I was born into chaos — sometime in June 1991, amid Yugoslavia’s collapse. My story starts in a modest house in the mountains of Kosovo’s Has region, with dozens of relatives living together. Politics and poverty forced my parents to leave and raise me and my siblings in Western security, all to ensure us a better life than they were given. 

Indeed, the biggest gift they gave us, next to all their sacrifices, was freedom. Growing up in Berlin allowed me to break free from traditional norms and tools of oppression, which to this day are being reproduced in Kosovo, the former Yugoslavia and many other countries and systems that are led in tyrannic ways.

Being a child from Kosovo, a post-war country, I learned very early in life what human beings are capable of doing to one another for power above all else. Despite the fact that I was lucky enough to experience our war through the safe window of exile, its effects will forever be part of my story, as well as those of my family members and Kosovars around the globe. 

Political oppression has marked the people of Kosovo for centuries. From the Ottoman Empire through the Yugoslav era, the 1998-99 war in Kosovo to the current neo-imperialism of Western powers — my country of origin has suffered from foreign occupation since long before I was born. 

My psychosomatic reality

The consequences of this political oppression followed me into the depths of my psyche and those of many others. They come in the form of negative thinking, unresolved rage, insomnia, hypersomnia, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, psychosomatic tics, guilt, shame, stress and panic attacks. 

Systems of oppression breed individuals with depression. My very own symptoms started to show in my teenage years, first through sleep paralysis. They later transformed into restlessness at night or excessive sleeping during the day. Today, I know that those were physical expressions of the psychological conflict I was suffering from as a first-born daughter to traditional Kosovar parents in Berlin. 

After I moved away for my studies, I finally indulged in freedom I had never known — personal, physical and financial. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to handle it. As much fun as I had, I also made some questionable choices and built a big pile of issues for future Jehona to deal with. 

Depression and regular vomiting added to my quarter-life crisis. It took me years to understand. Only upon becoming seriously ill in my 20s did I recognize a pattern and meaning in them. And I had to face the fact that it was time to change something.

Growing up with parents who never experienced a system that taught them self-inquiry, boundaries or healing made me hustle through life as well. Working several jobs and juggling academic pursuits led to exhaustion and burnout, both rooted in unresolved anger and grief. 

Evidently, it all reflected a lack of self-respect, as I was raised with the belief that I was not enough — a common element from my identities of being a Kosovar child, the only foreigner in my school class and a woman altogether. Some of you might relate.

When my vomiting became more severe, harmful even, I found myself broken down and unable to maintain my strategic self any longer — the self I had created to escape my childhood traumas, the self that in my early adulthood, caused serious damage to my health. 

Why? Because my immigrant thick skin and resilience became a burden that my body no longer wanted to endure. As it happens, the immigrant body masters exhaustion. Whether this body belongs to an underpaid shift worker or an overachieving expat, the health vulnerabilities of migrants persist throughout their migration cycle. 

Working conditions, exploitation, discrimination, undocumented status and sexual assault at work just adds to the ache of their life stories and the geographical distance from their families and support systems. Long working hours and the lack of time for oneself leaves little time for rest and processing.

Unlike my parents, I had time to adapt and sort myself out while they worked six days a week. Even now, Sunday is their only rest day, a day on which they rarely sleep. Same goes for their vacation time back in Kosovo, which sometimes causes them more stress and fatigue than recovery or relaxation. 

My parents are still in survival mode, 30 years after they left behind what they loved most: their families, their homes and mountains to go and pursue a better life in Germany, where even dogs were treated better than they were, as my father often says.

Understanding my journey

An immigrant’s journey is a leap of faith and requires huge amounts of loss, courage and guilt; the guilt of surviving, living a better life and having left the others behind. Especially when those others must deal firsthand with the nightmares of war, its ruins and the general uncertainty of post-conflict societies.

The cultural dislocation and uprooting of my parents was the price they paid for giving me and my siblings a life of ease. It gave us time to figure things out. What I now consider a privilege and luxury, took me years of struggle fighting with my parents, my cultural heritage and German society. 

Fighting and having to defend myself continuously was deeply ingrained in my being. I understood that the roots of my tics didn’t start with me but rather had something to do with descending from a war-torn country, oppression and the ever-working class.

Often, systems of oppression repeat themselves in the structures and dynamics of a family. Political programming influences parenting and childhood more deeply than one would assume. In many families, I observed the father in the role of the dictator, ruler and “god of the house” as we say in Albanian — which to me symbolizes patriarchy in its core.

Meanwhile, we have the mothers, who often appear as either the opposition or the ally. In some families it is the mothers who rule; all depending on the dynamics and hierarchies of power. The children are the people, bearing witness to what the regime teaches. 

Families are a reflection of the communities, societies and nations they are cultivated in. Therefore, it is obvious that those grown out of oppressive systems and war-torn countries tend to recreate hierarchies of violence and repression in their own four walls. 

As a social worker for the German Child Services, observing these structures is part of my job. I focus on domestic violence in immigrant families and their children’s anger, issues and frustrations. It hurts to say that domestic abuse and psychological terror are common in many immigrant households. 

After more than five years in the sociocultural field, I’m grateful to work in a profession that serves a meaningful purpose and allows me to heal my own dysfunctional upbringing and generational trauma. I learned a lot about the power of forgiveness and embracing generational strengths in order to break the cycle. In fact, to do that, one needs to remember that our ancestors gave us more than wounds.

Today I find a renewing comfort in my roots, which over time grew into wings. Anger was my loyal companion on this journey, and I’m grateful that I was able to transform my life once I started to address it back in 2019.

Counting my blessings

All this came because of my own challenges as a Kosovar child taught me to speak up and resist to gain liberation. Later in life I also learned the importance of saying no, which according to me, is the most powerful word in the world.

War follows you everywhere, no matter how intensely you experience it. In the diaspora, the additional cultural duality between two or more cultural dimensions will inevitably lead you to an identity crisis and make matters worse, like it did for me. The war between my worlds colliding within myself resulted in annual cycles of depression and much more.

Many of my diaspora siblings continue to suffer from anxiety disorder, bipolarity and other psychological challenges that make the life of eagles around the globe harder. Ironically, our national symbol, the double-headed eagle looking into two different directions, says it all. Living such a double life will bring you to your knees and force you to make decisions. 

Making peace with the different parts of me guided me toward a path of ownership, as owning my story and pain was necessary to let go of the suffering and rise from victimhood and trauma. By blending the different parts of our identity in our very own way, we may ground ourselves in its polar components and can extract actual force from our ancestral abilities. Intergenerational trauma is real but our ancestors gave us more than reasons to suffer. They blessed us, too. 

I see those blessings when I see my friends of all backgrounds turning their wounds into beautiful works of art. I hear those blessings when I hear a migrant worker cracking a joke during their break. 

I feel those blessings when I witness my siblings handling hardships and choosing life. I smell and taste the blessings when my mom cooks my favorite traditional dishes from back home. And I touch and live them when I have difficult conversations or spend quality time with my parents in spas and restaurants — something my younger self could only dream of. 

These blessings guide me in my choices, my projects and my writing — which I chose as my form of expression, as expressing myself was my key to unlocking depression and being who I am. As long as we are alive and remember our powers, we get to reinvent ourselves and decide the course of our stories. 

Just as history does not write itself, neither does your fate. Nothing is written and this is where you start.

Feature image: pictures from Jetmir Idrizi and Jehona Jahaj’s archive.

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