A Child of May
Or How I Failed to Become a Butterfly
New Spring
Exactly 33 years ago I became a refugee.
It was a beautiful day. The air was crisp, sun was shining. It smelled like fresh grass and blossom.
The tanks of the Yugoslav People’s Army rolled through my hometown, shooting at houses of civilians with suspicious surnames.
In case you haven’t figured that out already by my name, I was born in Bosnia, a small and complicated country situated in Europe’s southeastern corner. Us Bosnians like to call the ‘Asshole of Europe’, not just for its location but also for the pleasure of being born at a place that ruptures every time big powers have a go at each other: 1463, 1878, 1914, 1941, 1992 … and counting.
On that beautiful spring day, my family fled our hometown with nothing in our hands except a change of clothes, folded neatly in a flimsy plastic bag.
The gravity of the moment was absent from us. Cocooned by years of meek socialism, my parents’ generation was overly naive, thinking that the brewing ethnic war was just a short phase that would pass as soon as people ‘see reason’ or when the ‘European countries slam their strong hand on the table and pacify the unruly children.’
The war raged for four years, taking everything from us. Homes, friends, family members. Our lives became engulfed in a thick fog, clouding everything in its path.
In me, a 14-year-old skinny kid from a small town, the war sparked a process of transformation that never stopped raging, even now, three decades later. The fog never cleared, and I’m still searching for something. The buzz of questions raised in a teenager’s war-torn mind has never waned.
What I am searching for? I don’t know. I used to think that I was trying to find an answer for how could ordinary people shoot at their neighbors because a balding news anchor told them to do so. But now I’m not so sure.
Maybe I’m just searching for myself.
Then That Summer
Sounds very Buddhist of me, I know. But, for most of my life, I’ve been stupid enough to think that the answer can be found and that at some point in life, I will finally come Home.
When I reflect on my past, I recognize how much my entire existence has been driven by an insatiable need to find answers to questions buzzing in my mind. Even my choice of career was determined by this.
As a scrawny college freshman in post-war Sarajevo, I decided to study journalism. Watching famous journalists, like Christiane Amanpour, and photographers like Ron Haviv bravely step into war zones to report the truth, I thought that was the career for me. Searching for truth and sharing it with the world seemed like a life I wanted to live.
As one of the promising students (as I was told) in my generation, I got an offer and started working at a state TV station, a gigantic public broadcaster the country inherited from the previous socialist government. My workplace was an ugly brutalist building at the edge of the city. It was nicknamed after a fictional prison from an old TV show: The Gray Institution.
At first, I loved it. I would work for 12 hours a day, always happy to file in another report, chain-smoking along the way, drinking 17 espressos a day, learning the craft from the old wolves.
But then, the reality of the post-war Bosnian society, raped by the ruthless criminal ambition of the ruling political elites killed this desire in me like a rabid dog. The shallowness of the journalist class, combined with the miserable lifestyle this career allowed for, drove me out and I changed my profession for the first time.
The New Fall
Fortunately for many young Bosnians who spoke English and had a basic college education, the country was full of international humanitarian and development organizations looking for a cheap and reliable labor force. After two years working as a reporter, I was kicking-my-butt happy when I got a job offer to work at a United Nations Development Organization, an offshoot of the UN in charge of helping poor countries stand on their feet.
After a devastating ethnic war, Bosnia needed that more than anything else. I was happy to chip in and use my communication skills and experience to advance the organization’s goals.
This was the first time in my life that I experienced anything close to some wealth. The salary was good enough to afford almost anything I wanted: food, drinks, clothes, vacations, and books: anything a poor but curious boy from a province might desire.
I thought I was set for life. A decent job that allows one to belong to the upper echelons of society? A belly full of sausages and beer? What more could one ask for?
As you may guess, it turned out there was more. The itch to find answers was soothed, but it didn’t go away. It started itching again. I tried scratching it by continuing my academic studies. I enrolled and completed a Masters degree in Political Science at the local university, answering some questions but also opening a bunch of others.
I thought if I studied harder I’d have them answered. I read books all the time. My (girlfriend and the time and now) wife still jokes how lame of me was to go on a date with her and stay out only until 9 PM so I could go back home and read more.
It didn’t help. It itched even more.
I knew it was time to move again. This time I decided to go all in: I quit my well-paid job and joined the ranks of what will turn out to be one of the most precarious positions in any professional field: I became a PhD student.
No Vivaldi’s Winter
Believe it or not, I wanted to learn more about the philosophical foundations of politics, so I started a half-a-decade quest to answer some ethical and conceptual questions about democracy and liberalism. I was fortunate to get what at the time was a decent stipend at the Central European University, in the beautiful-yet-melancholic city of Budapest.
In hindsight, this sounds like an insanely risky move. Why on earth would anybody quit a well-paid job to devote the 5 best years of their life to studying arcane issues scattered across corners of academic journals in philosophy?
Well, to my defense, I was not the only one. There were (and still are) thousands of young people in the world who do exactly the same thing.
Honestly, it’s not that I had any clear idea about why was I doing it and what was the end game. I vaguely thought I’d become a professor at some point. But I do remember vividly the expectation I had while breaking my back reading thick books and writing incomprehensible prose: I thought once I get a PhD I’ll finally have an answer to the questions that were still brewing strong in my head. I expected to have at least some of them answered.
But then something happened in the middle of that process: my wife and I moved to New York City, driven by an offer of a visiting scholarship I got from Columbia University (basically, an unpaid and fairly loosely associated position that allows one to take classes and do research at the host institution - nothing fancy) and a serendipitous winning of the US Green Card Lottery.
Suddenly, the buzz of the questions got quieter. Not because I was smarter (spoiler alert: I was not) but because life got busy. To survive in the urban, cultural, and economic jungle that is New York City, we had to humble ourselves to the degrees unseen since the end of the war. Working odd jobs, from assistants in obscure publishing houses in Elmhurst to waiters in ersatz Italian restaurants in the Lower East Side, we had to learn the ropes of the quintessential New York hustle: swim or die.
Then another life-altering event: not long after finally getting an apartment of our own and my wife getting a decent job, she got pregnant. Life got even busier, but luck got our back too. Our daughter was born, healthy and kicking, and I got a full-time academic job. Things were alright. I’m tenured now, she’s turning into a teenager, and we’re still alive. Going strong.
It’s Spring Again, Sweetheart
But every time spring approaches, in early May, I become melancholic as I can’t help but remember those fateful days decades ago when my identity took on an errant form.
Sometimes I joke with my wife how I never stopped being a refugee (especially when I need to justify some weird habits like never wanting to accumulate stuff - except books). It’s a joke most of the time, but as with all jokes, it contains a kernel of truth. Once I was on the move, I couldn’t stop.
The move stopped being geographical. Being in New York helps with that, I guess, since this city is always on the move even if its people aren’t. Most of the time I feel like a shark swimming upstream a river: I move only to stay in place.
But, as a movement of my deepest self, it has never ceased. I realized recently that the career changes of my past were driven by nothing else but my evolving identity. All justifications I had at the time were a front for something I failed to acknowledge: that I was constantly running away from my past self. I’m a mental refugee, a slithering fish trying to escape the water that engulfs me.
It took me years to understand and come to terms with this. Throughout my life, I saw myself (to use another animal metaphor) as a butterfly-in-waiting, a hairy caterpillar on its way to finally morph into at least some kind of a butterfly. Years went by and the butterfly never materialized.
A caterpillar I remain.
My cocoon is littered with shells of my past selves: a journalist, a political scientist, a philosopher, a photographer, and now a blog writer in love with coding and statistics. My self is nothing more than a quilt, sawed together by a thread of memory, trauma, hope, and my most Bosnian quality of all: intransigence.
Since I am a professor and an educator, I’m always on the lookout for a good lesson for my students, whatever the topic. Here I’d tell them that being stable in your identity is bullshit. We are never anything at all, we’re always in the process of becoming something else. That something never comes, though. It is your own imaginary butterfly, morphing from one shape to another as time passes by.
But don’t despair, for this is not a bad thing. Not at all.
Early May, when the blossom is still fresh and semesters draw to a close, is a great time of the year to remind yourself that everything is just a beginning. There are no ends because time is forever. Don’t let anybody tell you that you don’t have time. You do. You always do.
Strangely enough, my birthday is in May.
Inspiring. Time is forever.The struggles, efforts and sacrifices are all worth it!
A very moving article about your journey. Happy Birthday and may your future be filled with goodness and happiness.