threshold

This is my first blog post on this website, though it is not my first attempt at blogging. Back in high school, I kept a blog called Railroad—a name that sounds far more evocative in Serbian and looked especially elegant in Cyrillic script (Железница). In English it sounds like a place where freight goes to die; in Serbian it sounded like a metaphor. I was among the early bloggers of the 2000s, and I remember that era with a particular kind of nostalgia, the kind reserved for dial‑up internet and the belief that strangers on the web might actually care about your thoughts.

It isn’t the sort of nostalgia that tempts me to romanticize the past or imagine returning to it—those years were hardly idyllic, and mine least of all. But there is a certain quiet grief that accompanies the act of leaving one’s country. I left Serbia at eighteen, and since then, I have rarely spoken my first language, let alone written in it. That distance—linguistic, emotional, and occasionally bureaucratic—is a price I continue to pay. Sometimes I reach for a Serbian word and realize it has simply packed its bags and moved on without leaving a forwarding address.

My first blog was endearingly naïve: an earnest teenager chronicling daily frustrations, school assignments, and her attempts to elevate her thinking by dabbling in subjects like nuclear physics or offering impassioned analyses of Anna Karenina. It was, in retrospect, objectively terrible—yet it possessed a kind of unrepeatable authenticity. I was a completely different person from who I am now, and somehow exactly the same.

What I remember with particular fondness is the small blogging community that kept showing up to read my posts—though I still have no idea whether those early texts were genuinely readable or whether we were all simply participating in a quiet, mutually generous act of human kindness. They read and commented on my nonsense, and I dutifully read and commented on theirs. It was a sort of collective benevolence disguised as literary ambition. We were basically a group of teenagers performing seriousness at one another, and honestly, it was adorable.

Regardless of what motivated us, the outcome was unexpectedly beautiful. I discovered that across Serbia—from Subotica in the far north to Niš in the deep south—there existed a quiet constellation of curious, intellectually hungry minds. People wanted to think, to articulate their thoughts, to test them against the thoughts of others. It was a small but vibrant ecosystem of readers and writers who believed, however naïvely, that ideas were worth exchanging. In hindsight, it feels like we were all part of a secret club whose only membership requirement was having too many feelings and a Blogspot account.

I’m fully aware that blogging today bears little resemblance to blogging in 2008. It’s no longer easy to stumble upon one another in the digital wilderness; we bloggers have become tiny, almost imperceptible drops in an ocean whose vibrant life feels perpetually on the brink of extinction. The internet now resembles a crowded bazaar where everyone is shouting, and I’m here quietly setting up a small table with a handwritten sign that says “Thoughts, free.” So, in offering my own, I’m keeping my expectations modest. I’m not expecting to be found. Instead, I see this space as a place to think aloud—publicly, and most likely infrequently—about whatever happens to feel most urgent to me at any given moment.

And since I’ve already mentioned physics, I can’t help thinking about Schrödinger’s cat—the unfortunate creature that is, depending on one’s perspective, both inside and outside the box, both alive and dead. That is more or less how I feel about my own blogging. It is a new beginning, and yet it couldn’t be further from one. I’m not writing in order to exchange ideas with other people, and yet I secretly hope that I might. I have no ambitions at all, and at the same time, I have every ambition in the world. I am both the cat and the box, and possibly the scientist who forgot why she started the experiment in the first place.