thoughts

Although the New Year is already a couple of weeks old, I'm still thinking about how I love the nostalgic last days of the old and first days of the New Year. As someone who over-thinks even the smallest words and gestures for decades, I'm glad it's justified to cling to memories from the past year on the days before New Year's Eve -- and be hopeful during the first days and weeks of January. I'm usually more the pessimistic  realistic type, but the idea of a fresh start never ceases to motivate me. In many ways, 2015 was a year [...]

I remember when I was younger, I kept stumbling across phrases like "once you're in your late twenties, you'll be less insecure" all over the place. I don't like clichés like that, but these days I feel like it's actually true: With age comes confidence. A few years ago, I was constantly thinking about what other people thought of me. I've always loved wearing black clothes for example, but I couldn't stand the comments about my appearance and questions like "has someone died or why are you wearing dark clothes all the time?". I spent weeks feeling uncomfortable in bright and [...]

We had just ordered our pizza and were hungrily sipping on our drinks, desperately waiting for our food to arrive after a long day at the world's biggest travel trade fair. It had been a day of small talk and business appointments, but as the evening commenced our press badges and business selves were slowly vanishing. We started chatting about non-work related topics, but naturally always returned to the same old one, the common favorite: Travel. -- Have you been to the Algarve? Can you repeat how to say cheers in Hungarian? What did you think of Bratislava? I suddenly realized [...]

When I look around, everyone seems to be so ambitious. Whether it's people I barely know, or my closest friends, everyone seems to be striving toward something: To lose a few pounds, to graduate magna cum laude, to find the dream job, to gain more Instagram followers, to find the love with that everlasting spark. Being surrounded by all these ambitious friends and acquaintances (aka people I stalk online) can be exhausting. Don't get me wrong though, it's in no way a bad thing to work toward something, to have certain goals. But sometimes I feel like this ongoing ambition contest also leads [...]

"I dreamed a dream my life would be..." -- these are the famous words Fantine sings in Les Miserables when she realizes that her life has absolutely not turned out the way she thought it would. Of course, I'm not comparing myself to Fantine's horrible fate. But her words stuck with me nonetheless: I was 16 years old when I was Fantine in our high school musical production of Les Miserables -- and I had a certain dream what my life would be like in the future, too. It was only a little high school musical show, but for me it was the [...]