I’ve avoided this for a long time – as long as I possibly could. But I think it’s time to face the truth. For too long now, I’ve been afraid to use my own voice.
From a young age, my voice was stifled. My choices and freedom were taken away. My power was dimmed, and a lot of times – it felt like my light was no longer there. As a young child in a war zone, my spirit broke at an early age. The message I got from the world was that I didn’t belong here. I didn’t deserve to take up space, and I didn’t even deserve to exist, let alone be alive. Even after the war, my parents coming from two backgrounds, I never fit in, and felt like an outcast in my own home. I was pushed onto my knees until I walked for miles with blood flowing down my legs…all because of who I was. What family I was born into. What ethnicity I was, and the religion my parents chose to (or not to) practice. The true country I was born into – Yugoslavia, wasn’t like that. It was all accepting, loving, and united. It was free.
That is, until someone else decided to stir the pot and turn people on each other. And suddenly, after the war, the country was mostly Muslim, and full of hate and division. Everyone cared what religion the other was, even though they never once thought about it before. They cared because someone else told them to care. They cared because they were programmed into hate and violence by others, for their own profit and greed. I watched my people slaughter each other, as a result. I watched and listened as we were bombed and shelled over 300 times a day. That’s when I truly lost my voice and my power, and in many ways, that part of me has been lost since.
Through sharing, through writing, I hope to slowly recover and reclaim that part. As I have been healing the traumas of war, poverty, starvation, hate and violence…I have started to reconnect with that child within me. The little girl who had to watch her own people kill each other, simply because someone else told them it was the right thing to do. The little girl who internalized the war, and instead of simply watching it externally, took it into her being, and manifested an even bigger war within her own body. And slowly, on my healing journey, while I’m nowhere near where I’d like to be…I know that little girl deserves her voice back. And this is just the start of reclaiming it for her.