote herself into history with nothing more than paper, fear, and an astonishing instinct for truth. She became beloved because she dared to say what she felt.

Which is why I remember feeling irritated when Dara Horn suggested — in her conversation on the Ask Haviv Anything podcast — that people respond to Anne Frank because she “behaved and looked like one of us,” meaning, I suppose, Western European, culturally familiar, easy to project ourselves onto. And in her book People Love Dead Jews, Horn offers a different but related argument: that Anne Frank is embraced precisely because she is dead, because she cannot confront us with the full magnitude of suffering she endured after the hiding place was discovered. Both claims follow a coherent internal logic (and I can wholeheartedly recommend both the podcast and the book — they are truly excellent). Yet the lines of argument that touch on the diary itself have left me unexpectedly disappointed. They gesture toward insight, but never quite reach the depth or precision the material deserves.

What drew me and quite possibly other people to Anne Frank was never her supposed familiarity, nor the tragic convenience of her silence. It was her refusal to flatten herself into anything other than a real, complicated girl. I loved her because she told the truth as she felt it — boldly, unguardedly, without the self‑protective evasions I relied on as a child. Indeed, I loved Anne Frank precisely because she was nothing like me. She wrote with a candor I could not imagine practicing; she trusted her own voice in a way I could not yet trust mine.

I was a child who lived in emotional lockdown. There was not a single soul I could tell what was happening in my home or in my brain. I could not confess it to a friend, and I certainly could not confess it to a page. Paper was dangerous. Honesty was dangerous. Even being honest with myself was impossible.

Anne Frank, on the other hand, was incandescently open. She wrote with a kind of fearless sincerity. She was bold, funny, self‑critical, impatient, hopeful, furious, tender. She wrote the way I wished I could breathe. She was, in my eyes, impossibly cool: a girl who could take the chaos of her inner world and turn it into excellent (!) sentences. I could not do that. I could not even imagine doing that. So, when I read her diary, I did not see a mirror. I saw, for the first time, what it looked like when someone refused to hide from her own truth.

Today, I am a different person. I write. I speak. I go to therapy. I am completely vulnerable on many occasions. And this blog — this strange, stubborn, ongoing attempt to articulate myself — is the clearest testament to that transformation. It is the proof that the girl who once envied Anne Frank’s honesty eventually learned to practice her own.

When I first read the diary — at nine, maybe ten — I didn’t even know that there was a Holocaust. I had no sense of the historical machinery closing in around Frank, no knowledge about the catastrophe that would swallow her life. I didn’t know how the diary ended, or rather, how it abruptly did not end. In other words,I did not need the one unprecedented genocide in human history to feel connected to Anne Frank. I needed honesty. I needed someone who showed me that truth could be written down without the world collapsing.

And I suspect that many children who encounter Anne Frank for the first time feel something similar. To us, Anne is not a symbol, not a cultural shorthand, not a vessel for collective memory. She is a human — a vivid, breathing presence on the page. It is that simple. Nothing more metaphysical, nothing more ideological.

While I fully recognize that the book needed a story with a villain to be truly compelling, the villain didn’t have to be the Holocaust; the emotional architecture of Anne’s diary would have held even if the external threat had been different. It could have been any system that crushes childhood from the outside. It could have been an abusive caretaker who crushes childhood from the inside — anything that makes a person feel alone in relation to the world. What matters is not the specific circumstance but the way Anne responds to it: with imagination, defiance, longing, and a stubborn insistence on remaining herself. The power of her diary lies in that interior resistance, not in the particular shape of the darkness pressing against her window.

I can see what Dara Horn might add to all of this: that I wouldn’t care if Anne Frank’s diary were more brutal, more saturated with the specific atrocities of the Holocaust. That I would supposedly turn away if the book confronted me with the full horror rather than the luminous interiority of a girl in hiding. But this is simply not true. I am devoting my life to this particular genocide; I have spent years, almost decades, reading precisely the kind of material Horn thinks readers avoid — the unbearable details that refuse to let the dead be sentimentalized. So I suppose I have proven you wrong, Dara. My attachment to Anne Frank has never depended on the “gentleness” of her story, nor on any imagined “comfort”. It has always come from the force of her honesty.

Yes, I understand that institutions and individuals use the book’s popularity for their own purposes, but that is not the readers’ fault. Therefore, it feels deeply unfair to scold people for loving Frank’s openness, as though affection itself were a kind of moral failure. And I know what you may respond, Dara: that this is not what you wrote or intended — and I agree that it perhaps wasn’t. Nonetheless, it is what many people, such as myself, may read between the lines.

Because, for so many of us around the world, Anne Frank is not a symbol to be consumed, corrected, or disciplined. She is not a cultural artifact whose meaning must be policed. She is a presence — intimate, unguarded, astonishingly alive — encountered at precisely the age when a child first discovers that another human being can speak from the page with absolute sincerity and talent. And that is why she matters. Not because she stands for something, but because she stands with someone: the young reader who suddenly feels less alone.

More than that: Anne Frank is one of the main reasons why I don’t simply care about the “dead Jews”, as Horn would have it, but rather about the living ones. The diary didn’t turn me toward tragedy alone; it turned me toward living, breathing humans — toward their voices, their histories, their survival, and especially their present. You see, Dara, Anne did something enormous for me at a time when I truly didn’t have anyone else to rely on. She showed me that it was okay to feel misunderstood, to not have a real friend, to feel out of step with the world around you. She showed me that it was okay not to be tender toward one’s parents — that ambivalence, irritation, even emotional distance could coexist with love. She showed me that the interior life of a person could be contradictory, imperfect, and still worthy of being written down.

And this is precisely where I part ways with Dara Horn. Her arguments — whether in People Love Dead Jews or on the Ask Haviv Anything podcast — assume that readers cling to Anne Frank because she is familiar or because she is silent. But Anne Frank was neither familiar nor silent to me. She was unique and startlingly alive. Through her, I learned to care not only about what was lost, but also about who is still here.

Reading Dickens in the Wrong Classroom

I watched Sing (Mindenki) today, that quiet Hungarian masterpiece about an injustice at school. It made me think about the injustices in my own school — of which there were plenty — but one stands out more sharply than the rest: my English lessons. And perhaps I should first confess something that doesn’t feel self‑evident, even to me. As a teenager, I hated English lessons with a depth reserved for things that feel both unfair and pointless. They were the one place where the subject itself — a language I have always loved — felt like a punishment rather than a door opening onto the world. And there was a clear reason for this.

My teacher — consciously or not — divided the class into two camps: those who already spoke English at a comfortable B2 level, such as myself, and those who didn’t. She taught for us, the English‑speaking kids, not for them. She handed out extracts from Dickens for homework, then tested us on them as if this were a perfectly reasonable expectation. And I still cannot comprehend how she failed to see the obvious: that the children who didn’t yet know English came from modest households, families where money had to be spent on essentials — food, shoes, and yes, probably alcohol and cigarettes, though they hardly qualify as essentials — but certainly not on private language schools, summer schools, or after‑school tutoring.

It was an injustice so ordinary that it went almost unnoticed, except by the children who were punished by it. And I think that is why Sing unsettled me today: It reminded me how easily a classroom can become a place where knowledge is rewarded, but potential is ignored; where a teacher’s blind spot becomes a child’s lifelong disadvantage; where a language meant to open the world instead becomes a wall.

Now, I am aware that every teacher is part of a larger system, and that my teacher also had to follow a curriculum. But even within that framework, I remain convinced — back then as much as today — that she could have made a far greater effort to accommodate those who were not yet fluent in English. A curriculum sets the destination; it does not dictate the route. And she chose a route that only the already‑advantaged, such as myself, could walk without stumbling.

What still troubles me is how little imagination it would have required to make the lessons fairer. She could have differentiated tasks, offered simpler texts, created mixed‑ability groups, or simply acknowledged that not everyone had the privilege of private tutoring. None of this would have broken the curriculum. It would only have broken the illusion that all children begin from the same starting line. And I am not naïve — I do not believe that one class can eliminate inequality, nor am I even sure that inequality should be eliminated. After all, some people genuinely work harder than others, and effort does matter. But even with the tiniest, most skeptical part of myself, I cannot understand how a teacher would fail to grasp that the stark differences in English level were not a mystery of talent or temperament, but quite clearly the predictable consequence of economic and social inequality.

And perhaps that is the heart of the injustice: She taught as if the children who struggled were choosing to struggle. She taught as if the Dickens extract were a neutral assignment, not a quiet reminder of who had more exposure to the English language and who had less. My parents, for example, spent thousands of pounds and sent me — twice — to a highly exquisite summer college in England; I arrived in her classroom already carrying the kind of linguistic advantage that money quietly buys.

What sometimes makes me angry, even now, is that I love Dickens — he is one of my favourite authors — and feel a kind of sadness that she learned nothing from him. She read him without absorbing the moral clarity he offers so generously: his insistence on seeing children who are failed by the very institutions meant to protect them. She assigned Dickens as literature, but never understood him as a lesson. And so the writer who spent his life describing the vulnerable became, in her classroom, a tool for excluding them.

What stays with me, however, is not the anger but the clarity. I know now that a classroom is never just a room: It is a place where a person learns whether the world is open to them or closed. Mine taught me that injustice can be small, polite, and carried out with a smile — and that this makes it no less problematic. And the older I become, the more I feel the weight of that difference. Perhaps this is why Sing moved me so deeply today — because it reminded me that the smallest injustices in childhood echo for decades, shaping who we become.

Money, Honestly

It has never been easy to write about money — not for me, not for anyone I know, not even for economists. And yet here I am, attempting it anyway. I want to reflect, as sincerely and as courageously as I can manage, on what money means to me now, and on the quiet, persistent ways it has shaped my sense of what is possible. In truth, my relationship to money has not changed all that dramatically over the years; it has merely become more articulate, more aware of its own shadows.

Long ago, I decided I had no desire to deliberately pursue great wealth, nor would I allow myself to feel envy over anyone else’s possessions. This never meant that I was blind to how essential money is — how it buys stability, medicine, education, a life with fewer sharp edges. I’ve always understood that. But even as a child, I sensed that beyond a certain level, more money does not bring more happiness; it only amplifies whatever is already there. That instinct didn’t come from nowhere — it was shaped by the world I grew up in.

And I grew up comfortable: two big houses, several bedrooms of my own, even a tennis court. And like many children who grow up comfortable, I flinched when someone called me rich, then tried to explain it away with elaborate justifications. I thought that denying comfort would make me seem more relatable.

Yet, even though we always had more than enough for the daily necessities, our home was never the embodiment of financial tranquillity. Quite the opposite: The more wealth my parents managed to accumulate, the more sharply they felt what they believed they were still lacking. It was as if every new achievement illuminated another rung on a ladder they were determined to climb — a ladder assembled out of anxiety, polished by ambition, and stretching so high it seemed to disappear into the clouds. Their prosperity never softened their restlessness; it only refined it.

My grandfather was completely different. He was the sort of person who found purpose in his work in the fields and in the time the two of us spent together, but never in material things. His sense of fulfilment came from rhythm, routine, and relationships. And so, very early on, I realised that it was his philosophy I preferred: a way of living that felt grounded and sane, unlike my parents’ everlasting treasure hunt that never seemed to bring them true satisfaction.

More than that, despite being financially stable, we were not a happy family. The bedrooms weren’t just a sign of comfort; they were a form of control. One of them was deliberately kept bare — no television, no computer — so I couldn’t spend the night with technology. (A rule that would have made more sense if I hadn’t spent most evenings reading.) And the tennis court, which should have been a symbol of privilege, was my private nightmare. It meant playing tennis many hours per day, carrying the weight of expectations, and feeling worse each time I lost to someone who didn’t have their own tennis court, which was, of course, everyone in Serbia at local competitions among ten‑year‑olds.

Looking back, I realise that money shaped my childhood not through luxury but through contradiction. It gave me comfort while taking away ease, offered abundance while tightening control, and created a world where privilege and pressure slept in the same bed. That is why my relationship with money today is neither romantic nor resentful — it is simply honest. I know what money can provide, and I know what it can never fix, no matter how much hope we attach to it.

What I understand now — and what I try to practice every day — is a way of living in which money is a tool rather than a measure, a source of possibility rather than anxiety. I stay close to my grandfather’s philosophy: Meaning comes from how we live, not from what we accumulate. If money has taught me anything, it is that a portion of it is indispensable, but it can never serve as the scaffolding of happiness or the foundation of belonging.

The Case Against Revenge

Recently, I watched Sleepers, that late‑1990s film about four boys whose lives are shattered after a reckless childhood prank delivers them into the hands of a juvenile detention system that mistakes cruelty for discipline. What follows is not punishment in any meaningful moral sense, but a sustained regime of degradation — a choreography of violence enacted by the very adults entrusted with their care. The boys leave the institution, but the institution never leaves them. Decades later, two of them, now men shaped by hardness rather than healing, encounter one of their former abusers in a pub. Recognition flickers, memory ignites, and they kill him.

The film left me with a question that refuses to settle: To what extent is one ever permitted to kill? Where does moral outrage end and moral transgression begin? Sleepers feels like a contemporary echo of the old revenge myth — a stripped‑down, unromantic Count of Monte Cristo refracted through the stark realism of American life. It asks whether vengeance can ever be clean, whether retribution can ever restore what was broken, and whether the desire to right a past wrong inevitably reshapes the victim into something unrecognizable.

My own conviction has long been steady: Taking an already existing life isn’t ethically justified except in the narrow realms of unavoidable self‑defence, mercy, or survival. For example, I believe it is fundamentally wrong to eat animals — and yet, if a single chicken stood between me and the end of my own existence, I would eat it. Survival does not erase the moral tension, but it does define the boundary of necessity.

This same conviction is why I have always opposed the death penalty in any form. The idea that the state — or any individual — could claim the right to end a human life as punishment strikes me as a moral line that, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed. To kill in the name of justice is to corrupt justice at its core, to turn the very concept of moral order into an instrument of irreversible harm.

But holding such a view comes with a price. Believing that no one should ever be killed outside those narrow exceptions demands a difficult kind of moral stamina. It requires learning to carry past harms lightly — or at least without allowing them to calcify into vengeance. It means accepting that the systems meant to protect us will often fail, and that the people who caused the harm will walk freely through the world. Sometimes, evidence is insufficient. Sometimes, perpetrators vanish into anonymity. Sometimes, the law is more humane than it should be. And yet, this is the cost of refusing to cross that irreversible line: the cost of insisting that justice must remain justice, even when it is imperfect.

This discipline of restraint becomes visceral when confronted with suffering as raw as the boys’ in Sleepers. Watching the film, I felt an immense sorrow for them — a sorrow that sits heavy in the chest. It is unbearable to think that children endured brutal rape and beatings, and that the adults responsible for their safety became the architects of their suffering. And yet, alongside that sorrow, I felt a quieter, more unsettling compassion for the guards as well — a grim curiosity about the kind of inner void a person must carry to inflict such cruelty on children. What produces a human being capable of that? What sadness, insecurity, or moral collapse makes such violence possible?

I do not see the world divided into the mentally healthy and the mentally sick — those labels are too sharp for something so fluid. We all move along a shifting spectrum, drifting toward steadiness, drifting away from it, returning again. No one stands permanently at either pole. What troubles me is how quickly we reach for the word unstable, as if naming someone that way could spare us from the deeper, more complicated truth of who they are and what they’re carrying. It becomes a shortcut, a way to flatten an entire inner landscape into a single, convenient explanation. But people are never that simple. Our minds are not tidy rooms; they are weather systems — changing, layered, full of reasons.

This is a conflicted compassion toward cruelty: an attempt to understand the void without denying the wound, a search for the human truth inside the inhuman act. It asks not for absolution, but for clarity. I have come to believe that this is the only way to build a better world — by showing that we are capable of understanding the non‑understandable. Because if we cannot imagine the sadness that gives rise to cruelty, we will never learn how to stop cruelty at its source. And so this difficult compassion becomes a discipline — a choice to insist that understanding, even when uncomfortable, is a moral act.

And that is why I am convinced that the two men in the film should not have killed their perpetrator. Their suffering was immense; I do not trivialize it. But learning to carry pain lightly is the only way to live with oneself. Not by forgetting, not by pretending the harm never happened, and not by abandoning the forms of justice that remain available. No — the discipline lies in refusing to let memory harden into vengeance. Because once anger becomes a compass, it points only toward more destruction. And the moment we let it guide us, we lose the very part of ourselves that was trying to rise above the wound.

Yet, this is precisely where the philosophical debate sharpens. Some argue that refusing vengeance is itself a moral failure — that justice demands action when institutions collapse, that moral outrage is not only understandable but necessary. Others insist that violence in response to violence is simply the oldest human mistake, a repetition of the very harm one seeks to condemn. And still others claim that compassion for perpetrators is a luxury available only to those who have not suffered enough.

I do not claim to have the final answer. I only know that choosing to see the pain in those guards changes everything. It does not excuse their actions, and it should not. But it shifts the perspective in a way that makes living as a victim far less suffocating. When we allow ourselves to imagine the thoughts, feelings, and histories that make a person capable of harming children, the story becomes less about what they did and more about the bleakness of their own inner world. It turns the narrative from one of pure injury into one of human complexity. In that recognition, cruelty no longer defines the meaning of the story. It becomes a testament to how profoundly a person can fail their own humanity — and how much more possible it is to rise beyond such ruin.

A Letter to My Future Self

Dear future Milice,

I am writing to you on this quiet summer day because I want you to remember — not the facts of your past, but the texture of your inner life many years ago. By the time you read this, your age will have climbed well beyond the early thirties, and I hope you will have gathered at least a little more wisdom than the version of you who sits here now.

And yet, I must tell you honestly: In the summer of 2026, you were doing rather well. Not flawlessly — life never grants that — but well enough to stand upright, to keep moving, to believe in the horizon. At this moment, you are a master’s student at the University of Vienna, which means that the long, intricate journey of building a life in history still lies before you. The path is unwalked, the doors unopened, the work unfinished.

But here is the quiet triumph: You already know by now that the destination is not the point. You have finally learned that the goal is not some distant, glittering end, but the daily act of living with devotion. You have discovered that joy is not a reward but a practice — that each day can be immense, luminous, and full simply because you are doing the work you love most in the world.

You are, in this moment, learning Hungarian and Polish — two languages in which you still stumble like a beginner, two alphabets of possibility that have not yet settled into your bones. I hope that, by the time your future eyes rest upon these lines, both tongues will flow through you with ease, as naturally as breath, as intimately as memory.

And I hope, too, that French and Spanish — the languages in which you now move with a confident, conversational stride — have by then unfurled fully within you, becoming not merely tools but companions, voices you can inhabit without hesitation. Perhaps, in your world, you have even wandered into Hebrew or Russian or Italian, drawn by curiosity or by the simple joy of unlocking yet another linguistic door. I wish this for you with all my heart: that languages continue to be your way of expanding the borders of your life, your way of loving the world more widely.

And then — the people. I am happy to tell you that, in this chapter of your life, you have gathered a small constellation of truly good friends. The kind who take a day off work just to stand beside you, who celebrate your victories as if they were their own. The kind who show up without being asked, who make your joys larger and your burdens lighter.

Sometimes, though, you still make mistakes with people. You choose to believe in those who — perhaps — haven’t earned all that devotion and trust. And yet, I don’t want you to change. Keep your eyes open, always, but also stay the kind of person who would rather give too many chances than too few. Remain trustful, even when it means being let down. There is a quiet strength in refusing to let disappointment calcify your generosity. It is the kind of courage that keeps a life expansive, and a character recognizably your own.

As for your parents, it appears that they have finally learned to respect your distance and your boundaries. It has taken years for them to understand that closeness cannot be forced into existence. Perhaps, in your world, you are able to speak with your father again, but from where I stand now, that moment has not yet arrived. And that is alright. Some relationships take time to settle into their truest shape, and some forms of peace are slow to grow. What matters is that you have chosen the version of closeness that does not cost your well‑being.

And Marc — well, what can I possibly tell you that you don’t already know? I hope he is still your steadfast companion, your BFF in the truest sense of the word, the one person who has walked with you from the moment you arrived in Vienna. A witness to your beginnings, a keeper of your stories, a friend whose loyalty has never wavered. I hope he is still there in your world, unchanged in essence, still laughing with you, still believing in you, still choosing you as one of his people.

As for your love life, I often wonder what it looks like in your world. Right now, I find myself drifting away from the one person who brought more safety, tranquillity, and happiness than I ever imagined a relationship could provide. And yet, sometimes life introduces things we could not possibly foresee. Sometimes we find ourselves distancing even from those who deserve the absolute best — not out of carelessness, but because something within us has shifted in a way we can no longer ignore. My hope is that you can look back on this period with the calm satisfaction of knowing that, at every step, you moved through it with all the honesty and fairness you could gather — as though each choice were a quiet vow to remain faithful to your own inner world.

In the end, the most important thing I want you to remember is that by the summer of 2026, you have learned to live without possessing every answer you once believed you needed. You have discovered how to remain genuinely happy even when the path ahead is blurred, even when certainty keeps its distance. You have learned to trust the unfinished parts of your life — the questions that linger, the choices that take their time, the chapters that open slowly. And in that trust, you have found a quiet, durable peace, one that does not depend on clarity or perfection but on the steady courage to show up as yourself, day after day.

So, future Milice, wherever you are, I hope you read these lines with tenderness. I hope you recognize the strength it took to keep going without a map. And above all, I hope you are living a life that feels deeply, entirely yours.

With love from the past,

Milica

The First Homeland I Ever Lost

As I spend these weeks in Hungary — trying to coax its language into my mouth one fragile suffix at a time — I keep circling back to a quiet, insistent thought. My connection to this country did not begin with its geography or its grammar. It began with Éva, a dark‑eyed Hungarian girl I met in kindergarten, who became my first best friend and, without ever announcing it, my first emotional homeland.

Countries rarely enter our lives through borders or flags or the ceremonious stamping of passports. They slip in through people — through the ones who shape our sense of safety and recognition. Éva was my first Hungary long before I learned my first Hungarian conjugation, long before I understood that languages can carry entire philosophies inside their syntax.

She understood me with an effortlessness that now feels almost mythic. My fears, my longing for freedom, my tendency to fold myself into shapes that caused the least trouble — she sensed all of it without explanations, without asking me to perform emotional clarity I did not yet possess. And more than understanding, she encouraged me to become the person I was trying to be, with a gentleness so precise that I now suspect she possessed an unusual emotional intelligence for a child.

She gave me books where girls were strong and victorious, as if she were quietly curating a feminist curriculum long before I knew what feminism was. And knowing how strict my mother was about sugar, she always asked her own mother to buy my favourite chocolate — Milka with strawberries. I never walked into her bedroom without finding that specific chocolate waiting on the table. She never said it was for me. Naturally, it was also her favourite.

But what touched me most was how she somehow knew which stories would speak directly to the softest parts of me — especially the ones about orphans. Long before I understood why those narratives mattered, she had already sensed it. A little princess, Harry Potter series, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre — she placed all these stories in my hands as if she were offering small lanterns, certain their light would feel familiar to me even before I knew how to name that familiarity.

Looking back, with the kind of clarity that arrives only years later — when childhood loosens its grip and memory becomes sharper than the moment itself — I have come to believe, though I cannot claim certainty, that she may have been in love with me. It is the only explanation that makes sense now: the intensity of her gestures, the closeness she sought, the games she invented that allowed her to touch me endlessly. In the swimming pool, she insisted we play the drowning game: I was drowning, she was saving me, again and again.

She held my hand every time we crossed the street, as if the asphalt itself were plotting against me, and she slept next to me during sleepovers, curled up with a protective tenderness that felt entirely natural. Children do not question intimacy; they inhabit it, unaware that growing up will one day complicate what once felt effortless.

In our early teen years, Éva understood something I had not yet grasped myself: I would never reciprocate her desire. And adolescence, with its small accidental cruelties, ensured that I didn’t understand her feelings at the time. So one afternoon, when she asked whether I had a crush, I answered with the cheerful obliviousness of someone convinced they were sharing harmless news. My answer turned out to be far worse than anything she had feared: I told her I was in love with a boy.

I wanted to tell her everything — how the boy and I had found our secret spot, a quiet corner where our parallel streets nearly touched; how we spent every Tuesday evening after our English lessons talking on that special corner until almost midnight; how we sometimes lost our breath trying not to let the conversation end, because the awkward silence would mean saying goodnight for another long week, until the next Tuesday; how this ritual had been unfolding for years under the disguise of friendship. I wanted to share my most important secret with her, to let her into the small, glowing world I was building with the only boy who mattered. But she didn’t let me. Before I could reveal anything more, she slipped into the bathroom, claiming a stomachache, and in that single gesture, she closed the door on our friendship, sending me out of her life forever.

Only much later did I understand that my innocent confession may have been the moment she realized that the emotional landscape she had imagined for us would never exist. And once that understanding settled in her, she removed herself from my life with a decisiveness that still startles me. For more than eight years, she had been the person who knew me best; the next day, she was gone without explanation.

And then, recently — decades after our last conversation, long after she quietly stepped out of my life — I learned that she had died suddenly, hit by a car. The news arrived without warning, without context, without any emotional cushioning, as if someone had opened a door and let a cold wind rush in. And the irony, of course, was impossible to ignore: It was my father who delivered the news, with the same kind of cruelty that had shaped my childhood. His voice carried nothing — no sorrow, no gentleness, not even the faint tremor of human concern.

In that moment, I felt again how precisely Éva had understood my parents long before I did, how clearly she had seen the emotional landscape I was still too young to name. Quite a few people recognized the narcissistic traits in my mother, but it was only Éva who sensed that my father wasn’t truly better — only her who perceived the deeper, quieter truth. She understood how even fundamentally good people, when they are not strong enough to trust themselves, can drift toward cruelty or allow it to unfold unchecked. She saw it all with a clarity I did not yet possess, and perhaps could not have possessed in that situation.

Even though we had not been in contact for decades, I was shaken. I am still shaken. There are losses that belong to the present, and losses that belong to the past but arrive late, like letters delayed for twenty years and finally delivered with the wrong postmark. Éva’s death felt like that — a message from a part of my life I thought was safely archived, suddenly demanding to be read.

I didn’t expect grief. I didn’t expect anything, really. But grief arrived anyway, carrying memories I hadn’t touched in years: her dark eyes, her protective tenderness, her strawberry Milka waiting on the table, her hand pulling mine across the street, her insistence on saving me in the swimming pool even when I wasn’t drowning.

Grief has a way of rearranging the furniture inside us. It shifts what we thought was settled, illuminates corners we haven’t visited in years, and asks us to reconsider the stories we tell about who we were and who we are becoming. In the days after learning about Éva’s death, I found myself walking with a strange double awareness: the present unfolding around me, and the past rising up like a soft echo, reminding me that the foundations of our lives are often laid by people we never get to thank properly.

Hungary, for me, will always be Éva’s country first: a place shaped by the echo of her tenderness, her courage, her perceptiveness, and yes, also her sudden withdrawal — a disappearance I know I will never be able to fully understand. As I walk through these streets now, sounding out words she once spoke effortlessly, I carry her with me. A reminder that certain bonds do not disappear; they simply settle into the background of our lives, becoming part of the geography we move through, part of the language we spend a lifetime learning.

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.