This is my first Thanksgiving; it’s not a thing in Europe, where I came from, and to be completely honest with you, I didn’t know how to approach it.
After a year like mine — a year of being hurt, escaping an abusive relationship, living in fear, healing from pain that still echoes in my bones, and losing my beloved little dog in the most tragic way — the idea of sitting down and making a gratitude list felt almost impossible. Actually, at first, it felt cruel. It takes courage to face a year like that and sit with the aching grief.
I had to force myself into this. When I first sat down to write about gratitude, the only thing that came out of me was sharp, wounded sarcasm. But I kept writing, I kept dragging the words out of myself, one stubborn, reluctant sentence after the other. Somewhere between the third and the fourth line, the wall I’d been pressing against finally gave a little, letting just enough light seep through to make me pause for a second.
What began as a stubborn, defiant anger eventually tamed and transformed itself into this list. Let me share this with you. Look what I’ve found still burning under the collapsed architecture of my life.
I am grateful that I survived the unsurvivable. Now I know it’s true — that until our very last breath, we can fight, we can choose, again and again, to shape our lives and ultimately our world into a better place to be.
I’m beyond grateful to have known Ellise, my puppy, and we shared a year—the hardest year of my life. She was there, loving me with pure and unconditional love that only animals can give. Through her, I learned what it means to be in perfect, effortless harmony with another being, to feel in my bones that this kind of connection isn’t a fantasy, it really exists.
I am grateful that Rusty, the little American kestrel, flew into my life for a month — and that because of him, I wrote Soulbird, a book that somehow ended up carrying into other people’s hands a piece of the strength I myself was starving for.
I am grateful that this year, I contributed to science with five academic papers — and that my research is slowly finding its way, helping build a better and more humane healthcare system.
I am grateful that my book, The Optimist — A Guide for the Anxious, Using the Tools of the Futures-Focused Psychologist, was published in Hungarian, and I love that the cover is a forever memento of my Ellise and our trio with Eliott, her brother.
I am thankful to have friends now on both sides of the ocean — those back home who never forget me, and those here who have opened their lives and hearts to me.
I am thankful that I saw New York in every season, in every color, and in every mood.
I’m thankful that this year has sorted things out for me — that everyone whose love wasn’t real or who was too weak to stand by and watch me walk through the fire has fallen out of my life. I love having a smaller, but absolutely f@cking valuable circle.
I am grateful for the person this year has shaped me into — humbled in the places where I needed humbling, and tougher in the places where I needed more strength. I’m glad that, even in impossible circumstances, I learned to live and grow entirely on my own, 8,000 kilometers away from everyone who has ever loved me. And I am proud that as a human and as a professional, I can now offer even more to the people who trust me with their healing.
Gratitude wasn’t obvious for me this time. I carved it from survival, from ashes, I built it on the ruins of a life I’ve lost. But it’s here. And I’m beyond grateful for that.
I’m a futurist, after all, who else should still believe in the futures I’m building, brick by bloody brick at a time.
Happy Thanksgiving from my new life in New York.
