VENDLER.

Gratitude

2024.12.16.

Somehow, December keeps bringing events that surprise me daily, make me reflect, and remind me of the impact my honesty has on my surroundings. The fact that I write my feelings out so transparently—what I am going through.

But the beginning wasn’t easy.

When I started blogging, I received endless criticism and confusion from my environment. “What is this nonsense again? Are you just craving attention? Can’t you find something better to do with yourself?” Close and distant friends alike engaged me in tense, interrogative conversations, offering advice about what I should and shouldn’t be doing. I would overhear occasional critiques behind my back. Yet somehow, I felt that I needed this. Not the criticism—the writing.

Then summer came, and even this “miracle” only seemed to last three days. Some likely concluded that “a fool is just a fool,” while others perhaps got used to or even grew to like my writings. Some found meaning in them, and increasingly, people reached out with messages and feedback.

Something began to shift.

I started receiving inquiries, conference invitations, and offers. Phone calls, conversations, and coffee meetups followed. That’s how I ended up at the Growth Magazine office, where during a lighthearted, friendly, hours-long meeting, I had the pleasure of meeting the owner couple. We chatted, said our goodbyes… and from that conversation emerged an interview, now published in the magazine issue released today.

It’s not customary to write or speak about our emotions, struggles, failures, or how we experience them—not even within families. Sometimes it’s so hard just to say something aloud, to find a listener who won’t drown us in unsolicited advice. Yet we yearn for it. Because perhaps even the most beautiful life is filled with challenges, failures, and tragedies. And if they don’t happen to us, they may happen to our loved ones, and their struggles become our struggles. In fact, those might feel even harder, as we often don’t know what we can do to make things better for them.

Maybe the knowledge that these things happen to others too, that other people also struggle, that our problems are somehow shared, that we can connect through these situations, makes those tough periods easier, more bearable. Perhaps reading about it is like telling someone who understands, someone who knows what we’re feeling.

In Growth Magazine, I speak openly about these situations—about disappointment, about the things I messed up, and about how I’m searching for my place today.

Writing all this out has brought me relationships, opportunities, and experiences over the past year that I am deeply grateful for—to life, and to everyone who has connected to my story in some way. And I truly am!

Thank you.

Beatrix Gosztola, András Sárközi

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The article was translated from Hungarian to English by ChatGPT. Thank you, ChatGPT, for being here.

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