Looking back at it now, it is hard to believe I grew up in the middle of a civil war, incomprehensible in the last decade of the 20th century, in Europe, and that I am now a citizen of the country that bombed the city of my birth and of my youth, Belgrade. It is a chaotic web of improbable events that led to where I am, and to opportunities. As boundaries were falling all around Europe, they were rising all around me. With a Serbian mother and a Croatian father, the crossing of boundaries is what I was. I could feel the irrationality of nationalism and tribal hatred in the way complete strangers reacted to my accent, or my last name. I rejected boundaries instinctively, by turning outward, learning foreign languages, traveling, and crossing borders whenever I was given a chance. As a child, despite the fact that my mother was a lawyer and my father a prominent photographer, I gravitated toward science and mathematics, which universally belong to no one and everyone. Science made borders senseless, and that is what I wanted to do.

At eighteen years of age, I left my war-torn country for America, leaving behind the familiar sounds of a language and way of life, knowing that from then on I would return to my childhood home only as a visitor. In coming to America, I arrived to opportunities inexhaustible in a lifetime. From all the choices before me, my choices remained my passions: I learned science and languages, and I insisted on supporting myself financially through something I enjoyed, teaching (mathematics). The decision to pursue medicine was made fairly early on, and although I loved the basic sciences, I felt biology without a patient was like a sailboat without the wind. This perspective carried over in my research, which continued to be patient focused. My Yale thesis project on Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia, a part of which was carried out in Italy, became something more meaningful and vivid as I learned to communicate with my patients in Italian. As I acquired more medical knowledge, I continued to utilize my language skills in international settings, including dermatology training at the University of Rome, and learning to care for HIV patients in Santiago, Chile. Understanding a language, like crossing a border is not the end point, but rather it is the point of departure.

Dermatology, like a photograph, is an open secret. The lesions present on the surface, the diagnoses, however, can lead to the most remote of etiologies, making the clinical work a daily discovery. Skin may seem like a border between individuals and their environment, but really it is a window to the diseases experienced by the body. By practicing Dermatology, I crossed over yet another border as a physician who understands that what matters most about what one sees is its link to what lies beneath. In my quest to shed boundaries that are either trivial or artificial, I have chosen a profession in which I will cross daily the very boundary whose integrity is the sine qua non of our existence: the skin.