Everywhere is good, but the best is in a wonderful, brave country: home! Finally, it feels good to love you, Hungary!

Oh no, this post is not about politics. It’s about my own feelings. Here I am, with dark circles under my eyes after yesterday’s all-day and evening scrolling, because it didn’t even occur to me to take a nap after all those nights up with my few-week-old baby. And yet I’m smiling from ear to ear, filled with an euphoric feeling that I can only be happy because I am Hungarian. I don’t feel the helpless knot of anger in my throat, but a peaceful, calm, liberated feeling, because I was part of something historic, and I no longer see possibilities only out there in the big world, but in here too. At home.

I have never been homesick, and now, for the first time in my life, I long to go home. For the first time in my life, I feel that I have roots, and they pull me home. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, and I already love that I belong somewhere, that there is a place on Earth where, right now, the vast majority of people feel the same as I do. This sense of belonging is truly incredible.

I have never felt such hope that I have a future in Hungary. That Budapest is no longer only a beautiful, vibrant city, but could also become the city of opportunities, the one I have always looked for elsewhere.

And in this moment, it does not matter that with my degree from Semmelweis University I could not, or hardly could find a properly paid job in my field, despite years of experience. That from my last job in Hungary, at the State Secretariat for Health of the Ministry of Interior, I was fired within half an hour of reporting my high-risk pregnancy. That, having been declared unfit for work with medical justification, and after several miscarriages, as an anxious expectant mother with a pregnancy that was risky again, they made my livelihood impossible once and for all. That that same day I got on a bus and moved to Vienna with a backpack, and right after training camp I moved Rú out too. That after my Hungarian address was canceled, within an hour I received the decision deleting me from the voter register, but they dragged out my social security cancellation for months, blocking my foreign health insurance for months as a high-risk pregnant woman. That at the Hungarian embassy they misled me by saying that weeks before the election we could no longer vote from Austria, and without an address not even in Hungary, so there was no point in trying. That I had no intention of giving birth in Hungary. That my request to give up family allowance (13,700 HUF per month) was only accepted if I answered every unrelated question on the form in full, forcing me through repeated requests for missing documents.

In this moment, I do not feel that back home neither my livelihood nor my decision to have children was sacred. Somehow I only feel that perhaps we may still have a future in the country where I grew up, where my older son was born, and where the younger one may yet return home.

A special sense of triumph beats in me, and hope and pride—pride, for the very first time in my life—that we are Hungarian too. From today on, I am not ashamed. ♥