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.

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.