Brankica Damjanović: Honesty as a wake-up call

She spoke, and the audience listened. Even the silence calmed down to hear her better. She swallowed tears, not emotions, and the audience let them go on their own. They laughed together, because laughter heals, but also liberates. They discovered so much about her, felt even more, and found themselves the most. She did not share life lessons, but life, she did not talk about herself and her family to expose herself in front of the audience, but to give them a part of herself. She did not advise how to become good, but how to be better than what they are. She boldly called for revolution, and asked that only the heart be carried away from weapons. She knows that a person wins even when he loses, because it is good... It is good to be a person, to be good, to live life, to be Brankica Damjanović.

"Every day, in the middle of the night, at dawn, I dig into the depths of my being, searching for a thought, a word, and a deed that will help me understand. Myself. And others," she wrote in the book "It's Good," which she published in 2014 and has gone through 25 editions.

Thanks to the writer Savi Radulovic and the Art Club "Prvo pismo" in Nikšić organized an evening with Brankica Damjanović. The audience and the author of ten books, including six collections of short stories, "dug into the depths of their being" - some loudly, with words, and some quietly, with thoughts.

"Brankica Damjanović's name has long become a brand. Her thoughts, like a bullet, spread through internet networks and captivate the audience with memorable discretionary statuses... She worked in journalism for two decades and then, like all true writers, left her job and started focusing on herself," said Radulović, who was the evening's moderator.

Damjanović talked about an introverted girl, a girl, a woman, who, after 20 years of doing a job that demands all of you, said: "Enough. I don't want to be exposed anymore because I don't like it."

When she got bored enough, she got advice from her brother, got creative, started writing, and again, this time in a different way, she became exposed.

When she came to terms with herself and her fate, when she accepted her sadness and embraced her happiness, when she realized that all the family tragedies she had experienced were just an integral part of life that she had to and wanted to believe in, she began to live. And to write. She put her soul's reflection on paper, let, as she said, the frozen tears from her childhood flow, and realized that life goes on - with or without dreams. It was only, as she said, when her dreams began to come true that she realized that they had not been destroyed, but only interrupted and realized when life decided to reward her with happiness after her sadness. Damjanović also talked about the loss of her homeland and the birth of a new one, about the people who brought her joy and made her love new cities, about how certain accidental or intentional encounters and memories encouraged her to write books.

"I heal myself with what I do. I wrote when I wasn't feeling well. It was my lifeline, something I held onto and intuitively knew that there had to be meaning in all of this. And there is. I haven't got all the answers yet, but it's showing. The answers have been coming," said the writer, whose life and professional journey has taken her from her native Pristina, via Pirot, to Belgrade.

She paid tribute to the people of Pirot with her first book, "(M)učenje jezika", and shortly after that she wrote a book about nurturing physical and mental health, "Natura sanat". She gave her son a book, "Moj sin Jovan", as a gift for his coming of age, and her daughter also managed to get her own book, "Kći". These books, as Damjanović said, are her favorite, and although she had no plans to become a writer, she continues to write and waits for short stories to "rest" a bit and allow her to write the novel she has been announcing for a long time.

"Every day I give myself hours of silence and solitude, because that is what is essential to me. My favorite motto is Ruled by the Right": 'Lord, give me my daily bread of solitude'. A person needs that solitude to see where he is going, how far he has come, what he is doing, what he is striving for, who he is," said the writer, who learned from her father that a friend is someone who enters the house, and from her daughter that there are friends in the virtual world, on social networks.

Although she was initially skeptical of this type of friendship, she realized that even in the virtual world, there is a person behind everything, and thanks to social networks, she gained new friends, but also new hope that what she writes touches people and that "good is the light of life."

"We need to understand how important we are to each other and we need to make ourselves and the people around us aware," she said.

For the end of the evening, but also the beginning of a new socializing, because the audience and she "met", they were on the "same wavelength", she also had a few pieces of advice.

"We have to be awake in life. Mostly we are not, as if our life is passing us by. The second thing is that we have to be honest, because it seems to me that today we are less and less honest with ourselves. We bury what is really important to us in order to make our image of ourselves shine in the eyes of others, and what we really feel is not important. The third thing is not to compare ourselves. Isidora Sekulić said beautifully: 'What others have is not what I do not have, but what was not given to me'. Let us have time for each other, let us be patient with each other – we are human and we all need more or less the same things," concluded the writer, whose sentences are often quoted.

"I like people who smell clean. When they talk."

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