Lost in Translation

On collapse, translation, and belonging

Stories of collapse and rupture surround us. The language of crisis is everywhere — and yet for some of us, this terrain is not new. Collapse has been the air we learned to breathe, the ground that shifted beneath us long before it began to shift for others. If I am to speak from where I stand now, I have to go back to where the ground first gave way.

It is early June 1991. I am in a small village in Istria with friends from university. Days stretch long and golden. We ride bikes through narrow roads lined with stone walls. We kiss under pine trees that leave resin on our hands. We swim in a still, cold sea that makes us gasp, laugh, and feel invincible. We are barely in our twenties, spending a week by the coast before final exams. It is an ordinary life in a country that still exists.

By the end of that month, the war in Yugoslavia will begin, and our lives will be shattered forever.

I do not know yet that I am living the last days of the life I was born into. I do not know that within weeks there will be empty shelves and endless queues, money losing value between morning and night, passports no longer opening doors. I do not know that the boys I laugh with will disappear — some leaving, some hiding, some never to return. I do not know that my identity will be reassigned to me, that I will be told who I am because of the city I was born in.

I will protest the war for years. I will wake up and fall asleep to news of cities I know being shelled. I will carry shame that this war is fought against people who were, until yesterday, my own. I will want to escape, to wake up somewhere else, to return to a normal life that no longer exists.

Two years later, I will leave, believing I am choosing a person and a new life, not just running away. I will carry hope in my body and grief I do not yet recognise. I will come back to what was home so many times over the years, but I will never return.

I still don’t know, getting on that plane, that I will spend the next 30 years roaming the world, trying to find my place. I still don’t know that where I grew up will never feel like home again, that I will slowly become a stranger in my own family. I still don’t know that the world I left my country for, trying to belong, will cost me everything. I still don’t know that the years I decide to find my way back to myself will cost me the world I have built, the stories, the friendships, the identity that replaced the one I left at the ashes of what was my country.

I will wake up years later in New York, on a sunny April morning of 2016, in one of the many houses I have lived in over the years, and find a stranger looking back at me in the mirror. A stranger I had to become to survive in a world that had nothing to do with the one I grew up in.

I will go for a long walk by the Hudson that morning, remembering those early immigration years — Sweden, Canada, the US, the UK, back and forth across two continents. How impossible the gap felt between the world I left behind and the world I found myself in. How absolute the demand was to accept a completely new system, where my reality, my way of being, my understanding of the world was being translated all the time.

From the first hello and the inevitable question, always, of “Where are you from?” — to strangers explaining the war I had left behind, never asking — to my therapist in San Francisco telling me I had not adjusted — to my kindergartener asking why I couldn’t be like other American mothers.

Everywhere I went, the evidence of my otherness was overwhelming.

Traveling back to what used to be home never provided relief either. What was once my country didn’t exist anymore. What replaced it never felt like home. It was becoming harder and harder to relate to friends, family, even my parents.

I spoke the languages fluently, yet I was always translating myself — both in the west and in the east. I will remember a moment just after September 11, when European friends started to leave the US, and I finally had to face the reality: I had no home to return to.

Walking that day, I will remember years when my assimilation became almost complete, when my insides were rearranged to create a new me — one that for many years felt like the real one, until it didn’t.

For over 20 years, I lived that existence — school, marriage, two kids, a career, succeeding beyond my wildest dreams. The system and the people around me always assumed the same starting point, the same references, the same values. I was accepted as one of them, and the translation continued, always in one direction.

Impermanence was the only constant. I learned over the years how to live with a series of masks, depending on where I was, how to find safety in anonymity, how to feel at home only in between places, never on arrival.

In the days to come that April, I will decide to leave my career, searching for the me I lost in the war and in all those years of becoming someone people around me could accept and relate to. I will learn in the years to come that people will not easily give up the version of me they got to know and love. Belonging was conditioned on playing the role they approved of. People were interested in my transformation as long as it didn’t challenge their own narrative. Overnight, I didn’t belong in my old corporate world, not with my friends, not in the world of transformation or even art. The identities I built for survival were no more. And my otherness was everywhere. There was no hiding anymore.

Seven years into breaking myself apart, I took myself out of the game completely, leaving London to travel, learn, and get to know myself outside of any references that were still holding me together — with the sole purpose of meeting this woman who had spent her whole adult life translating herself for others.

The travels took me all around the world — South America, Europe, North Africa, Japan — each encounter an opportunity to let go of what still held me in place and allow the world to meet me as I was.

As I embarked on that journey, my dad had a stroke, the relationship I was in ended, and for the first time, I understood how much of myself I had been translating — even with my children.

For the next three years, I faced the emptiness left after the collapse. The grief that followed once the illusions were gone. I learned how much adaptation, resilience, and creativity I had deployed to survive, to reimagine my life over and over. Slowly and patiently, I learned how to love all of me. To stop translating. To let myself be misunderstood.

Time with my dad proved pivotal — we found a way to walk each other home — him to his final resting place, me back to a new life slowly unfolding on my own terms. Time with my kids was painful at times and filled with regret, but slowly we learned how to find a language large enough for the different paths we were on.

On my travels, I met others who, like me, had never known stable ground. I travelled to places broken by history, where people had learned to work with the cracks of what remained. In those places, I didn’t need to translate myself. Even when the language was different, the understanding was immediate. I was held by their kindness, curiosity, and generosity. They moved me and gave me hope that we will endure this, too.

Back in London, I face my old world without translation for the first time. Some still explain my reality back to me.

And then there are the others.

We recognise each other by the maps tattooed on our skin. Wherever we come from, our stories and values form an intricate tapestry of knowledge. For us, the world was never not broken.

The people arriving at collapse hardest right now — the most disoriented, the most urgent in their questions — are those who have never had to navigate it before. And the response, so far, is to centre that disorientation.

To produce the frameworks, the ways of making sense of it from within the same dominant grammar that is itself collapsing.

I spent years not saying where I was from to avoid being lectured about my own country by people whose knowledge of it came from CNN. Thirty years later, the pattern holds.

The lived knowledge of collapse — from all the communities that have known rupture for decades — is still not what the system turns toward in its moment of crisis. Instead, it still explains itself to itself. This is how dominant systems reproduce themselves in their own unraveling.

What the system never understood is that we have never wanted or needed to be saved. That our experiences — the daily, unrecognised work of holding ourselves together inside rupture — were never something to be fixed, changed to fit a narrative, or included as footnotes in someone else’s understanding of reality.

The maps already exist. The people who carry them are already here.

The question is whether the world can learn from the people it chose not to see.