From the diary of a Balkan housewife

This is not a manifesto. It is not a theory. It is a Tuesday.

The order is changing. Everywhere. Democracy is retreating, authoritarianism is advancing, universities are losing autonomy, public discourse is coarsening, and women are expected to keep performing as if the ground beneath them were not shifting. The global turn towards strongmen politics, the erosion of civic space, the defunding of education and culture, none of this is abstract. It lands in the body. It lands in the schedule. It lands in the Tuesday.

There are no benefits for women like me. And by women like me, I do not mean only women in the Balkans or the semi-periphery. I mean women in academia in Bologna and Berlin and Birmingham too, women in education in São Paulo and Seoul, women everywhere who are told the system is meritocratic while the system is rigged. No structural support, no policy that accounts for the fact that we are expected to be excellent at everything simultaneously. Career. Motherhood. Domestic labour. Intellectual production. Nobody asks whether it is possible to be the best in all the roles that contemporary society assigns us. Nobody asks because the answer would be inconvenient. We are supposed to want the career and the children and the publications and the clean house and the grant applications and the conference papers and the intimacy and the creativity and the civic engagement. All of it. At once. Without pause.

And what I want, what so many women I know want, is simply more time. More time with our children without the nervousness, without the guilt of the unfinished paper sitting in another tab, without the awareness that the h-index waits for no one. I would like to sit with my son and not be mentally drafting an abstract. I would like to read my daughter a story without calculating how many citations I still need this year. But I cannot. Because the system demands output. Constant, measurable, indexed output. Publications. Projects. More projects. Evaluations. Reports. Impact factors. Women in academia are in a state of permanent burnout and it is still, still, barely spoken about. Not in Belgrade. Not in Brussels. Not anywhere loudly enough. As if naming it would break the spell. As if we would all stop performing at once and the whole machinery would collapse. Which, perhaps, it should.

But we don’t stop. We can’t. All the roles. All the time. Omnipotent. Robots. The game does not end. There is no final whistle. There is only the next task, and the one after that, and the version of yourself you perform for each context: the nurturing mother, the rigorous scholar, the patient wife, the dutiful daughter-in-law, the engaged citizen. Somewhere underneath all of them, a woman who hasn’t slept properly in years. And she is not only in my city. She is in yours too.

The feminist discourse on burnout often arrives from contexts where there is, at least nominally, a safety net. Parental leave. Affordable childcare. Functional public transport. Breathable air. But that safety net is fraying everywhere now. I write from the Balkans, where the word “sustainability” circulates in EU project applications while the river runs grey and the heating season coats the city in particulate matter so thick you taste it. But colleagues in other countries complain about other things. The details differ. The exhaustion does not. Where academic merit is a punchline and connections are the currency, that is no longer a Balkan condition. It is a global one. And the students everywhere, beautiful, furious, young, are beginning to understand this.

Rest. What is rest. I don’t know what rest looks like when the world is unravelling and you are supposed to be both witness and participant, both scholar and mother, both critical and functional. I have two freezers and I still threw out the rabbit stew because I forgot. Because I was doing 10 other things. Because the cognitive load of a woman in a collapsing order is not a metaphor for anything. It is just the load.

The poem that follows is not academic. It is what happens when the essay breaks down. When the argument loses its thread because the thread was never single to begin with. It moves between the kitchen and the climate, between the bus and the ballot, between cancer and lipstick, between exhaustion and protest. It does not offer a framework. It offers a Tuesday. And a Wednesday. And the space between them where something, rage, tenderness, stubbornness, refuses to go quiet.

The additional stanzas woven between the diary fragments come from an older body of work, poems about roads, vision, whiteness, searching, and they function here as interruptions. Breaths. Or the opposite of breaths. The moments when the mind escapes the list of obligations and lands somewhere stranger, somewhere that doesn’t yet have a name.

If rest is resistance, then perhaps so is this: the refusal to be coherent on command. The insistence on a fragment. The poem as a form of striking, not against work, but against the expectation that we hold it all together, gracefully, while the air smells like coal.

* * *

Everyone’s dying of cancer

Is this the new epidemic

How far has medicine come

Not very far it seems

Every day they die

There’s no cure

When they tell you you have cancer

They’ve handed you a death sentence

So now go figure out how to make friends with metaphysics and epistemology

* * *

Some time ago I made rabbit stew

Hey, rabbit stew

That’s so rare

And we’re not hunters

And it made me sad

To think

That it was some poor little bunny

And I used to be vegan

And I thought plants were the way

But they’re not

And it’s not sustainable

Even though sustainability is all the buzz

They’ve always hunted rabbits

We’ve always eaten meat

Actually we ate everything

We humans

That tough species

Whatever was around

But I threw the stew out in the end

Because they didn’t eat it

And a few days had passed

and hungry mouths in every land, through every age the same

Because the rich keep getting richer

And there are fewer and fewer of them

The earth is expanding or shrinking

I don’t know

The stew was good

* * *

I am not, I will not, I do not know

Imagination is voracious, a blood-thirsty beast

West of the tree, the white shines white

Yet not a tooth to whiten

Whiten me with resurrection

The whiteness will bleach itself white

* * *

We believers in democracy

That beautiful ideal rule

We’ve allowed fools

To govern us everywhere

And it’s not the Middle Ages

And it’s not a parade of court jesters

* * *

I have to

I’m rushing

I’m fast

I think to myself

Like a gazelle

I can get to everything

Or maybe I have a few clones

That I hide in the closet

* * *

I have to get up

I’m sleepy

I have to get up

I’m sleepy

I have to drive him to nursery

I have to drive them to school

I have to go shopping

I have to make lunch

I have to give my lectures

I have to finish the project

I have to have sex with my husband

It’s been a while

I have to love art

I have to be creative

I have to be a good daughter

Mother

Daughter-in-law

Wife

Professor

Scientist

Mentor

Friend

Citizen

How does one become all of that?

How does one pull all of that off?

* * *

That there ahead

Is not a road

Or is it right a trace

Or is it left a sign

* * *

I hate riding the bus

The air is stale

It’s claustrophobic

There are too many strange passengers

I don’t want to sit next to anyone

I want to be alone

I want a different means of transport

But I don’t have enough money

And I have to get to work

It’s far

* * *

Still, my irises wander,

Chasing elusive contours,

Of cerulean hue,

Yearning to discover their genesis.

* * *

No rain for months

I’m scared

No snow for years

I’m scared

Everyone around me uses water as if it’s a resource that can’t run out

They’re not scared

Because they don’t understand

They don’t believe the climate has changed

It’s easier for them than for me

They don’t trouble their brains

Whatever happens, happens

* * *

No it is not

A road is an invented

Line

A road is an imagined

Search

* * *

Everyone burns coal

I don’t know if you know

How much it stinks

I don’t know if you know how harmful it is

But nothing changes

Every winter is the same

My skin stinks

My hair stinks

My clothes stink

I stink

What’s the point of lipstick

* * *

Like lovers penned in ancient tomes

or figures dancing through dreams spun from stardust

we are characters in a narrative crafted by fate itself.

* * *

They say you need connections

For this and for that

I won’t do it that way

I want someone to recognize me

For my work and my merit

Hm

They laugh at us

That doesn’t exist

Find a connection

* * *

That there behind

Is it a road

Or is it memory

Or destiny

No it is not

No it is not

Yes it is

Only

* * *

In the place where vision widens,

splendor does not fade:

it deepens,

it multiplies,

when we learn

to open.

* * *

We walk. We stop. We blow our whistles.

We hold up banners. Witty. Catchy.

We fight. It’s time.

We jump. We sing. The flag is waving. Young beautiful faces. Old beautiful faces.

Everyone.

We believe.

Only this way.

Maybe it can.

Change.