From my earliest days of preschool, I have found myself at the crossroads of two worlds, cultural and linguistic. “Truck”, the teachers would insist, pointing to a plastic toy, beckoning me to repeat. “Kamion”, I always replied, being confused at what they wanted of me. I referred to the object with the word my parents, first generation immigrants, had taught me, and was confused when the others around me could not understand. For each “truck”, I would shake my head, point to the toy, and say “kamion”; I felt like an island floating in a sea of words I could not understand, hoping in vain to receive a similar response, one that would alleviate my loneliness. Alas, this never happened, as my stubborn three year old self invariably tried to make everyone else learn my language instead of accepting that I was the odd one out. 

Tired of this linguistic conflict, my parents decided to put me into a new preschool. Here, rather  than scolding me for not speaking English, the teachers were supportive and encouraged me to continue speaking my own language at home. They worked with me rather than against me, and as I learned English at school, I soon gained something I had never had before: friends. I began conversing with them, speaking English in a casual setting for the first time. All of this helped lead me to my next linguistic discovery; I learned to read, and this rapidly became my favorite pastime. I devoured books, even long novels that far exceeded my knowledge of English, but this only served to help me learn more words and expressions I would not have come across otherwise. The library soon became a daily haven, and I would bring back bags full of books I had not yet read, stories yet to be explored. By the end of the year, I was fascinated with English, in both print and speech, and understood and spoke the language quite well. However, this came with a downside: having limited access to books in my old language, my vocabulary began to deteriorate; even at home, English started to overshadow it. 

As kindergarten drew closer, my parents were told that, hailing from a bilingual family, I would have to attend an English as a second language program. I felt betrayed—I spoke English near perfectly, but was being put into a program with students who truly did not understand it, and instead formed cliques based on their language: Russians, Armenians, Hispanics, and Israelis. As my own language, Serbian, was extremely uncommon, I once again found myself alone but quickly gained solace in reading, my one true companion. English became further ingrained in me, further cemented in my mind, and for several years, my grasp of our native tongue slipped further and further out of sight, a fading glimmer of my past, only being rejuvenated by our annual trips to our old country. Still, as those trips grew fewer and farther apart and I developed more friendships and connections here, I realized I had little comprehension left of the language of my heritage. As our first post-pandemic trip loomed ahead, I felt scared, and guilty that I had forgotten it. I came to the resolution that I had to relearn it, and indeed did so. I retaught myself many intricacies of the language, and even the sounds I had never learned to pronounce in the first place—palatalization, noun genders, cases, conjugation. On that trip, I had my most thorough and pure understanding of Serbian yet, untainted by the eclipsing spread of English in me, and I learned more from simply being immersed in the culture and language around me than I had ever known before.

And now, I yearn to continue my reintroduction to the language and culture I had repressed so long ago. I learned the alphabet, something I had neglected for the sake of the Latin one. I whisper and recite the Cyrillic alphabet, speak words with sounds I had forgotten how to make over and over again to myself as a way of becoming convinced I knew how to speak my old tongue, and to prevent it from leaving me again. English brought me friends and Serbian kept me connected to family, and so I hope to find semblance of myself in both cultures and to strike a delicate balance, rather than a conflict, between the two worlds I belong to, perhaps forging my own true identity in the process.