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Luck, misfortune, acceptance

I try to pinpoint the pinpoint the first time I felt an overwhelming sense of bad luck, misfortune, evil eye, whatever you want to call it. Was it when I started losing more friendships than I can count in the same way that made me feel inadequate over and over again, every year since I was 11 ? Was it when we kept discovering that some illnesses ran in the family ? Was it when I understood that what I had experienced as a child was abuse and that I might not have been the only one ? Was it when we lost several family members in a short timespan and we were robbed of goodbyes ? Was it when the fridge broke down that one time ? And then the car. And then my computer. And then the sink. All in the same week.

Did it start with me - they did, after all, take me to some sort of witch because I refused to sleep and they thought someone had given me the evil eye the first few weeks of my existence - or is there some truth in my parents' words when they say that we have been cursed ? I recently learned that, in 2001, my parents were ready to move us back to their motherland. Everything was set up. Clothes and furniture were packed and ready to go. They eventually had to give up on the idea after nationalists violently attacked Bosniaks again in their hometown. To me, it felt like yet another unfortunate tale that could only happen to us.

I wonder how much of these feelings are cultural, how much of it is born out of superstitious beliefs. How much of it is rooted in having collectively experienced unspeakable and unfathomable life-changing violence that has spanned multiple generations, without ever taking a break. It makes sense that, if we cannot truly make sense of something, it is easier to conceptualize it as some uncontrollable power that comes to crush us and continues to strike repeatedly.

It also seems rather self-centered to believe that we are special enough to be cursed. That these horrible occurrences must be someone or something else's fault because it never should have happened to us. That our lives are so bad that we must have the evil eye. As if thousands on this planet were not experiencing much more difficult and traumatic life events at the exact same time. When I start thinking about that, I feel guilty.

Then, I think about how lucky I actually am, despite everything. And how lucky we are. "If the war hasn't killed us, neither will this." That's a sentence I've heard my grandmother, my mother and my aunt say before. And it's true since none of our relatives, as far as I know, have died in the war. We've been lucky enough to visit my family every summer since I was born, unlike million of others in the diaspora. I was lucky enough to meet my grandpa. Hell, I even met my great-grandpa. That doesn't sound like being cursed to me.

My therapist often congratulates me on how well I cope with things and how well I self-reflect. When I read about how to recognize that a child may be undergoing sexual abuse, I did not find myself in the signs. Was that luck? I felt proud of that, even though I knew it was wrong to feel pride. I was a happy child. A bit too talkative at the doctor's. Bratty and spoiled. Energetic. Cheerful. Sometimes a bit rude to my peers when I felt like I had to protect myself. It was only years after the abuse stopped that I developed anxiety and depression, and I'm still convinced that it had more to do with my fear of failure and disappointing my loved ones than it had to do with anything else.

Although when something bad happens to me, it's always a devastating and troubling wave of bad things happening at the same time, deep down I don't think I'm truly cursed. But I do need to accept that it's just this thing called life. And life sometimes really fucking hurts. But that shall pass too.

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People can turn off not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid. As everyone has observed, there is a mounting level of acceptable violence and sadism in mass culture: films, TV, comics, computer games. Imagery that would have had an audience cringing and recoling in disgust forty years ago is watched without so much as a blink by every teenager in the multiplex. Indeed, mayhem is entertaining rather than shocking to many people in most modern cultures. But not all violence is watched with equal detachment. Some disasters are more apt subjects of irony than others.

Regarding the Pain of Others - Susan Sontag (2003)

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Helena Janecic – "City Gals" series (2011-2012)

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Hayley Williams

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December 1st, 2022 (on grief and displacement)

As far as I can remember, at the age of 24, I have only been to two funerals. Both happened during warm summer days spent in Bosnia. I was just a teenager when I attended the first one to show support to my godmother, who had just lost her grandfather. He was buried in the orthodox fashion. Neighbours, friends and family were present. A priest said a few words, before singing a haunting prayer. Everyone was so quiet and sad. The second one occurred years later, when I was a young adult and my cousins, who live in Bosnia, lost their nana. She was buried in the muslim fashion, a street away from their home. Again, neighbours, friends and family were present. The imam and some of her male relatives prayed for her. The atmosphere was heavy. A lot of people cried and could not stifle their sobs. 

My grandpa, my dad’s dad, died when I was 15, but it is still feels like it only happened yesterday. I remember the moment I learned the news. I had been away for a week on a school trip to England. My grandpa had been sick for a little while and we’d get news over the phone regularly. I was young, so I didn’t think much of it, and my parents just let me be a carefree teenager. The day I got back from that field trip, my mum and my sister came to pick me up. As soon as we got home, I felt something wasn't right. Before we got there, the lights everywhere in the house were off. I asked “Where’s dad?” My mum took me to my room and put down my luggage there. She let me know my grandpa had passed away while I was gone and my dad had gone to Bosnia to take care of things. After that, I think I pretended I had to pee and locked myself in the bathroom to cry. We never were too good about communicating or sharing our feelings. I don’t remember much after that. I just know I felt really sad, but my parents made the choice for me that life had to go on. And so it did, except on the few nights I’m still occasionally hit by grief and I cry.

Death has hit a few other times since then. My grandma lost her sister during Covid, when travelling from France to Bosnia was impossible. I saw her melt in front of my eyes from grief. Only a year later, when they could finally go back, she was given some of her jewellery that she shows me from time to time. “Ovo je od moje Mine.” she tells me.

Then, a week ago, my grandma lost her brother, her only remaining sibling, from a devastating lung cancer. On a Thursday, his son called us to let us know he only had a few days left. My parents started planning a last minute trip to Germany where he lived, so they could see one another one last time, since Covid and old age had made travelling harder than ever, but he decided against it. He died on that Saturday.

"They were lucky to be in the same country when their relative died.” That’s a sick, selfish thought I had when I wrote those first few paragraphs. I try to make sense of things, and think for a second maybe if I got to bury all these people and say goodbye, it’d be easier. Of course, the reality is a lot different and it’s never that easy. As I got old, I realized wars create two types of distance, the geographical one and the emotional one. Because I don’t see my extended family that often, distance makes it hard to connect. If I don’t even get the chance to connect emotionally, it should be easy to handle death when it comes around, right? As a result, when I grieve those close to my heart, I think I mainly grieve what could have been. I grieve the stories I was never told about my parents, or my grandma, or their own life stories. I grieve the fact my sweet grandpa never really got to see me grow up and I never really got to see him get old. He saw me once a year, for a month. And, most of the time, I was too busy being a child running in the street with my friends, except for when he would force me to walk to the store with him so he could buy me all the chocolate in the world. Despite my occasional resistance, despite the little time we spent together, it was a widespread fact in the family that I was, somehow, his favourite grandchild. I always pretend I’m ashamed of it - because grandparents shouldn’t have favourites - but deep down I think I’m proud of it. I always wonder if he’d be proud of me today, were he still around. We both only got a glimpse of what our relationship could have been. I cannot wrap my mind around that kind of injustice.

In therapy, on Tuesday, as I sobbed because I felt like death kept knocking on my door too many times in a really short period and it was becoming inescapable and somehow the world kept spinning and life had to go on, I kept rambling about how impossible it was, because of the fucked systems we’ve created and continue to uphold, to live humanely.  “What if I wanted to stop everything for three weeks or three months to take care of myself? Of my grandparents? To deal with the fact even grief has to take a widely different form for us displaced people, and daughters and granddaughters of displaced people?”  “Why three months or weeks?” she asked. “I don’t know, Julia. Maybe all those years in Catholic school finally paid off and my subconscious can’t help but think about the Holy Trinity!” (Except I don’t actually call her by her first name, but I think it’d be funny if I did.) “But the point is I couldn’t do that!”  “No, you’re right, you couldn’t do that. You can’t stop everything for three months, but you can try to set aside some time to write down what you’re going through and take that time for yourself. You can do little things for your grandparents too. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”

I think all these thoughts and feelings would take more than a regular lifetime to process. But I don’t know what to do with them, so I might as well write about them, as per my therapist’s suggestion. Send them off into the ether. Make them other people’s problem too. Anything to avoid keeping it to myself in my sad brain and dealing with it on my own. 

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Maja Bajevic, Women at Work — Washing Up, 2002, from Harald Szeemann, Blood and Honey: The Future is in the Balkans

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The Clay and the Potter by Aitor Frias & Cecilia Jimen

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MY GIRLS GROW UP SO FAST…. I miss them so much

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Imagine replying THIS to a gay Bosnian woman who’s rightfully mad about Westerners not fully understanding a movie and calling it bad because of their own ignorance AND blocking her afterwards LMAO. That’s embarrassing. Are all Adèle/Portrait stans this insensitive?

I was literally just asking people to be a bit more respectful when talking about a movie which means a lot to people who survived the traumatic situation it deals with lmao. Boze saćuvaj. 

If you’re a non-Bosnian sharing your take on why you think Les Héros Ne Meurent Jamais is bad, all while knowing nothing about Bosnia, its history and its culture, you owe me money. ♡ 

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If you’re a non-Bosnian sharing your take on why you think Les Héros Ne Meurent Jamais is bad, all while knowing nothing about Bosnia, its history and its culture, you owe me money. ♡ 

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LADIES MEME: [½] unfairly hated > lila pitts