Digital Dugme

I write to you today empty-handed, after weeks of silence. This space (my public record of everything I’ve been learning) came to a halt, like a car stalling out on the highway.

I share this as a reminder of how necessary it is to live in your own truth. I don’t feel the same way I did when I first wrote the entry below, it feels like ages ago, though only a few weeks have passed.

Writing is hard, I admit it. But each time I push through that weight, I find my way back to the curious, unapologetic mind I’m grateful to call mine.

So yes, the next post is coming (a smoke break with an elephant in Travnik, Bosnia —stay tuned).

For now, my past self is waiting below these lines, ready to share how I worked through the block and what it felt like to write with so much pressing down. Two events, in particular, made it nearly impossible to find the words, and that is where the story begins.

The First News: A Highway Through Our Home

A highway is being built through the very villages I’ve written about here before.

This unsettled me deeply, but what weighed even heavier was watching my parents face losing their home in Bosnia again. First to war, and now to construction. The homes, the fields, the plum trees, the grapevines curling over balconies —all threatened with erasure, while our relatives and neighbours remain to watch it slowly unravel.

Being the youngest in a large family comes with many privileges, but it also means I witness things my siblings who live far away may not: my parents aging, their routines a little slower, their lives a little gentler. This news about the highway made them look different to me, not the pillars I had always known them to be, but more like the twenty-year-olds they once were, vulnerable and afraid. Most of the people who lived through the war years alongside them are now gone. It is only their children left to offer sympathy, fumbling to comfort them through something we can never fully understand.

Only recently have I realized how much my writing has flowed from my visits to that home. I hesitated to post this, but sharing here felt natural. I know many others have faced similar losses, and I appreciate the readers of these entries who sit with me in this space. Even when my creative side feels muted. 

The Second News: The Garden That Carries On

Grief and passion are similar feelings to me. Together, they disrupted my creative downtime.

Being the youngest is obviously outside of my control, yet it’s shaped me in ways I can’t ignore. In the first news, it meant watching my parents age differently than my siblings do, carrying fears they may never fully see. And it expands further still: a soft, unspoken fear that I’ll outlive the stories, the voices, the laughter. That I’ll be the last one left, holding the memories of what it all once felt like. The second news has made me feel that fear up close.

Just one week before my grandmother passed, we danced and listened to music, as we always did. Her death was unexpected, and it stunned me. She had known me not only as a child but also as an adult, because I had lived with her my entire life. We shared a quiet friendship, often trading songs at night, humming along together, and lighting up when we recognized the same lyrics.

When I was little, I’d spin around the basement in my socks, the music bouncing off the walls. Sometimes I’d drag her in, and we’d laugh as we twirled across the laminate floors. In summer, the dance moved outside. I’d skip through rows of strawberries and tomatoes, the garden alive with music. But that ritual didn’t stay in childhood. We still did it. Even when I was grown.

After she passed, I decided to keep her greenhouse going —five times the size of the garden box I used to tend to on my own. When spring returned and the frost lifted, the soil gave way, ready to be turned. I didn’t want to rip out the plants she had cared for. It felt like I was undoing her life. I wanted to lie down in the dirt and let time stop.

But I didn’t.

Because grief, as I’ve learned, sometimes pushes you through instead of under. Every day, I came back. I dug. I watered. Slowly, it stopped feeling like undoing and started to feel like continuation. Like she had handed me something without needing to say it aloud.

One afternoon, my neighbour walked over to our fence and asked, gently, “Where’s your grandmother?” I froze. It was the first time I had to say it (like really say it). A few weeks later, she saw me again and smiled: “It’s admirable, seeing you here every day after everything.”

That stayed with me. Because sometimes, routine isn’t just habit, it’s love in action.

Not long ago, I finally turned the music back on in the garden. I danced, beneath the same sun we used to share. My home feels emptier than it’s ever been, and yet somehow, I didn’t feel grief. 

Grief and passion have become the same feeling to me. And yes, together they’ve disrupted my creative downtime, but I’m alright with that. Because even in the pause, something else has been taking root…

The Highway Cuts Through, the Garden Still Grows

Standing in that garden, I realized it was more than a place of grief: it was a mirror of what I was learning about maintaining a life in a shared home with my family. Just as I had to learn to tend to what my grandmother left behind, my parents are learning how to face the slow unmaking of their village, their house, their past.

Over the past weeks, I’ve tried to remind them of a few things:

• The families still living in Bosnia deserve functionality, and that comes with new roads, while our house (now mostly unoccupied) is not a home we are being forced to leave.
• Though the land is precious, it is material. Our life in Canada is safe, unthreatened, and full. We’ve inherited parts of our identity without carrying all of its harshest vulnerabilities.

So maybe this is what creative block really is: sitting with discomfort long enough until it sharpens into something nameable. For me, it’s a reminder of how much my creativity has grown out of two homes I may never see the same way again. And what a privilege it is to say so.

But writing here takes time. And my life has picked up. These posts have been fun to write, and I’ve learned so much about how to improve my writing. For now, it’s time for a pause.

Creativity isn’t gone! It’s only pulled over for a moment. Until then, thank you for reading, and for letting me dance here again, even if only in words.