The Lullaby of the Eldest Daughter

London may test the constructed self. The CV, the accent, the postcode, the performance of belonging in a country that will always see the question mark before it sees you. That test I have passed for years.

Vietnam tests the inherited one. London can only reject what I built. Vietnam can reject what I am. The blood, the face, the language I speak wrongly and confidently, the belonging I was separated from before I was old enough to choose it. A thousand times more frightening.

I arrived apologetically for years. One person made me feel foreign once and I took the job on myself, did it more thoroughly than they ever could have. You become the greatest employee of your own inferiority complex.

I am the eldest child of immigrant parents. The demonstration that the sacrifice was worth it. The proof that the displacement produced something.

The trauma and the gifts come from the same source. The capacity to build alone, the financial intelligence, the precision, the ability to hold multiple complex systems simultaneously, the refusal to do things halfway. All of it wired from the same place as the difficulty receiving. The moving immediately to the next thing before the current one lands. The terror of stopping. Terrified of being seen without something in my hands.

What am I without all of this? As the first daughter, I do not know. Will extraordinary stop being enough if I stop producing more of it. The pattern is so embedded it has become invisible to me.

And yet, when Vietnam opens its arms wide, I fall into it.

There is a specific kind of welcome that does not care what you have achieved. That arrives before you have earned it. Not for the book or the company or the thirteen countries. For the blood you carry by simply existing. The face that shares a geography with ten million people in this city. The nose. The sound of the specific accent.

I was scared because I am also Hungarian. Because I grew up in London. Because my Vietnamese comes out sideways and makes people laugh — con này nói tiếng Việt khiếp khủng quá — and they are laughing with delight not contempt and I am laughing too and the gap closes and I am here, actually here.

No one is counting my fruit. I arrive to family friends' homes calculating what I carried, whether it was enough, whether the bag was too small, whether they would notice. The first daughter accounting for herself before she even walks through the door. Vietnam received me before I could finish the calculation.

The kindness is unconditional. Chuẩn. The cộng đồng, the we before I, which is the east's answer to the west's long exhausting experiment with individuality taken as far as it will go. I am living both sides.

I forgot the cardigan that covers my tattoos at my father's school reunion. I stood in front of his peers without the covering I had prepared and the world did not end. Vietnam has been doing that to me since I arrived. Asking me to stand in it without the armour. And the city just keeps going, warm, loud, familiar, mine.

The first daughter who built a constructed self to survive is now learning what the inherited one is worth.

Once I stopped negotiating with myself internally, the world stopped resisting me. I cannot fathom the speed at which Vietnam is receiving me. And my work. Therefore me.

What is human? A body and a soul. That is the whole provision. Love and imagination on top of that. The capacity to make something that did not exist before and release it into the world and watch it travel without you.

A book is a very strange machine. It lets a mind travel without the body.

The certain things are fixed. But we move around in infinite space. What you do now decides what happens tomorrow. Not as pressure. As the law of nature. Cause effect, effect cause, then again cause effect.

The mind is constantly negotiating with reality instead of experiencing it as it is. The question is always the same: do you wish to blame the world all your life or look deeper.

My sense of self right now is cycling through Hanoi in the morning. Printing. Checking paper quality. Eating bánh mì on the street with the hunger of someone tired in a good way. Being asked where are you from ten times a day and answering in Vietnamese that makes people laugh with recognition and not distance.

Infatuation with ideas is easy. Commitment to a few is harder. This is the commitment. Not the grand version. The daily one. The cycling and the printing and the food and the tiredness and showing up tomorrow.

Even in hardship, change to good is always wonderful. The inferiority that was self-inflicted all along. The welcome that arrived before I earned it. The cardigan I forgot. The stuttering I walked in to find.

The things that matter most are always so intimidating. Because they are the only ones that can actually reach you. Our mind is the most intimidating thing. Our mind is the most dangerous thing to us. And once you stop negotiating with it, once you stop making yourself foreign to yourself, the world opens.

It has been open the whole time.

Vietnam has known me all along. I was just the last to arrive.

Anicca, Anicca, Anicca

Ten days of silent meditation and what the body knows that the mind only thinks it does.

***

That something is difficult should be one more reason to do it. This was the sentence I kept telling myself.

***

I want to write about Vipassana. To document what I went through, to share the goodness I benefited from. I am far from perfect. I just dipped my toes into ten days of Vipassana kindergarten, yet it was powerful enough to shift my worldview and make me want to pass it on.

In March 2026 I undertook ten days of a silent meditation course called Vipassana. A technique originating from India and carefully preserved across 2,500 years, now being taught by S.N. Goenka (Goenkaji, as students affectionately call him, the ji a mark of deep respect in the Indian tradition) through centres across the world. I found mine in Kosgama, Sri Lanka, on a hill surrounded by nature, quiet in the way that only places built deliberately for quiet can be. My partner went first, in Nepal. The results he demonstrated without even meaning to created a strong interest in me. I signed up. I got approved. The days leading up to the course I waited patiently, nervously, excitedly. I had never stopped talking from the moment of my birth, not for one hour let alone ten days. This was a challenge I felt illuminated to face.

Before the course starts, as a new student you take up five precepts, the five basic moralities essential for participation. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not speak lies. No sexual misconduct. No intoxicants. You arrive at the centre, sign in, submit your valuables, your phone, computer, smart watch, any reading or writing material. You are to abstain from all other forms of meditation, yoga, exercise, spiritual or religious practice. I agreed to all of it.

I noticed the others around me. We were separated by gender, but during my course the male residential quarters were being renovated, so it was twenty to thirty women only for the entire ten days, with the exception of our lovely translator and assistant teacher Mario. Not only was I about to undertake my first ever ten days of noble silence, I would be doing it entirely in the presence of women. I was elated. Let us begin.

The centre, Dhamma Sobhā — meaning Radiance of Dhamma — sits on six acres of land in Kosgama, surrounded by mountains, about 50 kilometres from Colombo. After orientation and dinner, noble silence began. From that evening onward, no eye contact, no physical contact, no speech. The internal world was to remain contained, unaffected by external influences as much as possible. The sounds of wildlife throughout the day — birdsong, insects, tropical animals we could not identify — a living world continuing entirely indifferent to our silence. The distant sound of traffic and construction that never fully went away. At first a distraction. Then, without meaning to, a tool — one more thing arising, one more thing to observe without reacting to, one more practice in the practice. No mobile phone nearby, no other people's thoughts bleeding into yours. A refreshing new experience I had never before had.

I would describe Vipassana as being dropped into the midst of an ocean that is your mind. So deep. So shallow. So beautiful. So terrifying. Too vast and diverse and infinitely pulling me everywhere. Past, future, past, future, past, future. Anything was easier than to focus on the present. From day one to day three we focused our entire attention on respiration, the breath, as it is, not as we would like it to be. If shallow, shallow. If deep, deep. When the mind wandered, and it wandered constantly, we were simply to bring it back to the breath without judgement, without anger at ourselves for having done it again.

It felt like going from Tokyo, seeing thousands of people pass before you every moment, to suddenly being alone in a cave in the Himalayas with nothing but your own thoughts. Goenkaji called it a deep surgical operation on the mind. You must work hard, patiently and persistently. You are bound to be successful. Bound to be successful. The mind is used to being stimulated, constantly receiving input, constantly reacting. To sit with only the breath, something so ever-present it is taken entirely for granted, was extraordinarily difficult. The mind is like a wild bull. Raw, undirected, powerful force, charging without aim, not wanting to be observed, wanting only to move, to react, to do anything but simply be still. Every evening brought Goenkaji's discourses, which quickly became one of my favourite parts of the day, something to focus on that was not as demanding as the sitting itself, his voice patient and persistent and quietly certain of something I was only beginning to approach.

Gradually across the first three days we narrowed our focus from the full breath to a small area around the nostrils and above the upper lip. Second day, the triangle consisting of the area of the nostrils and above the upper lip. Third day, underneath the nostrils and above the upper lip. Notice if you feel any sensation. Heat. Tingling. Prickling. Anything. I was stunned to find that after several hours I began feeling heat coming from my nostrils. I started noticing the breath moving sometimes through the left nostril, sometimes the right, sometimes both. We were instructed not to develop any attachment to the sensation, not to feel happy when we felt something or frustrated when we did not. Just observe. Understand the nature of all sensation, which is arising and passing away, arising and passing away. This is the true nature of impermanence. Not as a concept borrowed from a book. Not because Goenkaji said so. A truth you experience within the framework of your own body. Whatever you experience in each and every moment. Moment by moment. Moment by moment. Tremendous patience was required, patience I often did not have. Yet the environment and the commitment I had made kept me there. Coming back to the breath. Coming back.

These first three days were the necessary introduction, sharpening the mind enough that on the second half of day three we would begin Vipassana itself. When we narrow the area of focus on our bodies, the mind becomes concentrated and starts noticing sensations it never knew were there before. Without forcing, without clinging to want a certain sensation, without feeling aversion from anger that we feel nothing. Like the weather, some days you see the sun, sometimes you do not. The nature remains the same, coming and going, coming and going, coming and going. No matter how much you try to preserve the delight and warmth of the sun it is bound to change. No matter how much you wish the rain away it will come regardless of what you want. Our definitions and our judgements of what these natural phenomena mean to us is why and how we form attachments and aversions. They are just as they are. Same with sensations. They are just as they are. And we were to observe them as they were.

You have to work for your own liberation. No one else can liberate you.

On day three we began learning Vipassana. We were to observe and move slowly from head to feet, covering as many parts of the body as possible, noticing whatever sensations arose. Tingling. Heat. Cold. Prickling. Pinching. Numbness. Pain. Perspiration, sweat. Pleasant or unpleasant we were to observe without preference, move through the body part by part, give no sensation more importance than any other, give all importance to the one universal truth that every sensation arises only to pass away. Anicca. Anicca. Anicca. These words ended every sitting, every beginning, every end. Impermanence. Impermanence. Impermanence.

The unconscious mind is not truly unconscious. Everything we experience arrives first as sensation, through the five sense doors of eyes, ears, tongue, skin, and thought. Sensation arises. Perception follows. Then comes the reaction, craving or aversion, and this reaction is the root of all suffering. Not the sensation itself. Not what happens to us. What we do with what happens to us.

None of what your five sense doors tell you is ultimately reliable. All of it is conditioned, shaped by perception before it even arrives at what you call the mind. Sensation arises. Perception names it, instantly, before you have chosen how to name it. Reaction follows, faster than thought. By the time you believe you are responding to reality you are already three steps inside a story your nervous system wrote without consulting you. The practice lives in the gap between sensation and reaction. Vipassana widens that gap until the choice becomes visible.

By day four or five I could observe sensation across my entire body, moving head to feet then feet to head, a continuous sweep. Vibrations. Wavelets. All of us, the entire material of our experience, arising and passing, arising and passing. Equanimity, the steady balanced observation of whatever arises, meant not wanting unpleasant sensations to cease, not wanting pleasant ones to continue. Simply to observe. To let the wave be a wave without becoming it.

The mind is a dividing instrument. It takes one undivided reality and cuts it into pieces. This is mine, that is yours, this is beautiful, that is dirty. Consider hair. Someone tells you that you have beautiful hair. Then you find a hair in your food. The same hair, from the same head, and now disgust. Dirty. The hair has not changed. The mind has divided one undivided reality based entirely on context and arrangement. Beautiful while assembled on the head. Revolting when displaced. The same with nails. The same with everything we call mine. We like it while it is assembled. And yet all of it is bound to pass away.

My partner. My family. My home. My, my, my. We build an identity from the things and people we attach ourselves to and then defend that identity fiercely, feeling elated at praise, distressed at blame, because we have confused the assembled picture with the self. What is mine is priceless to me because I believe it adds to my identity. This creates tremendous attachment and therefore makes me prone to suffer when it decays, because I have not yet understood what impermanence truly means, not in the body, not as a truth pertaining the framework of the self. One must develop their own wisdom, to understand and therefore fully know it as ones own truth. Not one from the books. Not because Goenkaji said so. I may be a writer. I love to intellectualise impermanence and philosophise about life. Yet until I experienced the nature of impermanence within my own body, felt sensation arise and dissolve, felt the mind grasp and release, it was all theory. Intellectual entertainment. The difference between knowing anicca and feeling anicca is the difference between reading about the ocean and being dropped into the middle of it.

On day three, towards the end, we were also introduced to adiṭṭhāna, strong determination. For one hour, three times a day, we were to sit without shifting our posture, without opening our legs, our hands or our eyes. Developing strength of the mind.

Oh the excruciating pain. The numbness. The legs trembling. I contemplated whether to sit in this position with intolerable numbness or in that one with intolerable pain. After a while I started telling myself that this pain cannot hurt my mind. It may feel like pain but it is a sensation and it is bound to pass away. This is a thousand times harder to do than to say. After forty five minutes the real challenge begins. Surely the teachers have forgotten to ring the bell, surely it has been more than an hour. I tell myself anicca, anicca, anicca, eagerly waiting for Goenkaji to begin the closing instruction, yet it keeps not coming. And then I catch myself. This waiting, this desperate clinging to the sound that will end the suffering, is the same mechanism as the suffering itself. Clinging to the absence of pain. Aversion from the pain. The bell I am waiting for and the pain I am avoiding are the same thing wearing different faces. Look, I tell myself. Let us see how long this lasts. This too will change. And when the bell does ring and we come out of adiṭṭhāna, the heavenly bliss of easing the pain feels like a balm over the soul. And that too, I know, will change.

Students left during the course. Of course I too entertained the idea of stopping. But I had made a strong determination at the beginning that I would persevere. And so I did. There were those who had to leave. May they find peace within themselves. It is not easy. It may not be for everyone. But if you come, and you keep being prompted toward it, will you try to give a fair trial to this technique.

It is not total isolation. Students may request brief interviews with the teacher to ask questions about the technique itself. The silence is from each other, from the noise of the external world, from the accumulated distraction of ordinary life. Not from guidance when guidance is genuinely needed.

No ritual. No belief required. No god to pray to or doctrine to accept. Just three things, interlocked, each one necessary. Sīla, morality. The ethical foundation without which nothing else can stand. Samādhi, the right concentration that can only arise from morality. You cannot still the mind while guilt or fear occupies it. And paññā, wisdom. Not borrowed wisdom, not the wisdom of books or teachers, but your own wisdom arrived at through direct experience within the framework of your own body. These three are like a three legged chair. Remove any one and the whole thing falls. What has anyone to criticise in this. Morality. Mastery of the mind. Purification of the mind. Any religion, any culture, any background. Nothing to add. Nothing to take away.

Dhamma means universal law of nature. The truth of how things are. Not as we would like it to be, but as it is.

One hundred percent of suffering comes from you. None of it is external, however much it may appear to be. From the moment one takes birth one believes they are in a constant cycle of misery that others are afflicting upon them. I could tell from first hand experience, seeing my anger arise and pass away in the hall, my fear arise and pass away, my joy and sense of peace arise and pass away. And depending on how I reacted to it I created sankhāras. Sankhāras are the old patterns of the mind, the deep grooves worn by years of reacting in the same way to the same sensations, the cause and effect chain that keeps firing long after the original cause has gone.

Sensations that were always there, firing constantly beneath the mundane of daily life, suddenly observable once all distractions are removed and the attention is trained finely enough to feel what was already happening. This is the nervous system becoming visible to itself. Sit long enough in silence and you will start meeting your own habit patterns.

The more equanimous you remain, the more old sankhāras come to the surface and pass away. The more you react, the more you multiply them. Only love and compassion can bring you out of misery. Suffering just creates more suffering. In ordinary life we find other ways. A run, a film, a drink, a substance, anything that generates enough sensation or distraction to push the discomfort back down. It works temporarily. But the sankhāras remain underneath, like volcanoes. Never addressed, building pressure, capable of erupting at any moment and overpowering everything. The only way out is through. Not suppression. Observation. Not numbing. Feeling it clearly enough that it loses its grip.

In my case many of my sankhāras had to do with anger I felt, fear I felt, from being misunderstood, from old wounds carried without examining. Like the sensations, they arose. Like the sensations, they passed. I clung to past moments that made me feel violated and I clung to moments of joy and happiness, not letting either go, causing myself misery in both directions. Misery is universal. Comparison is meaningless. The past is gone.

If one hundred percent of suffering comes from you, then one hundred percent of liberation also comes from you. Nobody can give it. Nobody can take it. The same truth that removes the excuse also removes the dependency. ‘If only my mother changed a little.’ ‘If only my partner changed a little.’ ‘If only my daughter, my son, my colleague, if only others changed a little’, never me.

You cannot change other people. You can only train the mind. And a trained mind, meeting the same world, creates a completely different experience of it.

The technique itself was preserved over 2,500 years, taken from India to Burma where Goenkaji was taught by his teacher Sayagyi U Ba Khin, and brought back to India and eventually to the world. It asks only that you try the technique purely, so that whatever benefit or lack of benefit you experience you can attribute entirely to it. You are not asked to believe anything. You are asked to observe.

The course is free and entirely based on donations. You are living as a beggar, eating whatever is given to you, in our case delicious vegetarian food, wearing clothes that do not reveal the body, trying to reduce the ego as much as possible. You are eating food paid for by someone who came before you. Your course will be paid for by no one yet, because you will pay it forward for those who come after. The economic structure of Vipassana is itself a teaching. You receive without possessing. You give without clinging to the giving.

The ten days had a rhythm that became its own world. Wake at four. Meditation from four thirty to six thirty. Breakfast until eight. Group meditation, then individual practice through to eleven. Lunch. Rest. Back into the hall at one, continuing through to five with group sittings woven in. Tea break. Evening group meditation from six to seven. Then Goenkaji’s discourse until eight fifteen. A final sitting. Question time. Lights out at nine thirty.

I started noticing restlessness at night, unable to sleep despite working so hard all day. My dreams became extraordinarily vivid. Childhood. Old miseries. Things that had made me happy. The surgical operation was in full effect. Towards the end of the course we were also to move through the body in sweeping motions, trying to feel sensations not only on the surface but through the entire body. Not to imagine the internal organs but simply to feel.

If all we are is sensation, sensation arising and passing away across the entirety of this body, then what is I. The elements are not merely metaphysical. They are the direct physical qualities of every sensation you feel. Earth — solidity, hardness, heaviness, pressure, the weight of the body against the cushion. Wind — movement, vibration, oscillation, the tingling that travels across the skin. Fire — heat, burning, cold, the warmth of breath leaving the nostrils. Water — binding, fluidity, perspiration, the cohesive force that holds it all together momentarily before it passes. We are temporary patterns of earth, wind, fire, water. The distinction between inner self and external world dissolves not philosophically but physically. The same elements as the rain. The same elements as the hill. The same elements as everything. The taboo against knowing who you are dissolves when you feel clearly enough that who you are is earth, wind, fire, water — arising and passing like everything else. Is this bubble of wavelet I. Is this hair that is currently still on my head, is this I.

We arrived as strangers. We lived alongside each other for ten days without speaking, without touching, without making eye contact. And yet something else happened in that silence. We became curious about each other in the way the mind becomes curious when its usual tools are removed. The human mind is so inquisitive. So relentlessly interested in other people, in their stories, their interiors, what they carry, what they are working through. Strip away the phone, the conversation, the eye contact, the entire social infrastructure through which we normally satisfy that curiosity, and it does not go away. It intensifies. It turns toward the only information available — the colour of someone’s toenail polish, the way a person holds their shoulders, the particular quality of someone’s stillness or restlessness. I watched my neighbour. She watched me. Ten days of silent curiosity building between us. You cannot touch anyone. So you hug yourself instead, shifting in your seat, arms folding across your own body in the small unconscious gestures of a person who is craving contact. You get to know each other without knowing each other at all.

When the ten days ended and noble silence was broken, the feeling was overwhelming. Tears. Faces turning toward each other as if seeing for the first time. Hugs, the full body relief of contact after ten days without it. My neighbour and I had been living next to each other for the entire course, curious about one another, constructing each other in our minds from nothing but presence and peripheral glances. She had been wondering about me. I had been wondering about her. And when we could finally speak I told her that I had heard her cry one night in meditation, and that when I heard it tears had welled up in me too, and that I had felt from that moment that I was free to cry also. In the shared crying of two strangers who could not speak to each other and could not touch each other something had passed between us that needed no words and needed no contact. Just presence. Just the sound of someone else's grief making your own grief feel less alone in the dark.

On the last day, after ten days of no rain, a heavy downpour came. The sound overpowered the discourse itself, drumming on the roof of the hall so loudly that Goenkaji's voice was swallowed by it. When it ended we came out. A few of us walked straight into the rain. We stood in it and let it soak us completely, stood there alive and laughing and holding each other in a group hug, soaked through, the sky having done what ten days of sitting had been trying to teach us. Everything passes. And when it passes something else arrives. And that something else is allowed to soak you to the bone if you let it. We let it.

There were moments I wanted it to end. When the bell would not come and the legs were trembling and the mind was exhausted, I wanted the last day to arrive. And then the last day came. And when it did I felt something unexpected. Grief. Not for the difficulty. For the leaving of something that had, in its ten days of total demand, become the most honest place I had ever been. I had never been anywhere so difficult. I had never been anywhere so pure.

I feel enormously fortunate to have found this technique. That I went when I did, where I did. That the conditions were as they were, that the hall was full of women, that the rain came on the last day, that my neighbour and I had the moment we had. None of this was guaranteed. All of it arrived. I received it as fully as I knew how.

This is not a destination. Far from it. Goenkaji taught that the work continues long after the ten days end. Morning and evening sittings. The practice returning in whatever city you find yourself in. I am at the very beginning of understanding what that means.

Far from perfect. I dipped my toes in and the toes went in knee deep without my noticing, perhaps up to the shoulders. Vipassana is not a vacation. It is not a retreat in the gentle sense of that word. It is the hardest and most worthwhile investment of ten days I have ever made in myself. Time is so precious. To cultivate strength of the mind is to cultivate the source of everything. Keep the mind as a wild untamed bull, raging, reacting, reacting, reacting, and misery awaits. Train it, and the same world becomes a completely different experience entirely.

See for yourself.

Dhamma.org

Normal is Plural

I always call somewhere home. The word arrives naturally, without decision. I say it and mean it and then later say it again about somewhere else and mean that too.

Home is fluid. I have known this for long enough that it no longer feels like a loss.

Normal is the same. We say it as though it were universal. But my normal in Hungary and my normal in London and my normal in Vietnam are not translations of each other. They are different languages entirely. You cannot look the word up in a dictionary. You have to live inside it for a while before it starts to make sense, and even then what makes sense to you will not make sense to the person standing next to you, even if you share a postcode, even if you share a bed.

Normal is plural. It always was. We just built infrastructure around one version of it and called that reality.

There is a paradox that arrives when you have lived in many places. You stop needing the fourteen toothpastes. Not because you become ascetic or superior about it but because you have seen people live well on two, on one, on whatever is available, and the abundance starts to look less like freedom and more like a question you have to answer every morning before you have even brushed your teeth.

Does having everything make you forget you already have enough.

The fear, in many places I have lived, is the habit rather than the reality. The infrastructure is already there — the healthcare, the stability, the food, the safety so embedded it has become invisible. And still the chasing continues. More money. More certainty. More. Not because the rain is actually falling but because the memory of rain, or the idea of rain, or someone else's rain, keeps the fear alive long after the umbrella is open.

I say this not from above it. I am inside it too. I have stood under the umbrella and felt cold anyway.

What living in many places gave me was not superiority over any of them. It was the ability to see each one from the outside while still being inside it. Medellín, Bangalore, Almaty alongside Paris, London, Tokyo. The logic of each place visible because you have seen the logic of another. Not better. Just multiple. The same way you can hold several languages and none of them cancels the others out.

How do we know what we know, and what invisible forces organise that knowing. How does a human being learn to think for themselves.

Not through the toothpastes. Through encounters. Through the book that finds you at the right moment. Through the conversation that unravels something you had been carrying without knowing its name. Through sitting with a question long enough that the question itself starts to change shape.

As Paul Zacharia understood it: the web catches the prey. The spider just eats what the web brings.

I wove the web. I built the conditions. The materials were privilege and time and the particular freedom of not being under survival pressure, which is not nothing, which is in fact everything, which is the thing most people do not say out loud when they talk about how they got here. Hungary gave me the melancholy and the precision. Vietnam gave me the warmth and the responsibility toward continuity. Britain gave me the permission structure, the intellectual confidence, the language the world reads in. And I — the consciousness sitting at the intersection of all three, belonging fully to none of them and therefore free to take from all of them — took those materials and built something that did not exist before.

The hunting is done by the geometry of the work. I just had to build it and trust it and let it catch what it was shaped to catch.

We exist in a constant state of ambiguity. Clarity and confusion arriving together, bliss and suffering sharing the same morning.

Change is the only constant. And if that is true, which it is, which every version of normal in every city I have called home has confirmed, then the only intelligent response is to welcome it. Not to grip. Not to build higher walls around whichever version of normal you happen to be standing in. To trust the motion.

Normal is plural. Home is fluid. Impermanence is not a problem to be solved. It is the condition of everything, including the self that keeps arriving somewhere new and calling it home.

And the self means it every time.

Game declined

Every game needs two players. Without a counter-move, it simply is not a game.

Someone decides you are not enough of the thing you are. They hand you a word. Sometimes it is gentle, almost affectionate. Sometimes it cuts. The word changes depending on where you stand and who is doing the measuring, but the mechanism is always the same. You are being tested against a standard you did not set, judged by rules you did not write, and found wanting by someone who appointed themselves the judge.

Here is how it works.

A comment about your language, your customs, your choices, your distance from a place they consider the source. The comment carries an implication: you have strayed too far, diluted too much, forgotten something essential. You are less than you should be. This is the opening move.

Your go. Will you defend yourself? Will you list your credentials, recite your knowledge, prove your belonging? Do it, and you have entered the game. And in entering, you have already validated the premise — that their judgment holds weight, that your identity is something external to be audited and approved, that you owe proof.

Defense is participation. And participation is loss.

The board is fiction. The hierarchy being defended is arbitrary. The authenticity you are being measured against is a moving target, a test designed so that someone like you cannot pass. The game was rigged from the start. The only way to win is not to play.

Refusal is hearing the comment, seeing the board being set up, and choosing not to move your piece. Letting the move fall into empty space, unanswered, unmet. No counter-move. No game.

Underneath the comment, someone is trying to hand you their pain. Their discomfort with change, with displacement, with the impossibility of keeping cultures pure in a world that has always been mixing. Unresolved grief about staying or leaving, about holding on or letting go, about carrying a weight they never chose but cannot put down.

You do not have to take it.

Secure people welcome. They are curious. They ask questions not to test but to understand. They share what they know without making you feel that your not-knowing is a failure. Their sense of self is not threatened by your existence.

Insecure people build hierarchies. They measure suffering as if it were a credential. They need you to be lesser so they can be more. They need you to fail the test so their passing it still means something. Because if you are allowed to belong without meeting their standards, without carrying what they carry, without suffering the way they suffered — then maybe the standards were never real. And that is unbearable.

Suffering seeks company.

Without a counter-move, it is not a game. It is just someone talking to themselves.

Identity is not a test you pass or fail. It is not something external that can be measured, graded, audited by others. It is lived. It is felt. It is the accumulation of a thousand small inheritances, choices, accidents, migrations, losses, and survivals that you did not choose but carry anyway. You do not owe proof. You do not owe performance. You do not owe anyone the story of how you came to be the way you are.

There is no authentic version of you that exists somewhere else, in some other language, some other place, some other life. There is only this version. The one standing here. Shaped by migration and survival and a hundred choices made by people who came before you. Carrying inheritances you did not choose but cannot put down. Trying to live in a world that keeps asking you to pick a side when you are made of many.

You are the result of movement, of mixture, of borders crossed and languages learned and cultures held loosely because holding them tightly would break them. You are what happens when worlds collide and create something new.

And new simply is new.

The Alternate Reality

An excerpt from While We Still Have Time, forthcoming 2026.

Allow me to paint an alternate reality.

***

I walk the path of conformity, securing a mundane job and adhering to a timeline dictated by society’s wishes. I tread in respectable mediocrity before making any decisions, postponing life under the illusion of endless time. I put on a mask of happiness, sacrificing my true self for the empty approval of those around me. I am perpetually out of place, misunderstood, and perhaps even at odds with my own essence. I am a social tool, fitting neatly into precise compartments that offer a false sense of security. I outsource my beauty, my worth, my happiness, letting others reflect it back to me so I don’t have to feel it directly.

I look down on freedom, and those who cannot follow my predictable path, their freedom a threat to my fragile sense of superiority. In this pursuit, I believe in my superiority, a puppet master in a world of my own making, where the only truth is the facade I present. I document my life obsessively, not what I am seeing but myself seeing it. I am already imagining the image while the moment is still unfolding. I stand somewhere beautiful thinking about how I look standing there. Being seen replaces being. No one questions this anymore. We call it sharing. We call it memory. When all it is is proof-gathering for a life that isn’t being lived.

In this alternate reality, I am applauded for my restraint. People call me grounded, realistic, mature, because I have learned how to silence the part of me that wanted too much. I confuse numbness with peace. I mistake predictability for safety. I congratulate myself for surviving a life I was never meant to inhabit.

I only walk to my car. I sit inside a sealed machine that protects me while exposing everyone else, a private capsule of speed and force where my attention carries consequences beyond my own body. I growl at traffic as if it weren’t made almost entirely of people exactly like me. I demand speed while contributing weight. Every street becomes a test I barely notice: children, cyclists, elderly bodies calibrated against my impatience. A kill machine, normalised, regulated, insured, handed over daily as responsibility disguised as convenience. I burn fuel to spare myself the effort of distance, traveling on roads designed to fail gradually, absorbing destruction into routine. Roads disappear beneath my feet so I can arrive sooner, untouchable.

I scroll through other people’s lives to reassure myself that no one is truly free. I consume inspiration in controlled doses, careful never to let it infect me with action. I say one day so often it becomes a lullaby that puts my courage to sleep. My dopamine levels fluctuate like the waves I can’t ride. From morning till evening I can’t eat without my phone glowing beside my plate. I promise myself I’ll quit, detoxify, limit, delete and dismiss every method that would actually inconvenience me. I believe I have discipline but I simply decide I won’t do it just yet. The phone keeps me stimulated enough to feel content and distracted enough to avoid feeling trapped.

I become fluent at making excuses. Time, money, stability and responsibility. I tell myself I’m choosing this life but the truth is I’m avoiding the fear of choosing anything at all. I grow intolerant of depth. When conversations drift toward meaning, death, or desire, I redirect them to logistics. I cannot afford to look too closely. Awareness would demand movement, and movement would expose the lie. So I stay busy. Productivity numbs the pain I won’t even name.

I develop a quiet resentment toward anyone who lives loudly. Artists embarrass me. Lovers who risk everything irritate me. People who leave unsettle me. Their existence implies that I could have done otherwise, and that is an implication I cannot survive intact. So I mock and pity them, reducing them to cautionary tales, anything to keep my own reflection from cracking.

I go on retreats where enlightenment is sold to me for three thousand pounds guided by Greg from California, while locals work invisibly to keep the experience seamless. Nothing signals awakening like money well spent. I outsource the slow, humiliating work of introspection to a schedule, a package, a payment plan. I leave lighter, cleaner, convinced I’ve arrived, then return unchanged, reassured that depth remains a product I can access whenever I’m ready to pay.

I tell myself I care about the planet as I inhabit cities that import everything we consume. I want to see untapped places and tap them, while calling it curiosity and exploration, while deep down I know it would be too raw for me. I want to numb myself on holidays where all I do is lie still, recovering from the exhaustion of a life I call successful. I am a hypocrite flying across the world, the single largest personal carbon load most people ever create and I know it. I offset, I rationalize, as the fuel is burning beneath me. I live in a city plugged into extreme resource use, sustained by imported food, constant climate control, endless infrastructure, and I sip a matcha oat latte while knowing better. I buy sustainable things to consume without guilt: new yoga mats, new bottles, new clothes wrapped in eco-language. I know better, and continue anyway.

In this reality, I am dazzled by height and shine. Skyscrapers convince me of progress. Glass towers rising from sand feel like achievement, even when I know they are built on invisible hands, on imported bodies that will never look up from the ground they poured. I admire the bling while pretending not to see the cost: cities covered in luxury, faces frozen in Botox, abundance displayed like a weapon. I mistake excess for power, spectacle for substance. I tell myself it’s impressive, aspirational, the future, as I carefully avoid asking who paid for it, who disappeared into it, who will never belong to the skyline they built. I let myself be seduced by the glow because it saves me from asking harder questions about what kind of world I am applauding.

I tell myself I am above chaos, when in reality I am terrified of aliveness. I confuse control with dignity. I confuse order with meaning. I confuse comfort with fulfillment. And slowly, expertly, I become someone who is very good at living, and very bad at being alive. Years pass without leaving a mark. My body ages, but my inner world remains untouched, untested, unspent. I grow older without growing deeper. I accumulate objects, routines, acquaintances, but no stories that could save me if everything were stripped away. And one day it dawns on me that I have become invisible to myself. The dull, unbearable knowing that I did everything right, and I still betrayed my life.

Not that this life is painful, but that it is acceptable.

The Cage Question

Imagine that you are in a cage.

However, you are not human but animal.

1. Tell me the first animal that comes to your mind.

2. Describe the cage in as much detail as possible.

***

The cage offers a window into how we understand ourselves, our limitations, and the often unspoken rules that govern our lives. The animal symbolises the raw, unfiltered essence of who we are, while the cage represents the external structures imposed by society, family, or even our own minds, which we perceive as containing us.

This exercise is a way to get to know someone better. Ask them for their thoughts on their chosen animal and keep asking for more details. What colour is the floor? What's in the corner? Understand what their cage looks like and how they feel inside it.

When asked to describe their chosen animal, people unconsciously reveal their feelings: how they view their constraints and their potential for freedom. People talk about it without realising it, it's disarming. Some see themselves as raging bulls, straining against the bars. Others might envision themselves as birds, unable to imagine a cage, seeing it as a room where they can fly high and gain new perspectives.

There is no difference between the cage and the animal because the boundaries we think we see, the limitations we feel, are essentially linked to the essence of who we are. The cage is not an external force keeping us trapped. It is an extension of the animal, of us, a manifestation of how we perceive the world and our place in it.

For some, the bars are thick and unyielding, representing deep beliefs, fears, or societal expectations that feel impossible to break free from. For others, the cage may be fragile, barely noticeable, something that could be shifted at any moment if only they realised their own power.

Those who are fully assimilated by society won't see the cage; they are so into the illusion they see no boundaries.

You can't possibly be comfortable everywhere. The people who don't see the cage, who think they are free, are often those most confined by it. They are so deeply assimilated into the expectations and norms of society that they don't even realise they're in a cage at all. For these people, the cage has become indistinguishable from the world they live in.

To see the cage, to feel its bars, is the first step toward freedom, because in recognising the boundaries, you give yourself the power to redefine them.

Some see themselves as dragon lying dormant. Their cage is made out of twigs so thin that if the dragon moves the cage collapses. The cage has a sword going through securing the enclosed there.

When I was first proposed this question, I saw myself as a tiger: fierce and strong, caged within a zoo-like structure. The bars were thick and unyielding, allowing minimal space to walk in a circle. The ceiling was so high that the tiger could not see the end, leaving it to wonder if there was ever an escape.

I've always identified with a tiger. Growing up in a country different from my heritage, I often felt the pressure to assimilate, clinging to anything that made me feel part of the society around me. These were desperate attempts to fit in and be accepted. Within those confines, I've become both resilient and strong. I like having my space and feeling secure in it. The adaptability I've developed reminds me of a big cat: flexible yet firm. Tigers are known for being unpredictable, quick to make decisive moves. Similarly, my emotions can flare up intensely, yet at other times, I am calm and steady, like a quiet giant. There's an untamed strength in tigers, but also a sense of grace. That combination is where my confidence resides.

The question is not whether the cage exists but whether we understand it for what it is. The tiger, the dragon, the bird: they are all aspects of ourselves, representing how we move through life, how we see our power, and how we navigate our perceived limitations. But the cage, too, is part of us. It's a creation of our minds, built from our beliefs about the world and our place in it. When we understand that the cage is of our own making, we can begin to shape it, bend it, and eventually walk through it with the power of knowing we were never truly confined.

There is no world outside of you. Everything you experience is a reflection of your own thoughts, perceptions, and beliefs. The cage is not imposed by society, nor is it forced upon you by external forces. It is you. The world, as we know it, is a mental construct. When you change your mind, you change your world.

Just as the cage can be a symbol of confinement, it can also be a symbol of transformation. The cage, initially seen as a binding constraint, can, however, evolve into a sanctuary that not only helps us exist in a certain way but also protects us and aids in navigation. The cage is something to be understood. And in that understanding lies the key to our freedom.

Parrot in a Sea of Penguins

Some people think a hundred thousand dollars is the hardest thing to earn. For others, they can just get a hundred thousand.

The concept of earning is small. You can lecture me about earning while I enjoy my life in the suburbs. Are you trying to prove a point? So what if I didn't earn it with hard work? I was born with it. You made it to Earth: did you earn that? Do you earn who you are or where you are? You have not earned anything, no matter what.

Because I earn money, I have earned the right to live? Absurdity. Our value and right to exist aren’t defined solely by our economic contribution but by our intrinsic worth as human beings and the unique qualities we bring to the world. Your worth is inherent in who you are: the kindness you show, the connections you build, the impact you make through your authenticity. Earn the things that matter to you. It's never next time, it's now.

Parrot in a sea of penguins.

You need to establish a person’s worldview to get to know someone. Some people believe to exist is to make money. And the same perspectives tend to hand out together because they perpetuate that worldview and won’t question it.

What does rich mean to you? What does making a living mean? What if I live on a farm and don’t even use money? Is that making a living?

The answer depends entirely on the worldview of the person you are speaking to.

Which is why you have to establish that first. You have to know what game they think they are playing, what winning looks like from where they stand, what they would say if you asked them quietly, without judgment, on an ordinary Tuesday: what does any of this mean to you?

Because some people will answer with a number.

And some people will pause.

And in that pause, in the space between the question and whatever comes next, that is where you find out who you are actually talking to.