My Country Is Not in the Pull-Down Menu by Vesna Jaksic Lowe
Vesna Jaksic Lowe’s “My Country Is Not in the Pull-Down Menu” is the winner of the 2026 CRAFT Award for Excellence(opens in new tab) in Flash Creative Nonfiction.
How do you answer the questions “Who are you?” and “Where are you from?” Vesna Jaksic Lowe asks in her author’s note, when you’ve lived in several countries and grew up in a country that “no longer exists”? Jaksic Lowe takes on large questions by homing in on an everyday example in “My Country Is Not in the Pull-Down Menu,” winner of the CRAFT Award for Excellence in Flash Creative Nonfiction.
The narrator “glares” as she runs the cursor up and down the menu on her laptop screen, “furiously strike[s] the touchpad” and “bangs on the Return key” in her fruitless effort to insert Yugoslavia on the alphabetical pull-down list on her job application. While she would prefer “N/A” to the false alternatives presented on the form, she’s not offered that option. Instead the cursor itself seems restless and the form matches her own urgency, hurrying her along, threatening to close after a countdown. “The form cares not about how binary these answers feel to me, how much they reduce me. It feels like a betrayal, an erasure of a part of me. I want to shut off my anger, shut my thoughts before they spiral.” Jaksic Lowe dramatizes the narrator’s frustration through mounting questions and the relentless countdown, which she can only stop with a “panic-click.”
Her job application could be any bureaucratic form, for there are many: forms for the DMV, banks, airports, passports. The situation is not hers alone. “What about those of us who hail from countries that are no longer countries? Those of us who exist in the gaps, the un-identifiable?” Jaksic Lowe asks unanswerable questions that are larger than her own difficulties, larger than the drop-down menu on a form. She reminds us of wars and migrations and shifting borders and global change. She reminds us that good essayists ask questions instead of providing answers. She defines who she is in the absence of the opportunity to do so. When she hits “submit,” she surrenders momentarily to a country “that hates nuance as much as I hate this form.” —CRAFT
I glare at the pull-down menu on the laptop screen, the arrow painting each choice baby blue as I send it running up and down, up and down. With each click, a new country or continent.
Congo.
Costa Rica.
Croatia.
How nice to traverse the world like this, a swift tap of a finger leading to one border crossing after another.
My birth country, Yugoslavia, is not listed among the options. I press my thumb on the touchpad, trying to resuscitate a dead nation. I want to create space for it somewhere between Vietnam and Zambia, but the form won’t allow it. I’ll have to pick a side—the place where I was born, Serbia, or the one from which I hold citizenship, Croatia. I furiously strike the touchpad controlling the blinking cursor, but it blocks me from highlighting more than one choice. My index finger bangs on the Return key, as if the repetition of force can bring a foregone place back to the present.
I migrate towards the bottom and search for a blank line, perhaps an “N/A.” No luck. How dare this form assume that my birth country still exists? That my nationality at birth matches my current one? That my “native language” bears the same name I grew up with? What about those of us who hail from countries that are no longer countries? Those of us who exist in the gaps, the un-identifiable?
The form needs an answer, and it needs it to come from the drop-down menu or I won’t make it to the next stage. The cursor’s blinks expose its restlessness, the urgent requirement to make a choice. The form cares not about how binary these answers feel to me, how much they reduce me. It feels like a betrayal, an erasure of a part of me. I want to shut off my anger, shut my thoughts before they spiral.
A rectangle pops up on the screen. “Are you still working on this form?”
30 seconds.
29…
28…
27…
“Yes!” I panic-click with my forefinger, then exhale when I stop the countdown. I’ve been thinking about who I am and where I am from for four decades. I could use another twenty-seven seconds.
The rectangle disappears, its four borders gone as if they never existed.
I am used to this—on passport forms, job applications, at the DMV, the bank, the airport. Bureaucracy can’t be bothered with me. It does not tolerate nuisance, has no space for fragmented countries, complicated histories, new languages born out of old, fractured ones. It must define me with a click of a button, compress my identity within one highlighted line, no more.
But what do you check off when you come from the two parts of a nation that turned to war enemies, destroying it in the process? What do you check off when the hyphenated name of your mother tongue has divorced into two languages? What do you check off for “Nationality” when your country has morphed into seven? What do you check off when your motherland no longer exists—not on maps or passports or in drop-down menus? What about those of us who come from the “formerly known as,” the “ex,” the disappeared “and,” the abandoned acronyms. Those of us from lands whose names form entire landscapes.
If there is no box for me, who am I? If I’ve lost two out of four citizenships, who am I? If I am defined by the violence of political borders, who am I? Should I identify myself in terms of what I used to be, where I currently live, where I long to be.
The cursor flickers and the hours tick away as the job application deadline approaches. My right index finger resigns from its battle against the return key. It hovers listlessly between the MacBook’s keyboard and the screen. A liminal space between the fluidity of typing and the formality of a form. Another thing I’m used to—the in-betweenness, the not-quite-here-or-there. The endless floating and searching. Clinging to a place reserved for history books and faded maps.
One employer’s job application makes me clench my jaw, sends my heart racing. I have let it remind me of my status as a perpetual foreigner, something I’ve known for a long time. Always adrift, between countries and continents and boxes and forms.
Not Serbian, because I was only born there and left at three months. Not Croatian enough because I’ve forgotten words from my mother tongue and haven’t lived there since I was thirteen. Not Yugoslavian because it has been decades since Yugoslavia was deleted from pull-down menus. Not Canadian because I only lived there for four years and have lost my Canadian citizenship. Not American because I will never feel patriotic about a country that prefers profits over people, defines itself through capitalism and consumerism, and hates nuance as much as I hate this form.
I pick the closest true answer and hit “Submit.”
“Thank you. Your submission has been received.”
Another rectangle, before its borders fade.
VESNA JAKSIC LOWE(opens in new tab) works as a nonprofit freelance writer, writes creative nonfiction, and runs the Immigrant Strong(opens in new tab) newsletter. Her work has appeared in three anthologies—Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity (BookHug Press) and the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2024 and 2023 (Woodhall Press) and is forthcoming in two more anthologies. Bylines include The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Daily News, Catapult, Electric Literature, and Los Angeles Review of Books. A former award-winning reporter, her creative writing has been supported by Hedgebrook, The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Tin House, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Find her on Instagram @vesnajaksiclowe.
Featured image by Adolfo Felix, courtesy of Unsplash.
