A lot of you are new here lately — and many of you found me through my Balkan / Slavic / first-gen corner of the internet 🥹❤️ so I figured it was probably time to properly introduce myself.
Hi, I’m Jelena 👋🏼 — a first-generation born Serbian-American living in NYC — and if I’m being honest, a big part of the past year has been about coming back to myself and my Serbian heritage.
I’ve spent most of my life being more comfortable behind the camera and only recently started showing up online more consistently as me where it’s still a bit scary *being seen.*
The more I’ve grown, healed, and gotten honest with myself, the more I’ve realized how much of me is tied to: my roots, my culture, my depth, my creativity, and the parts of me I spent a long time shrinking just to belong. That’s why my handle starts with “sorry” — to reclaim that and stop apologizing.
I really believe that every day we’re alive is a gift, and I try to remind myself — and anyone who needs it — of that as often as I can. You don’t watch the person you love most die and walk away seeing life the same way. One of the gifts grief gave me was a deeper appreciation for being alive.
This page has become a space where I share pieces of my authenticity: identity, healing, grief, joy, expression, storytelling, humor, and what it means to become more yourself without losing where you come from.
So if you’re:
- Balkan / Slavic
- first-gen / bicultural / raised in a diaspora
- “too much”
- healing
- grieving
- in-between versions of yourself
- craving to exist more freely, joyfully, and alive
- or just trying to feel more at home in who you are…
I’m really glad you’re here.
Dobrodošli.❤️
#SerbianAmerican #FirstGen #SlavicDiaspora #BalkanGirl #TooMuch
Growing up Slavic in America is a unique experience.
It can mean growing up between two worlds.
Carrying a name people don’t know how to say.
Feeling pride, invisibility, humor, contradiction, and cultural whiplash all at once.
It can mean loving where you come from while also feeling how misunderstood, flattened, or overlooked Slavic people often are in the West.
This carousel is just a small glimpse into what that’s felt like for me.
And despite all of it, I’m deeply proud to be Slavic. There is so much beauty, depth, humor, pain, soul, and complexity inside these cultures.
I hope more people get curious enough to really learn.🤍
#Slavic #SlavicCulture #EasternEurope #Serbia #DiasporaStories
times my name has been butchered in America: 484202390
for educational purposes: in Serbian (and other similar Balkan/Slavic/Germanic/Nordic/Uralic languages), our “J” is pronounced like a “Y” in English… which is why spelling my name somehow makes things even worse😭
#Slavic #SlavicCulture #EasternEurope #Serbia #DiasporaStories
Did anyone else go through a full inspection every time they left the house? 😭
I used to dread walking downstairs knowing I was about to get the up-and-down look, nitpicking every detail of me….so I started living a double life.
The version of me my strict parents accepted felt sterile, overly put together, and uncomfortable…and then there was the version of me that came alive once I left the house that was colorful and expressive. I’d keep backup outfits in my bag, change at school or in a friend’s bathroom, put my hair down in the car…and become myself again somewhere between home and wherever I was going.
I know a lot of first-gen, diaspora, and bicultural kids understand that feeling of constantly negotiating between who you’re expected to be at home and who you become outside of it.❤️
Also, to this day, I still hate putting my hair up😂
#GrowingUpSlavicInAmerica #SlavicCulture #BalkanCulture #ImmigrantHousehold #FirstGenAmerican
How much of this is cultural…and how much of it is something else?
I remember describing my Mama to my Serbian teacher and he laughed and said, “that’s how most of the parents are.”
That genuinely blew my mind because part of me understands. My mom left everything — her career, her language, her identity — to start over in a new country while raising three kids. Of course there was stress. Of course there was loss. Of course she carried generations of unprocessed pain.
It’s important to note that I love my mom. I know she did the best she could. She gave me my language, my culture, my roots and I’m grateful for that.
AND
….growing up around that level of emotional dysregulation has real, lasting effects. The kind that don’t stay in childhood. The kind that shape how you react, how you relate, how you see yourself. The kind your body remembers.
Both can be true.
This is for anyone who grew up feeling like a burden. Who learned to shrink, stay quiet, or contort to keep the peace. This is for the kids who lived on edge without knowing why, always bracing for something…
Healing from this isn’t about blame. It’s about awareness and responsibility. Seeing what was modeled to you. Recognizing how it lives on in you and making a different choice so it doesn’t get passed down again.
Nismo sami.❤️
#SlavicInAmerica #BalkanDiaspora #ImmigrantHousehold #MotherWound #CPTSDHealing
I’ve been hearing this my entire life…
mostly from the Slavic women in my family 😂
what does “too much” even mean?
this year, I started questioning it
and stopped shrinking myself
or being afraid to be seen.
what people really mean when they say you’re “too much”
is that they don’t have the capacity to hold all that you are.
and that’s okay.
so many of us internalize this
and it turns into shame
that lives in our bodies
and our inner narrative.
this is your reminder to reframe it
and take it as a compliment!
because being “too much”often just means
you’re being your authentic self. ❤️
__________________________________
Cijeli život slušam to… uglavnom od žena u mojoj slavenskoj porodici 😂 Šta uopšte znači biti previše? Ove godine sam počela to da preispitujem i prestala da se smanjujem ili da se plašim da budem viđena. Ono što ljudi zapravo misle kada kažu da si previše jeste da nemaju kapacitet da prihvate sve što jesi. I to je u redu. Mnogi od nas to internalizuju i to se pretvori u sram koji živi u našem tijelu i našem unutrašnjem narativu. Ovo je tvoj podsjetnik da to preokreneš i shvatiš kao kompliment, jer biti previše često samo znači da si autentična. ❤️
#toomuch #feelings #innerchildhealing #selfexpression #highlysensitiveperson
Growing up Serbian in America meant every major holiday happened twice.
Once in the world around you and once at home because Orthodox holidays follow a different calendar.
Today, hundreds of millions of people are celebrating Easter and somehow it’s still not recognized as a holiday here.
Happy Easter to all who celebrate today✨
Hristos vaskrse❤️🐣
#Serbian #OrthodoxEaster #Diaspora #CulturalIdentity #BetweenTwoWorlds
Growing up Slavic in America is a unique experience. Part 2️⃣
It can mean being introduced to mortality early. Hearing about death, war, and survival before you fully understand life.
It can mean growing up in rooms where joy and grief exist at the same time, where people sing, eat, and celebrate…while carrying everything they’ve been through.
It can mean learning that life isn’t guaranteed, and that being alive is something you don’t take for granted.
This carousel is a glimpse into how my culture shaped the way I understand joy — not as something that comes after everything is good, but as something that exists alongside it all. Because when you grow up knowing how fragile life is,
joy is survival.
This perspective is something I’m deeply proud to carry from my culture. ❤️
#Slavic #SlavicCulture #Balkan #Serbia #DiasporaStories
when your American friend comes over after school 😭
I was always a little nervous to bring a friend home…and this is why.
When you grow up between cultures, it can feel like you’re living in two completely different worlds: one version of life at home, and another once you step outside of it. Sometimes the gap between those two worlds feels huge when you’re a kid trying to fit in.
This is MY lived experience. There’s a lot of crossover across Slavic x Balkan x households of many other cultures, where a lot of us multicultural folks can relate to a friend coming over and experiencing:
→ guests treated like royalty
→ you absolutely cannot leave hungry
→ slippers are not optional
→ someone may randomly start teaching geography or history
→ there’s containers, bags, or random objects saved for later
→ privacy is virtually non-existent
What did you have to explain about your household growing up? 👇
#GrowingUpSlavicInAmerica #SlavicCulture #BalkanCulture #DiasporaStories #FirstGenAmerican
I read 25 books in the first 3 months of this year and yes…it felt worth celebrating.📚✨
But not just because of the number but because it brought me back to myself.❤️
Reading was one of my first forms of escape as a kid. When home felt emotionally unpredictable and my mom’s moods could change like the weather, books became somewhere else to go. Somewhere quieter. Safer. More stable. More mine.
This year, reading brought me back to that part of myself again. The imaginative one. The curious one. The girl who found comfort, wonder, and refuge in stories. And in a world that feels increasingly chaotic, I think a lot of us are looking for somewhere to go.�
Somewhere slower. More human. For me, books have become that place again.
So yes — I threw confetti about it. Let’s normalize celebrating the little things you’re proud of.
�💌 Read more in this week’s Substack: I Read 25 Books in 3 Months This Winter. Here’s Why I Think Reading is our Greatest Form of Escapism Right Now.
#ReadingLife #ChildhoodHealing #InnerChild #CelebrateTheLittleThings #RomanticizeYourLife
Some of the worst thoughts I’ve had about myself were once said out loud to me…
I think that’s something people don’t always understand about healing. For some of us, the inner critic didn’t come out of nowhere. It was built through repetition, conditioning, survival, and environments that shaped how we learned to see ourselves.
So no, it’s not always as simple as “just let it go” or using logic and willpower to brute force it away.
A lot of healing is unlearning what your body once believed it needed to survive. And that is deeply courageous work.
#innercritic #CPTSDHealing #healingjourney #motherwound #traumarecovery
