Early November. London. I was there for the launch of The Erotic Review’s second volume. No, not the escort review site. Yes, the legendary cultural journal. I interviewed a dress. But that’s not what I’m here to write about today.
I knew my period was close. I knew the US elections were 5 November. I knew my flight back home from Heathrow to Serbia was 5 November. Inspired by a post-WW2 era image commemorating the teamwork of the USA, UK, USSR, and the partizans of Yugoslavia who collectively liberated Yugoslavia from Hitler’s Nazis, I had booked a photoshoot with one of my absolute favorite photographers I’d never worked with—AJ Hamilton, known on Instagram as The Togfather. I didn’t even ask about trade—I knew what I wanted to shoot, and when one person is art directing it’s hardly ever a real collaboration—I asked what we could get done for what I could afford to pay. Creatively, AJ was picking up what I was putting down—this thread of unity despite difference. Togetherness in spite of past rifts. AJ was an absolute joy to work with. Outrageously talented. Clear, direct, yet soft communication. No energy was wasted.
On the way to the airport I felt awful. All the physical weight of PMS, all the emotional instability of the same, and all of that emotion focused on what was going to happen in my country of origin. Would the majority's decision be counted swiftly? Would there be delays? Turmoil? Protests? Riots? Insurrections? The last two items on that list were inconceivable in America before January 2020. We literally didn’t conceive of them as potential outcomes. Sure, these things happened in other countries, but in the US they weren’t even on the radar for anyone who wasn’t a highly specialized analyst. Now they were significantly possible options on the table.
The plane was about to board but I had to pee. In the stall, blood fell out of my vagina and spiraled around the toilet bowl. I was not prepared. I wadded up a fistful of toilet paper in my underwear and went back to the gate to see whether there was time to run to a drugstore and buy something purposefully suited to the situation. Patrick did the running for me, while I used my limited vocabulary to explain to the Air Serbia agents that they just needed to wait like two more minutes please, because I have my period but I didn’t know I would, and yes I was at the gate but I wouldn’t board until my boyfriend came back but really I promised he would be there any second now.
As we walked into the plane I said “It’s not an omen”.
It was an omen.
I woke up the next day to results so stark that there was no question. Trump would once again be president, and J.D. Vance would be VP. I had client sessions to attend to. I put my own feelings aside and focused on work. Once I’d run out of work, though, I had to deal with what I was feeling.
There’s a restaurant in Stari Grad that I’ve been coming to since 2015. The head waiter always remembers me—reportedly, because I am kind, and because I tip. I always remember the restaurant because they are kind, and they are patient with my Serbian. They let me use the language I have, even when that means an interaction takes longer. They noticed, over the years, as my command of the language improved, and gave me positive reinforcement. That restaurant feels safe and cozy to me. They also make a good salmon fillet and have a decent selection of wine.
I stopped on the way to buy a pack of real cigarettes. I felt the situation called for it.
I Instagrammed a selfie. Many of the comments were commiseration, many were neutral, and some were of the “pwn the libs” variety. Lately I have to wonder about the latter category. Are these real people expressing real political stances? Are they bots directed by one government or another? Are they trolls, out to cause turmoil wherever possible? Bots directed by trolls?
At some point Patrick came by. We moved to a tiny bar around the corner from my apartment. I wanted to dance. Patrick asked why I wanted to dance. I told him I’d seen some studies which show that dancing is more effective for depression than pharmaceuticals. He scoffed. I hastily googled and texted him the first two that came up—one studying the general population and the other studying the elderly. Outmaneuvered by statistics interpreted into charts, he agreed to dance.
The thing is, I never learned how to follow, and he only knows tango.
So, there we were in a bar with five small tables, populated by a mix of people ranging from majstori with concrete dust still smeared on their overalls to businessmen in suits. Dancing. About to fall down the stairs. Stepping all over each others’ feet. Successfully avoiding bumping into strangers. Amusing the bar owner, who is a sweetheart and, much like the staff at the aforementioned restaurant, patient with my Serbian.
It was what I needed, at the time.
To circle back to the (people? lines of code?) who thought I was a lib and wanted to pwn me, I’m a political magpie. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. My positions are generally “I don’t keep up with this closely enough to have the kind of nuance necessary to discuss policy”, or “I’m going to defer to Ash who does follow these things closely”, and, most importantly, “What does this mean for the lives of the individual people in the US and outside of it, including myself?”
The way democracy works in the United States leaves a lot of marginalized people vulnerable. The example I’m most familiar with is sex workers. But I don’t have a better way. I can’t conceive of a system that is fair to everyone. I do have a frustration that critiques of the current system are met with implications that the person doing the critiquing should have some perfect replacement worked out. Nothing is perfect. Nothing will ever be perfect. And we need to be able to say “hey, we’ve left out this group over here” or “maybe this could be polished up a little” and have an actual conversation in good faith.
Ash maintains that I’m probably a socialist democrat. Think early 2020s Elizabeth Warren. Think FDR, whose museum I visited on my last trip back to New York. Stakeholder capitalism is the closest framework to the way I run my companies and have run my career since I had the autonomy to choose the hows of my work. And the scale of a company is the largest system I can wrap my head around. I don’t know if the ways I handle my business would function at the size of any country, much less one as massive, sprawling, and infinitely multicultural as the United States of America. I’m specialized in other areas. How countries should be run is not my department. It’d be nice if the people specialized in politics could figure something out.
The political beliefs of my friends and family span the spectrum. And I’ve happily written for libertarian magazine Reason a few times, as libertarians are one of the few groups whose beliefs align with what sex workers need. But when it comes to politics, I’m just tired. There’s too much noise, there’s too much headline engineering to understand what’s happening on the ground in the US. I visit once a year, and my friends there are also tired. Excluding Ash, they’d all prefer to talk about anything else. I don’t know enough to have an opinion. But, oh boy howdy, did I have feelings.
When the red wine hangover cleared and the PMS madness lifted, I made my selections from AJ’s photos. I questioned whether my creative impulse was too naive. Whether I should release these photos today, as planned, when they will have a political connotation to them due to temporal context, or wait until some random day in, I don’t know, June.
So here is my naiveté. My hope. My open, bleeding heart that just wants all of us to be as ok as we can be. To have the strength to support each other despite difference. To have the emotional fortitude to allow people whose lives we disagree with to continue, as long as they aren’t significantly hurting others. The ability, if we feel we’d be better off somewhere else, to go there. And the capacity, if we cannot or will not leave, to stay and do more than survive. I fear the worst, and I dream of the best.
To all my friends who’ve been asking, and to the subscribers here, I’ve got an explanation of what it’s been like to be an expat in the works. So go ahead and get your questions in, and I’ll do my best to address them. The short version is that everywhere has upsides and downsides, and it’s about choosing the set of pros and cons that works best for you.