That Is Exactly How It Is

In late 2022, I left Berlin and moved to a small village in rural Bulgaria. My grandmother was 93 years old, increasingly unable to walk or care for herself, and we were — by that point, due to circumstances I may write about another time — the only two remaining members of our family. Monthly visits were no longer enough. She needed someone there.

What followed was one of the most meaningful, difficult, beautiful, and bittersweet years of my life.

The winter that year was mild and wildly beautiful. Azure skies, barely any snow, hills the colour of straw rolling out in every direction above the village. Each day, after the morning routines were done and my grandmother was settled, I would walk for a couple of hours through those hills — listening to an audiobook, thinking about life, breathing air that tasted like nothing I could find in the city. There was an unusual quality to that time: stripped of distraction, held in the particular stillness that comes from being needed, I found myself thinking more clearly and more deeply than I had in years.

I had always been drawn to philosophy. As a child growing up in Bulgaria in the 1980s — behind the Iron Curtain, in a strictly atheist, materialist culture — I was already contending privately with questions about God, death, and what it meant to be human. That inquisitiveness had little to do with my upbringing; my parents were pragmatic and non-religious, and school offered no encouragement in that direction. The questions simply would not leave me alone.

They followed me into adulthood, through a Master's degree in anthropology, through doctoral studies, through an ongoing and widening engagement with philosophy — Heidegger, Whitehead, and later the neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, whose work on the divided brain provided a bridge I hadn't known I was looking for between philosophy and the human mind. It was during those winter walks, also, that I encountered Jill Bolte Taylor's Whole Brain Living — a book that planted seeds whose significance I wouldn't fully understand until later.

~~~

By late summer of 2023, my grandmother had turned 94. Her condition had become dire — at least from the outside. She was bedridden now, eyes mostly closed, her voice thinned to whisper. She had to be cared for like a newborn. Looking at her lying there in apparent stillness, I found myself wondering what was happening on the inside.

So I asked her.

I asked if she was bored. She whispered: no. I asked if she was suffering or uncomfortable. No. I asked if her inner experience was still vivid and full, despite everything. Yes. When I read to her, I could watch her face change — light up at certain passages, shift at others. So I asked her directly: despite how things looked from the outside, could she follow everything happening around her? Was her inner world still as rich as it had always been?

To spare her energy, I suggested she squeeze my hand once for yes, twice for no.

She didn't squeeze my hand. Instead, she gathered herself, opened her eyes briefly, and whispered: "That is exactly how it is."

~~~

I have thought about that moment many times since. There she was — outwardly diminished, barely present in any way the world could measure — and inwardly: radiant, lucid, entirely herself. The spirit, whatever we mean by that word, was completely intact.

I encountered this idea again later, when I began reading Viktor Frankl. He called it his psychiatric credo: that the human spirit is always intact. That however reduced or constrained a person's outer circumstances, something in them remains unreachable, inviolable. I had already seen it with my own eyes, in a village bedroom in Bulgaria, on a sunny morning in October.

She passed away peacefully in her sleep not long after.

~~~

Returning to Berlin, I entered what I can only describe as a liminal year. A deeply meaningful chapter had closed and I needed to find what came next. I read widely, walked a great deal, and let the question stay open without forcing an answer.

And then, as these things sometimes happen, a series of small events led me to Frankl — to logotherapy, to existential analysis, to the school of thought that takes meaning not as a luxury but as the central human necessity. The more I read, the more I recognised something I had already been living. The year with my grandmother had not been a detour from meaningful work. It had been the very thing.

I enrolled in the diploma programme at VFI. I completed it and opened my practice in Berlin.

My seeking of meaning turned out to be the meaning I had been seeking.