A year has passed without me actually realizing it was over. A year has passed, and everything has
happened with actually „nothing” happening. Seemingly, of course. But actually, this was a very
important year. It has restructured many lives, just as it has mine. I was driven by these changes,
lessons, fears, insights, individual, shared and/or parallel stories, engaging in dialogue with them,
reflecting on them, and by combining them with my own experiences. In the meantime, I had to
face that my problems where not at all that „special”. No two stories are the same, of course, but
there is an abundance of eerie similarities…

Then world opened up again and there was that panic of having to open the door. To some
extent, everything continued where it was left off, but not exactly. Interestingly, expectations did
not change. The familiar questions came pouring in: „So, do you have a proper job yet? Are you
still living with a flatmate? When will you get married? Family? You know, your biological clock is
ticking…” The tremendous pressure was back. And it resulted in easier situations for some and
more difficult for others, because even if expectations have not changed, the soul has all the
more.

As Imre Kertész put it:
„I would move on, but feeling of uncertainty trembles within, an irrepressible nostalgia. For I too was
jealous of my solitude, the intimate hours of reading and selfcastigation, the latent source of power
in loneliness, the entire old and, as it were, defiant way of existence that accreted to me, the fact
that I lived incessantly confronted by the forces of destruction, setting myself in opposition to them,
so to speak, like an arrowhead on a bow…It was a great adventure, a joy, and upon which I now
look back like an old man upon his youth.”*

*Imre Kertész: Someone else (A Chronicle of the Change) (Translated by Tim Wilkinson)

All images ©Zsuzsa Darab