Vacation While Genocide

Where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission.

Hvar Town, Hvar Island, Croatia

Note: This article was written in October. I revisited it as a form of a pick-me-up I needed today. You might need it too.

I wasn’t planning to travel this year. My summers are usually spent in Europe with my family, but lately, any sense of joy has taken a backseat to the horrors unfolding in this world. Not just the livestreamed genocide currently happening in Gaza, but the entire West funding, supporting, and justifying it—while preaching morality and the importance of a rules-based order to the world. To me, that is as horrific as the mangled bodies themselves.

The world feels so apocalyptic right now, and planning trips felt like an exhausting task I couldn't handle. All I could muster this past year was waking up, checking my phone, staring in disbelief, researching, posting, eating if necessary, and hunching over the screen—waiting for some miracle to stop this. Then, rinse and repeat the next day.

I've never been on vacation during an active genocide. Can it even be called a vacation, going home? Or is it more like wandering around, questioning why I get to enjoy the land I was born into while others must bleed for it?

Unwell.

I wasn’t doing well, watching children get slaughtered on my screen for over a year now. But why do we keep saying women and children as if male adulthood somehow makes death more acceptable? Do we need to push children into the narrative to spark sympathy for an entire nation being erased before our eyes?

My family and a few intuitive friends, who see beyond the surface of someone’s life, have noticed that I’m scrambling. Being a writer means spending days and weeks on research, which involves confronting the atrocities being committed against the entire population every minute of my day. I’m constantly entrenched in what’s happening in Palestine. I can’t escape it.

Being neurodivergent doesn’t help—I live other people’s pain as if it were my own.

Gaza also made me despise legacy media. Legacy—what a grandiose moniker for something so ugly and deceptive. I’m devastated by how complicit they are in this genocide. The magazines I once adored, admired, and dreamt of writing for have all broken my heart. The country I worked so hard to call my second home has let me down by funding this atrocity. I’ve lost my sense of self, my direction. There were days when I would wake up and no longer know who I was or where I was going.

Core.

When lost, go and get familiar with who you are.

Go back to your core.

A neurodivergent brain means being bothered by constant noise, like someone else’s phone conversations, hearing other people’s music or videos playing on their phones without wearing AirPods, TV noise in the background, beeping sounds, repetitive sounds, sudden sounds, and so on. Most of my day consists of fighting off other people’s noise and trying to regulate my nervous system.

It’s not pretty.

On one particularly loud day, nothing could help. The New York subway is a neurodivergent hell. Out of 10 people, 6 are scrolling their phones without the headset. On the outside, there’s the noise of construction, ambulances, and sirens. My noise-canceling Beats were empty, I forgot to charge them. I was starting to casually—rage.

At that moment, while I was trying to find a quiet spot to lower my cortisol levels (in Manhattan, that’s a non-existent concept), a friend called me. I was agitated, but I particularly like this friend; I didn’t want to reschedule her. We started chatting, and, not sure how—we ended up reminiscing about a TV show we watched as kids. She’s from an island a boat ride away from my home town, a spot I’ve been going to since childhood. We talked about the music we grew up with and the sounds of the beaches where we grew up. She mentioned her favorite stone beach I have to visit, and we talked about our favorite foods, wines, and people. Slowly, my mood began to shift from cortisol-induced frustration to joy.

It was strange—I don’t often shift from despair to pure glee in the span of a single conversation. It wasn’t just the person or the subject but rather how reminiscing about the things I grew up with and the elements that define me helped me reconnect with my core. It reminded me of who I am, where I come from, and what my essence is. I realized that no matter how chaotic the world becomes, the essence of who I am can never be taken away.

Home.

A trip home was way overdue.

So here I am. Writing this from my bed in my mother’s house.

And it’s hard.

Coming home, it’s a double-edged sword.

How can I see all this beauty around me and not feel guilty for those who simply want to live on their own land—a basic human right everyone else in the world is entitled to? How can I enjoy the familiar tastes of food, olives, fish, and the smells of grass, land, air, shore, and sea—knowing some people are labeled terrorists on their own land? How on earth can you be a terrorist on your own land?

The first few days were tough. I hadn’t seen my family in almost two years, and the beginning is always rough until we all adjust to each other again. Just when we finally settle in, it’s time to leave. I’m something of a strange presence to them—an unknown entity that floats into their lives once a year, if we’re lucky. They’ve resigned themselves to the fact that I’m part of the family—not that they have a choice—even though my life is a complete mystery to them.

Others.

I’m at that sweet spot where people message me to stop posting about the genocide in Gaza, while other people message me asking why I haven’t posted anything about Gaza today.

I’m used to it—I’ve always been the kind of person who fits everywhere yet fully belongs nowhere: not quite Croatian, but never entirely American; a girl, but far from girly; a tomboy, but not exactly a feminist. I’m well accustomed to these impossible expectations.

In school, I excelled in languages, literature, art, and math, while also playing two sports, one at a national level—a strange mix of brain functions that don’t typically go hand in hand. Trust me, this isn’t a flex; those who try to do everything often end up achieving not much—other than maybe impressing a few people along the way.

Quest.

As you can tell, I’m on a soul-searching quest. It’s been a hard year. I’m trying to regain myself.

I want you to use this article to soul-search, too.

Coming home always means confronting countless truths—the ones we’re ready to face and those we’d rather ignore. It’s about reconnecting with parents, encountering people we left behind, wandering the streets that shaped us, and stumbling upon things in the home we grew up in, reminders of who we were before the world hardened us.

And if that weren’t enough, enter genocide—unleashed by a lunatic state that not only covets another people’s land but aims to annihilate everyone who doesn’t belong to their kind, while ruining the lives of the people opposing such medieval violence.

Add to this a global superpower that hasn’t gone a single day without dropping bombs somewhere, keeping its citizens in a state of fear to pacify them from demanding universal healthcare, affordable education, and reasonable housing costs. An empire that pits us against each other with identity politics and divisive issues, distracting us from uniting to challenge those in power.

Truth.

By finding some peace of mind back home, I came to a couple of conclusions. Radical truth: the only way out of this labyrinth of violence, gaslighting, lies, manipulation, and injustice is by consistently speaking radical truth, at all times. No matter which side you’re on, what party you belong to, or any other affiliation—just be in a constant search for the most brutally honest truth you can find, and SAY IT. And do it with yourself as well. There’s no change we can create without constant self-reflection, rejection of all tribalism, and an ongoing search for radical truth.

The only way I see us moving forward is by being authentic to the core—by representing an absolute truth within ourselves. I receive messages daily on Instagram from people asking me how I keep going. After everything we've witnessed, how do I find the motivation to move forward? How do I pick myself up from the disappointment of what this world has become? How do I overcome all this hopelessness?

The answer is by being the representation of what you want to see in the world, regardless of not seeing it. By being a constant reminder of radical truth and speaking it out within the system, regardless of who hears you. You have to be an anomaly in this messed-up world, full of lies, deception, violence, and gaslighting us into oblivion. You have to be the link in the chain that breaks this propaganda-induced coma.

This is exactly where I regained my hope and renewed my pursuit of humanity in a deprived and unjust world. I realized that while I may not have the power to end unkindness, injustice, propaganda, and lies on a global scale, I do have the power to disrupt these within myself.

Falsehoods.

I realized that I must exist in a creative space where I continuously confront and highlight the falsehoods surrounding us, reminding myself and those who are willing to listen about the realities of what our governments are endorsing and funding. I must exist in the space where I rebuff legacy media in shaping our perceptions through their extensive control over information.

As these thoughts conceptualized in my mind, I read a brilliant piece by Caitlin Johnstone - We Need Both Outer Work And Inner Work To Truly Free Ourselves. It might be exactly what your soul needs if you, like me, spend most days swinging between we’re completely doomed and we CAN build a better world together:

“It’s just not good enough to blame all our suffering on the system. Doing so just encourages people to keep masturbating their inner wounds on everyone around them instead of growing up and doing the hard, uncomfortable work of becoming a conscious human being.”

“As individuals, none of us have the ability to single-handedly uproot all the unkindness and falsehood in our world, but we can each as individuals uproot the unkindness and falsehood within ourselves. And by doing so we make the world a kinder and more truthful place by just that much, because we tended the little plot of land we were given—our own personal slice of the human plight—with care and responsibility.”

“What matters is your intention to uproot any untruth and disharmony within yourself, and a sincere curiosity about where such things might exist within you.”

Seeing.

“Clear perception is what moves things toward health, and the lack of clear perception is what keeps things in dysfunction.” — Caitlin Johnstone

“Seeing is the first step toward health, which is why every unhealthy aspect of humanity does everything it can to avoid it. We will not have a healthy world until we become a conscious species, and we will not become a conscious species until we all have unrestricted perception, both inwardly and outwardly.”

Truly seeing the world and all the falsehoods around us is the concept with which we all must operate. We must never again allow ourselves to lose focus, get sidetracked, or fall into hopelessness due to the brutality of those who rule us, making us submit.

Where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission, which I believe is immoral.” — Edward Said

We simply cannot afford to succumb to hopelessness. That’s precisely why the ruling class conducts their atrocities in full view of the public—to make us feel disoriented and powerless, as if we can’t affect change within the system. Their strategy is to instill a sense of futility, driving us to retreat into the manageable aspects of our lives. Neither we nor the Palestinian people under siege can afford our hopelessness.

I expand on this in one of my previous articles.

Uprooting the Unkindness and Falsehood Within Ourselves

Mount of Olives, East Jerusalem, Palestine

As I’m finishing this article, the smell of seafood pasta slaps me from my mother's kitchen. “You have to come now, this food is worthless if it gets cold!” she yells. “Coming,” I respond, knowing all too well she’ll say this six more times before I actually come. We sit at the table, and I pull out a bottle of olive oil that my friend from the beginning of this article gifted me, cultivated by her family, for my mother. It’s packed in a homemade soda bottle, and if you know anything about olive oil, you know those homemade bottles in completely inappropriate containers are the world’s treasures.

After lunch, I’ll walk down to the beach below my house to meet my father, jump in the sea with him, and talk trash about his friends who are annoying him, while they stand next to us

In the evening, I’ll walk around the famous Roman Empire palace, 1800 years old, built by Emperor Diocletian. Walking on those stones always connects me to the history that transpired here. It’s a place woven into the souls of every single citizen of this town.

Every single step I took during my visit home recovered my ailing heart. Everyone that noticed I wasn’t doing well with covering what’s happening in Gaza for the whole year, was right—getting in touch with your roots is what every soul on this earth needs.

Land.

Now, why do all of us, every single person on earth—have this privilege, this right, the most basic human right of all; all of us but the Palestinian people?

Why do I get to enjoy all this, while they cannot? They get shot at if they fish too far into the sea, their olive trees are uprooted, their houses are stolen, their kids are arrested, abused, kidnapped, or killed, and they cannot enjoy the land they were born on. And all of this, just because some other people decided that, instead of sharing the land, their safety depends on destroying the people who were already there.

Spending time on my land, made me weep for their inability to cultivate, live, own, and enjoy theirs—even more.