Marijeta Mojašević from Montenegro's life changed twenty years ago.
She went on an excursion to Bar, and woke up in a hospital room in Belgrade, as the youngest among the patients.
"Everyone caresses you here, Belgrade, big room, and I don't know anyone and I ask 'where is my mother?'
"The doctors realize that my memory has returned and they say 'she will come in an hour', and she did," this 35-year-old woman remembers today.
Then he will find out that she survived a stroke, which caused amnesia.
Despite treatment and surgery in Switzerland, six months later, she suffered a second stroke that will leave her permanently disabled.
Today, Marijeta, a graduated social worker with a wide smile and activist for the rights of people with disabilities, is one of only two women from the Balkans on this year's BBC list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
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Spongebob and the hat
In Montenegro, which like many countries in the Balkans only in recent years develops a support system for people with disabilities, Marijeta graduated from university, enrolled in master's studies, got a job and started a family.
He regularly gives lectures to young people about life with disabilities.
The BBC's list of 100 women was proposed by an international initiative OneNeurology, whose ambassador she is.
She says that psychotherapy, as well as family and friends, helped her a lot in accepting her own disability or, as she calls it, "knot".
After the first stroke, which she experienced at the age of 15, the blood vessels of the brain were damaged, and during the next stroke, they were permanently unable to transport oxygen.
"The second time it's the same as when you break a thread, then you tie it, a knot remains and my disability is my knot," Marijeta told the BBC in Serbian.
Hemiparesis remained - a partial loss of the right side, and it is particularly painful for her to see double images that she cannot get rid of.
She cannot be operated on or cured, because her eyes are completely healthy, but the disease is in the vision center in the brain.
While we are talking via video call, the wall behind her in the home in Nikšić catches my attention.
A hat with a flower rim hangs above the curtain, and a SpongeBob poster hangs on the wall.
She turns and hatefully says that the hat is hers, "because she must always be protected from the sun", and SpongeBob is her son Đurađ, who is two and a half years old, and his mother's smile.
"Nothing else looks like me," he adds with a twinkle in his eye behind his glasses.
Excursion, then hospital
Marijeta was born in 1988 in Berane in the north of Montenegro, a hilly town named after the old Slavic word for ram, with a population of about 29.000.
Her older brother gave her an unusual name for these parts, after her sister from Vojvodina.
Today, she jokingly says that she "hated her brother for the first 10-15 years".
"He gave me a name that no one else has, so some nicknames still stick to me," he recounts, laughing.
"It's okay now, remember me more easily."
She was an excellent student, in the eighth grade she participated in a physics competition, and then an excursion followed that disrupted everything.
"I was in a bar, the doctors don't know what's wrong with me, they think I drank something.
"I can't be moved, and they walk me around," she recounts what others told her later, because she doesn't remember it.
From a teenage girl who writes a diary about concerts, falling in love and school, she becomes a depressed girl who takes strong drugs, does not use her right hand "normally", has difficulty walking and struggles with chronic pain and headaches.
She didn't go to school for a year and a half, she wrote in recently published excerpts from her diary..
Dear Diary,
Today is my birthday. I'm not celebrating him, because it's not the time for that. It's not time for anything. That's right for you. I am so bad. I try to be the same as before, but it doesn't work. School is terrible. Everything is different and stupid.
Society, professors, whatever. I feel stupid and lonely. But that was a long time ago. I can't tell you what annoys me, but the list is long. This is not me anymore. It's someone else. And I miss the old me!
Here, I'm crying. Pathetic and ridiculous, isn't it? I think God was supposed to take me. I'm not for this. I didn't.
These lines of the diary on September 18, 2003. she signed as NOBODY.
Until then, she signed herself as M, Maki or physicist.
'Marietta, you are not dreaming, this is real life'
After the second stroke, everything got worse.
Hospitals and trips to spas followed, not at all easy for a girl who during puberty overnight "found herself in someone else's skin", not accepting that it was "her skin", she describes today.
The recovery started from scratch - she learned to eat with her right hand and learned to write with her left.
Her mother and friends helped her learn and study, because her double vision made reading very difficult.
During one of the rehabilitations in Igalo, the physiatrist sent her to exercises, but also "for a chat" with the psychologist.
The conversation with her will be crucial.
The therapist will immediately recognize that Marietta's defense mechanism at the time was the denial of reality.
"She tells me: 'Marietta, you're not dreaming, this is real life, you don't want to wake up from a dream, you have to work on yourself and come to me tomorrow.'
"I go to the room all convulsed and I wonder how she knows," describes the first encounter with psychotherapy, which will last for years from 2004.
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He says that he doesn't know "what would have happened" if he hadn't met that psychologist, as well as some doctors he appreciates.
"I came across great people with whom I can talk about other topics, I was lucky, and you shouldn't be lucky, but it should always be like that," she adds.
That is why she joined the initiative a few years ago OneNeurology to draw attention to neurological diseases, which, along with cancer, are among the most common causes of death in the world.
The BBC's recognition means a lot to her, because "a lot can be done through prevention."
Lectures are the best cure for prejudice
Today, Marijeta is a youth counselor at the Youth Office in Beran and provides support and guidance to high school students and students, as well as advice for training abroad, such as Erasmus program, which she often went to herself.
She also designed the "Life with Disability" workshops where she talks about her own experience to elementary and high school students.
He says that young people are mostly very interested.
"Those workshops are like wow, that's what I really like to do," he says with a lot of enthusiasm.
She held the first one in 2016, for the International Day of Persons with Disabilities on December 3, and she says it was very successful.
Sharing experiences and life stories are the best way to fight stereotypes and prejudices among young people, and to create empathy, Marijeta believes.
"It's an overpowering effect.
"After one lecture, a girl who had a mild stroke came up to me and said, ``everything you said, it's like I said it.''"
Young people are full of questions, and without judgment and after talking with them, often very emotional, she feels that she "did something important".
"And I'm overjoyed.
"You bare yourself completely in front of them, they are somewhat uncomfortable, and then happy."
In Montenegro, 11 percent of the population or slightly more than 68.000 people have obstacles in performing daily activities due to long-term illness, disability or old age, the data are of the 2011 census.
She started from scratch and is not giving up
Three years ago, she enrolled in her master's studies, passed her exams and is preparing to write and defend her thesis.
Reading is still "cancer of the wound" for her, and audiobooks wouldn't help her, because she is a "visual type".
"I read as slow as a snail, then I underline, then I read it underlined, but somehow I managed, in the end it didn't turn out bad," he describes what studying looks like.
Parenthood represents another, new life challenge, but she is happy to have found the right partner, for whom her disability is not a problem.
Tomas, who works in marketing, is her "partner in crime," she says happily.
"When you enter parenthood, it's an arena, there is no list of what needs to be done, but we try," describes Marijeta.
She missed her system support, especially psychological. She only knew that there was a gynecology table for women who use wheelchairs.
Due to weakness in her hands, her biggest fear was not to drop the child while carrying or nursing it.
Marietta walks without an aid, and she manages, she says, to run after her son.
She can't drive, but she likes to walk and knows how important that skill or "power" is, because she experienced what it's like when she doesn't have it.
And he doesn't give up.
She is now four months pregnant and they are expecting a girl in the spring.
She has a hard time watching movies, loves going to the theater and enjoys traveling, and sometimes writes a blog.
She tries not to let her disability, or backpack, as she sometimes calls it, be too heavy.
"You can be mad at the rest of the world, because they don't have a disability, or it can be your partner."
"I simply had to get over it, and it was difficult for me, because I was in an environment where most people do not have any disability," she concludes.
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