I have always thought my identity to be a million little pieces, which could not fit together. I moved to Canada at 11 as Yugoslavian at the beginning of the war. When the war broke up my country, I was forced to try to fit within the Serbian-Canadian community in Canada, being Serbian, this seemed to make sense. However up to that point, I had never been in present day Serbia as I was born and raised in present day Croatia (which during my time both made up Yugoslavia). Yet I was not Croatian, so being part of the Croatian-Canadian community made no sense. Instead, I tried to push aside those Balkan parts of me, trying to fit into a Canadian community. And yet, this also did not fully make sense. Marrying into a completely different culture and having people mistaken me from that group also added another piece. There were all these pieces that seemed to come from different puzzles.
My life has been a journey of realizing they all belong to the same puzzle. I have come to see that I am split apart into many pieces, like my home country was, but these pieces make me who I am. They do not make me broken, instead they make a beautiful mosaic of an identity which is constantly shaping itself to be the truest expression of who I am and what I want to be in any given moment.
Snjezana