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Slouching in a chair in our part-garden, part-construction-lot front yard, I’ve spent the last few days trying to write the opening lines of a perfectly marketable blog post.
I have thought of and promptly disregarded the most common of the LinkedIn sentences—the so happy to be announcing that I. . . and the it’s been a tough four years but. . . These are clichés that bring about some dread over me whenever I encounter them out in the wild. They feel corporate and corporate just ain’t me.
In some small way, they feel dishonest. We’ve all added a detail or two to a story for comedic effect or otherwise skipped over a terrible and brief subplot to make an experience sound smoother or cooler. This is a bit of a similar feeling. Whilst I might actually be happy to announce it and the past four years might have been a mess—I’m staying humble here—the words still ring a little too hollow to my ears. Such sentences also seem to have some anxiety-inducing effect over me, that people in turn might perceive my words and thus my actions as simply hollow.
So, honestly and openly this time, I begin. I started a remote undergraduate English Literature programme in late autumn of 2020, a programme which I have been side-lining more and more as time goes on and thus have still not finished. As much as I love reading a book and subsequently ranting about said book for anywhere between a week and a dozen years—my family will eventually grow accustomed to my Woolf obsessions, I know it!—English literature is not exactly what I want to be doing with my life. By mid-2021, instead, a classmate had planted in my mind the idea of studying abroad. Specifically, the idea of studying in Valencia, Spain.
I had no knowledge of Spanish and I knew little of Spain, except for Spain has sand and sea, Franco was bad, and Madrid is the capital. After a thorough years-long investigation, I can confirm that all of these things remain true. Before 2021, I had never even heard of Valencia and the last time my mother had stepped foot near it, it had been a budding Spanish town, but one not quite so memorable as t is today. I was, however, also just resurfacing from a long period of depression and the appeal of existing in a new place, free of memories, good or bad, was enticing. I scoured the World Wide Web for about ten minutes before finding an undergraduate programme that was a) in English, b) still accepting enrollments, and c) was in a field that actually interested me. Political science.
It was on the 10th of February 2011 that I sat in front of the TV in our Belgrade apartment in the late afternoon or early evening hours and watched a live transmission of the streets of Cairo bursting at the seams with human beings freed. This is the first political event that I remember witnessing and whilst I would have no way of knowing or understanding that authoritarianism would return quickly, the view of a falling dictator and the subsequent celebrations would wake something already half-stirred by then within me.
When I saw an International Relations programme taught in English, how could I not? I approached my mother that early summer day and with a half-joking intonation asked, quite frightened equally by both the possibilities of failure and success, “Wouldn’t it be crazy if I studied abroad?”
Four years have passed and a lot has happened. A lot has changed, too: from the clothes I wear, to the state of my mental health, my political and personal attitudes, the kinds of friends I have. I’ve also an ever-growing understanding of the horrors of Yugoslavia, an ever growing-love for what Yugoslavia was, and my ever-growing love for antifascism, both of the Yugoslavian make and others. I’ve also learnt that the bureaucratic process is hellish in many places, but especially so in Southern Europe as a whole. The past two years alone have been life-altering—the past year especially so. Meeting the love of my life, experiencing an entirely new country, learning more than I ever have before and thus knowing more than I ever thought I could, and still not knowing nearly enough, defending a thesis that took many pages and many, many panicked text messages and video calls with my partner and one of my best friends—Switzerland, you are not forgiven—and interning at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, which had taken over both the physical offices and some of the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, inter alia—these have been things that have felt like a lifetime stacked into less than a year.
I’m now back in Serbia. Living, breathing here, for a period of time which could range anywhere from two years to who knows? In part, I am lost on what to do next. In part, I’m happy to be home with my family. In part, I think it’s fitting that I’m coming back home, with the streets of Belgrade bursting at the seams with human beings yearning to be free. With whatever comes next, I do hope that the mess is a little kinder, a little sweeter, and a lot more exciting. Much like the terrifying idea of moving to Spain that ended up being one of my best so far—only a quarter of a century, people, there’s more to come—anxiety can be deceiving. So, perhaps, I could let go of it a bit.
So, with all of that having been said, I’m happy to announce that I’ve graduated from my undergraduate International Relations programme. And that I’ve finished my year-long Erasmus+ student exchange experience in the Netherlands. And that I’ve finished my internship at the IRMCT. And that I’ve gotten engaged. And that I’m back home. And that I’ve touched grass. And that it’s been a tough four years but it’s been a great four years.