Undergraduate / "Angry Serbian Women"- Common Application Essay [4]

Common App: Topic of Your Choice

"Лука, дете, пробуди се и одговори на питање!" ("Luka, wake up and answer the question!"), said the ominous shadow that accompanied my initial jolt into consciousness. There she stood, terror incarnate, fear itself, a shriveled but tall figure hidden behind a veneer of blanching powder and cracked lipstick. Why had I been daydreaming during a lecture when my insolence not only invoked the wrath of a disgruntled Serbian woman, but resulted in having to speak in front of a classroom in which I felt utterly alien?

I was ten when my parents decided to move back to their home country of Serbia. Brought up in a distinctly Serbian household, I was accustomed to my native language, culture, cuisine, etc., but was naturally petrified of moving overseas. I had visited relatives there each year since roughly the age of two, but had in no way fully mastered the language or developed some deeper social skills other than the ability to colloquially greet an elder or accept a compliment. Frankly, it was a terrifying prospect. No manner of prolific introspection can accurately describe a child's fear of the unknown or the feeling of losing all structure normally provided by one's parents, home, school, and country. But I had never before waved a flag. I had never considered myself one piece of a larger, greater whole. Even so, whatever titular feelings I had at that time were about to be wholeheartedly and succinctly stripped of me. Serbia's bizarre and foreign environment threw into the water the cultural balance I created for myself in order to marginally belong to Vernon, New Jersey.

My assimilation into Serbian society, though tremulous, was not as unfathomably difficult as expected. My return to America two years later was.

Following my parents' divorce, my mother and I returned to the US and to the same environment in which I had spent a considerable amount of my childhood. But all was not the same. Utterly dislodged now from even America, I found myself unable to interact with my fellow peers as I once did. It was as though my previous eccentricities had been, unbeknownst to me, amplified by this newfound cultural identity that engaged in an effective symbiosis with the very characteristics that had originally set me so far apart from others. Since then, I have strived to perfect the illusion of normalcy and conformity. I have been developing my mask, or rather masks. I have fashioned the plaster and picked the right paints. I have framed both the dimensions of myself and those of others in order to, almost seamlessly, travel between two worlds- to, when no longer able to be alone, step out of myself and into one of the hollow shells I have created. But I sincerely believe that I will have no need for such meticulously constructed veneers in the next stage of my life; I shall find individuals to whom I can show the neglected essence of myself. These next four years will be the true spring of my life. I shall blossom. I shall thrive.

"Mr. Dragutinovic, how's that nap treating you? Would you be so kind as to explain to the class what Philip Roth cites as the reasons we have such a propensity for totalitarianism, in "The Plot Against America?" Alright, deep breath-I've got it, this time.