I started college in the fall of 2006. Initially it was a completely new world for me and most of the changes were positive. First of all, I quickly noticed that professors and students alike took me seriously from the very beginning. That had usually not been the case at Berkmar, let alone at Richard’s. I even made temporary friends with some fellow freshmen I had met in the hall on the first day. Among them was a young woman who had experience with helping people with disabilities, along with her friends. She would later meet me when I got off the bus in the mornings and would carry my bag. (I sat in my scooter during the trips to and from college.) She did that for much of our first semester. It seemed, for a while at least, as if I had overcome my extreme introversion and my mistrust of people. Another change was the schedule; I had classes only three times a week that semester and there were long breaks in between classes too.

Of course the most important changes hat to do with the classes themselves. All professors assigned quite a lot of reading and I had yet to learn how to handle that. In high school, I had been taught to express everything one needed to know about any essay topic in two typed double-spaced pages or less. That was a very bad habit that I quickly needed to end in college. It is not easy, however, to rid oneself of a clear formula for doing something, when it has become second nature. But the first rule about college for me was that there were no ready-made solutions or formulas for doing anything. Independent, critical thinking was needed. That is certainly true even for a junior college, regardless what anyone might think about it.

During my first semester, the professors mostly just lectured and there was little to no discussion that the students were expected to take part in. That was somewhat odd at first, but it also played into my strengths, because I had always been a good listener and it was my best way of processing information. On the other hand, depression had significantly lowered my attention span and had inhibited my ability to focus. Taking notes was also out of the question, because I would not have been able to write nearly as quickly as any of the professors lectured. I was therefore allowed to use a recording device, which as I soon found out, was not very helpful either. But listening to the class lectures and supplementing them as much as possible with the assigned reading still usually turned out to prepare me well for tests and other graded assignments. My academic performance as a whole was better in college than in high school.

I wrote several relatively short essays for my English class (although I did not think of them as short at the time) as well as probably one major essay at the end of the semester. I do not remember their exact topics, but I do recall that I politicized everything, even then. I would sneak in a critique of consumerism, militarism, or corporate control of society.

 The most memorable thing about my history class that semester was that the professor seemed to embody many of the stereotypes about instructors of humanities departments. He was an intellectual who spoke several foreign languages and had a touch of the positive, possibly necessary insanity about him that comes with the job. As stated above, it was a class about early word history, dealing mostly with the first known civilizations. One day he started a lecture about absolute monarchy in France, which was obviously for another class. When someone noticed that the lecture was millennia ahead of the period we had been studying and informed him where we had actually left off, he stopped and lectured on Ancient Egypt instead. He did so seemingly off the top of his head and as though nothing strange had happened.

The political science class began with a historical perspective of the process that took America from being a loose and ineffective union of thirteen largely independent states under the Articles of Confederation (the precursor to the current US Constitution) to a true union and a fairly strong federal government under the latter document. Later, it became for the most part a discussion of current events between a few conservative students and the professor, who was probably moderately conservative as well. My opinions were radically different from theirs, of course, but I never interjected. I wanted to avoid unnecessary conflict and there was no participation grade in the class.  The only grades there came from four multiple-choice tests on all of which I did quite well.  

This was the semester of the 2006 midterm elections, mentioned early in the previous chapter. Public anger about the war in Iraq put an end to unchecked Republican rule and gave Democrats majorities in both the House of Representatives and the US Senate. The hope was that the new Congress would use its power of the purse to deny further funding for the war and thus force the conflict to an end. Unfortunately, however, the new House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic leadership in Congress never had any intention of fulfilling the mandate given to them by the voters. While I was skeptical about whether the new Congress would change things drastically, part of me still wanted to trust them. Therefore, seeing how much more important their political careers were to them than the human lives that were so needlessly lost in Iraq was a bitter pill to swallow. Nevertheless, their disregard for the will of the people (and for that matter the contempt of the entire political class for the interests and wishes of the common man) was important for me to see. It was a better lesson about politics than any that I could ever expect to learn in a classroom.

I took a German test at the end of the semester and did well enough to obtain the maximum possible number of semester credits for it. I do not remember much about the math course, other than that it was surprisingly easy. I do remember very well, however, that my depression symptoms still significantly influenced my life. Despite doing well in school, I was still feeling hopeless. When the student who carried my bags told me that she had been struggling with depression too, before getting psychiatric help, I finally started to warm up to the idea for myself.

That winter break turned out to be of life-changing importance to me.  A few months before, I had joined a social internet forum and talked to several interesting people there. One day during that winter break, I talked to a young woman from Athens, Greece. We chatted for more than three hours that first time and realized that we had quite similar values, a similar outlook on life and that we were each experiencing a crisis in our young lives. We exchanged e-mail addresses at the end of the chat, in order to stay in touch, without having to be online at the same time, which would not have been easy, due to the seven-hour time difference. I also finally went to my first psychiatric appointment. The doctor was quite understanding of my situation and he of course was a good listener as well. That was exactly what I needed: someone who would just listen to me, without any emotional attachment. I came away from the appointment with hope, which was something I had not had for the past year or so.

Soon after the 2006 midterm elections, what I now call “the perpetual presidential campaign” began and it has never stopped to this day, more than eight years later. Liberals and progressives of all stripes had had enough of the presidency of George W. Bush, which the leadership of the Democratic Party looked to exploit with an early start to the primary campaign season. At the time, I was already aware of and sympathetic toward political movements outside of the political establishment, such as the Green Party. I even came across something completely different online, the World Socialist Website. It represented the Fourth International, founded by the anti-Stalinist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, in the 1930s. Nevertheless, I still held on to the naïve and stubborn view that the Democratic Party was “the people’s party,” only temporarily being held hostage by the right-wing interests of big business and militarism. I felt strongly that if there could only be a leftward shift in the leadership of the party, it would significantly move the country forward.

I then became a strong supporter of Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign He not only talked of ending the Iraq war, he also had the record of having voted against the war and against every bill that funded it. He also made me aware of several domestic issues, such as the problem of for-profit insurance companies acting as middle men in the health care system and standing between doctors and patients. I just wanted to believe that there was at least one officeholder in Washington who had the interests of the working class at heart. It was only much later that it became clear to me that his mission was not to take his party to the left, but rather to bring disgruntled leftists back into the Democratic Party.

In the spring semester of 2007, I took a world religions class, the second semester of Freshman English, as well as economics and statistics. With the new semester, I made two new temporary friends, both of them were significantly older than me. One was a woman of Native American heritage, who helped me get from our world religions class to my English course. The other was an Italian man, who sat next to me in that class. Despite our difference in age, he and I had much in common. We often talked about soccer and we were not far apart in our political views either. My most important relationship of all, however, was not with someone at the college. I kept up at least weekly e-mail correspondence with the Greek woman I had met online in December and we chatted whenever we both had time. Those chats would usually last for more than five hours. It did not take me long to fall deeply in love with her and I could feel that she felt the same way about me. Still, neither of us initially had the courage to confess these feelings to the other. Therefore, it was not until one Saturday morning, when I was overcome by incredible bravery that I decided to confront her with what we had both already knew deep down. I told her how I felt about her and asked her to give me an answer of any kind. It always took her several days to respond to my messages, since she was not as obsessed with the internet as I was. Waiting for her response was therefore quite brutal.

That weekend, I regretted my honesty several times and even thought about writing her again, to ask her to disregard the earlier message. Thankfully, I decided against that and in favor of just letting the chips fall where they may. On that Monday morning, I finally received her response. She said that she felt the same way for me and that her fears had not let her admit it before.  Reading that message was an unspeakable relief for me then. The question of how we would handle such a long-distance relationship was only a secondary concern at that point. We agreed to keep as close as possible for the time being and visit each other when the time was right. A few weeks later, we agreed to have our first chat since we expressed our feelings, in order to make a few basic decisions. The most important one was that we officially became boyfriend and girlfriend on February 13, 2007. It is a special day that we continue to celebrate every year. Before the first anniversary, we celebrated the 13th of each month. I have never before been very romantic, but she always brings the best out in me. In fact, in the first few days since we became a couple, all my depression symptoms seemed to be completely gone.

My world religions class was one of the best courses I had taken in college, perhaps even the best. The professor was very liberal and taught us to respect other religions, as well as to focus more on the similarities rather than the differences of the different faiths.  The major assignment for the class was to go to a religious service of a faith or denomination that was neither our own nor the one we were most familiar with (in the case of non-religious students), to interview someone of that faith, and to write about our experience there. A colleague of my mother’s at Parkview was a Unitarian Universalist, attending their services on Sundays, not too far from our house. He was also more than happy to let us accompany him there and to answer my questions afterwards. Unitarian Universalism has the best features of the world religions (being kind to others, helping the poor, etc.), without the baggage of any strict dogma. In other words, if there were an ideal religion for me, this would probably be it.

The essays in English class once again gave me the opportunity to express my political views. This time, I did not even need to move away from the assigned topics to do so. The aim of the course was to teach us to express our ideas in writing in a professional manner. We wrote many small essays about things like which historical event we would change if we could do so. Another topic I remember was the question of whether or not parents of elementary to high school students should have the power to remove certain books from the curriculum of their kids’ schools. The term paper was an analysis of the play Death of a Salesman, which also left room for political analysis.

Ironically, the class in which I kept extraordinarily quiet about my views was the highly politicized economics class. The professor was what might be described as a market fundamentalist. My experience with teachers and professors that held right-wing views was that they did not welcome any serious discussion or debate, while the liberal ones usually did.  This professor in particular would insult the few students who dared to voice their disagreement about the magical powers of the “free market” and the evils of government regulation, usually even resorting to name-calling. During every class period, he would go on long rants about how fantastic life would be if people only acted in their own self-interest, rather than trying to help others. His mantra was: “The government that governs best is the government that governs least.” I often wonder how such people cannot realize that according to their logic, failed states would be the ideal. Test questions were even biased at times, such as asking what critics of minimum-wage legislation usually argue. We had a term paper in which we addressed an economic problem in America and proposed a solution. I chose the cost and inefficiency of the health care system. My solutions addressed everything except the elephant in the room, which is the for-profit nature of it. I went out of my way not to involve government in any part of the answer. That proved to be a quite viable strategy that ensured me an A in the class.

As for the statistics course, it was the last mathematical class I ever took. At the beginning, everything was easy and commonsensical. Later, it became quite complicated, but somehow I always did relatively well on the tests.

The summer brought with it several minor international soccer tournaments that I watched.  It also brought me more depression symptoms, which I learned to quietly endure. My parents and brother went to New York City for a few days and I declined to join them. My aunt and uncle brought me food at mealtimes then. There were also several extremely long chats that seemed to fly by with my girlfriend. Other than that, my memory of those months is quite limited.

For that fall semester, I registered for far too many too-tedious classes. At the same time, my depression continued to become worse. Those two things combined put me into a vicious cycle once again. My depression kept me from completing school assignments, which in turn made me feel even more depressed. In late October or early November 2007, I withdrew from all of my classes. There was simply no way to complete the outstanding assignments in any of the courses, especially given that more and more of them kept being assigned. To this day, I do not regret having made this decision, even though it prolonged my college career significantly. It was necessary at the time to take care of my health.

I did numerous tests then, including another MRI and a physical. Nothing produced any unusual results, but I was still not feeling better. I could tell that even my psychiatrist was becoming unsure of how to improve my situation. I also became desperate and out of that desperation, came the courage to tell my parents about my girlfriend. I had not told them before, because I was afraid of their reaction to my having met someone online. I had hoped that if I told them, they might be able to arrange a meeting, before my situation became even worse. They reacted surprisingly well, although my mother did express her doubts much later on.

Meanwhile, my parents decided that since I was not going to school, I should at least do physical therapy. I was long too old for the place I had gone to six or seven years earlier; therefore my mother found a therapist who made house calls. He was very outgoing and interested in his patients. We talked about my study of history and due to the upcoming presidential elections, he wanted to know whether I had an interest in politics. He later told me that he liked to listen to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. That was unbelievable to me, that such a well-educated person could get his political information from that source of hate-filled garbage. After the first months to a year of therapy, he saw that this was beneath his intellectual level and he changed his views tremendously. Despite my distrust in people, he was quickly able to break through that and we became friends. The therapy itself was also quite helpful. It gave me something to do and he refused to give up or feel sorry for me, no matter how extreme my depression became.

By then, the presidential primaries were well underway. On the Democratic side, it was a toss-up between the totally  unqualified first-term senator Barack Obama and the former First Lady Hillary Clinton, who had just been elected to her second term in the US Senate (and somehow claimed her eight-year residence in the White House had given her the necessary credentials).Obama and Clinton had easily overcame their other primary opponents, due mostly to their deep pockets, filled by wealthy donors, and their rock-star status, which came as a result of the former’s race and the latter’s gender. On the Republican side, the longtime Senator John McCain quickly defeated his closest GOP challengers, the strongest of whom were former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. Clinton and Obama both ran cynical campaigns, presenting themselves as agents of change, despite having done nothing other than serving the status quo in their short political careers. The Republicans, on the other hand, ran honest campaigns, working hard to outdo each other in conservatism, reaction, and backwardness. For me it was clear that neither of those parties represented my views or the interests of ordinary people. The history of the American Left (in the days when such a thing still existed), was full of internal struggles between reformists and revolutionaries.   I found myself struggling between these two tendencies for the coming years, but initially I chose reform and joined the Green Party. 

My psychiatrist had put me on quite a cocktail of antidepressants at the time, which while bringing down my energy level, stabilized me tremendously psychologically. This amazing improvement helped me decide in favor of joining my family on their trip to Croatia and Bosnia in the summer. It was our first trip back there in ten years.

My mother was my brother’s German teacher in high school at that point and they went on a trip to Germany and Austria with other students, before going on to Croatia by themselves, where my father and I joined them a few days later. By then, the presidential primary season was over and Barack Obama had clinched his party’s nomination. And I still did not find anything about him that was worth supporting, no matter how hard I tried. His speeches were filled with empty rhetoric about hope and change, while his voting record in the Senate spoke volumes: he voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act, to fund the wars on all but one occasion, to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that have helped the government spy on citizens, and he also voted in favor of the bailing-out of the banks. Knowing all of that and the fact that he had raised ungodly amounts of private money for his campaign was too much for me to be able to support him with a clear conscience. That meant that I would go to Europe, where Obama-mania had reached much higher levels than in the southern United States, with an unpopular stance. My uncle in Croatia made that clear early on, when I was too jetlagged to defend myself.

Thankfully for me, soccer soon replaced American politics as the main topic of conversation. The 2008 European Cup had begun. Germany and Croatia were placed in the same group (with Croatia winning the game between them). By the time the Croatia-Germany match took place, we were in Mostar, the city of my birth. We visited my paternal grandparents there. It was the house I had called home for about the first five years of my life. I noticed how difficult it was for me to move from one place to another there. Although Mostar is located in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the people of Croatian heritage there (such as my father’s family), are generally much more patriotic toward Croatia than those who actually live in that country. Cities like Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, are home to liberal intellectuals and therefore nationalism does not take hold here as easily.

 As in the group stage of most major tournaments, the last two games of any one group are played simultaneously, in order to avoid giving anyone an unfair advantage.  The situation in our group was clear. With wins from its first two matches, Croatia was already in the quarterfinals as group winners. They played Poland last, who only had very slim chances of advancing as runner-up. The other game in the group, featuring Germany and Austria, was much more likely to decide the runner-up spot. It was impossible for me to explain to my grandparents that the Croatian match was irrelevant and the German one decisive. Therefore, I had no choice but to watch the former with them.  I later heard that Germany barely kept itself in the competition by winning 1-0 in a boring encounter.

A few days later, my father took my mother and brother to Dubrovnik, Croatia, where their flight back to the States started. He and I had a separate route, from Zagreb, through London, and to Atlanta. Neither of us could sleep the night he returned, so we decided to immediately go to Zagreb in his rented car. We arrived there the day before our flight to London, which made it possible for us to watch Germany narrowly defeat Portugal in the first quarterfinal of that European Cup. The next day, we flew to London but did not arrive on time to board our plane to Atlanta. We were quite angry to hear that the next flight there would not take place until the next day. Since it was an error made by the airline that caused this, they paid for our hotel room in the UK and all other expenses of that day.

Being there for the day also had some advantages. An uncle from my mother’s side of the family, who lives in London, came to see us. Another perceived advantage was that we could watch Croatia’s quarterfinal against Turkey. That, however, turned into one of the games I least like to remember. Croatia played positive, offensive soccer, but could not find a breakthrough within the ninety minutes. It was not until the end of extra time that they managed to take the lead. But in added time of extra time, the Turks launched one of their few offensive plays of the game and the ball went in, 1-1! The Croatian players were so shocked that they missed nearly every penalty in the shootout that followed, thus losing the game. We flew home the next day and a week later, Spain won the title in the final against Germany.

My scooter turned out not to be good enough when it came to maneuvering limited space, such as entering small offices, and it was not the easiest to put on the buses that transported me to and from school. Therefore, we decided that I needed a motorized wheelchair instead. It arrived shortly before the start of the fall semester, so my therapist and I decided that it would be best to wait another semester before starting school again. We would use the time to practice using the wheelchair.

During that time, very little of note happened in my own life. My girlfriend tried to visit me; she had bought the ticket and gone to the American embassy thinking that getting a visa would be a formality for her. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case. Not only was she denied the visa, but she also had to take verbal abuse against both of our families. When they saw our names, their response was, “These are not Americans, they are Bosnians!” Despite the fact that she had shown them the flight ticket back to Athens, they accused her of wanting to marry me, so that she could stay in the US. There was no proof to back that up. In fact, we are both against marriage, because people tend to get married for the wrong reasons. In any case, she returned to the embassy a few weeks later, with an articulate invitation letter from my mother. They simply took the letter from her and tossed it in the trash without reading it. They also blacklisted her and told her never to come back again.

Meanwhile, the 2008 presidential campaign hit a new low toward the end. Senator McCain had chosen Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, thus appeasing the extremist fringe of his party. McCarthyist hate speech and a redbaiting frenzy were now the cornerstones of the campaign of a man who had a reputation for being a responsible statesman and a centrist in official Washington.  It was a reputation that I never bought into, myself.  Obama for his part reacted to these attacks by moving further to the right and also naïvely trying to appease ultraconservatives. While still campaigning on “hope and change,” he went out of his way to show his conservative credentials, really from the time he won his party’s nomination. He chose longtime establishment US Senator Joe Biden as his running mate, which some rightly saw as a sign to the elites that he was a status quo candidate after all. He also rejected public funding for his campaign, instead of raising a record amount of private funds up to that point. His victory speech on election night was also quite telling. He said that “change has come to America,” which to me said that his being elected to the presidency was the only change he was seeking.

Next Chapter: A new beginning