being bosnian can be so exhausting because sometimes im bosniak and sometimes im bosnian and in the eyes of nationalists i am a turk or a serb muslim with serb ancestors and im harassed by 17 year old chetniks who were taught the same hateful rhetoric their parents learned from nationalists and some days i do not feel like a real person with a culture and history because of everything that has been stolen from me and the nationalists have gotten a little too good at gaslighting bosniaks and telling me my language doesnt exist and it just feels like modern day genocide thats violent but not in a physical sense and some days i feel so ground in my identity, like when im presenting a project on settler colonialism in RS and my classmates look at me and say, ”this is powerful,” and ”thank you for teaching me—i never knew,” and it eases the sharp bite of pain driven by a wedge in my skull and i feel like who i am supposed to be: a bosniak, teaching my peers about my history and who i couldve been if it werent for war
