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.
