E Everything I Have Left

2026 is the year of farewells.

It began in January. Just before I received the news that I would lose my grandmother , the person I loved most in my entire family , I made the decision to say goodbye to my antidepressants. I had been on them for five years. They had done their job, if muting one’s feelings and fogging one’s judgement can truly be called helping.

The weeks that followed were excruciating. Coming off the daily hum of slow-release serotonin while simultaneously watching the decline of the beautiful soul who had raised and nurtured me my whole life was its own particular kind of cruelty. By the time the withdrawal had become manageable, she was gone.

That was my second farewell. And very likely the most significant one of this year, if not of my entire life.

Then, exactly a month after her funeral, standing on the back step of my store with a vape in my hand, I decided to stop. Just like that. Nicotine had been a faithful companion for five years , and for good reason. It acts on the ADHD brain like a small, reliable miracle, flooding it with dopamine when nothing else will. I had originally started vaping to spite a former partner who had been deeply abusive toward me, (more on him another time, if I ever decide he is worth the sacrifice of ink) but what began as defiance became a safety blanket. For five years I wrapped my emotions, thoughts and quiet anxieties in strawberry-flavoured vapour.

I had promised my partner in January that I would leave vaping behind by June, already outlined a plant to execute this. But my grandmother’s death, and the inner dialogues I have been having with her ever since, advised me otherwise. Her voice in my head urged me toward the end of April instead. I thought I would surprise her, quit early, make her proud. I imagined her showing me off to her afterlife companions, to my grandfather, pointing at me and saying: look what I made her do .

I am fifty-one hours past my last puff. I am irritable and I feel the ghost of that familiar hand movement, the soothing, repetitive ritual of it, more than I feel the nicotine itself. I am managing with nicotine pouches for now, using far fewer than the recommended twenty a day, and already planning how I will taper down from three milligrams to nothing.

But beneath all of this, a question is forming that I cannot quite silence.

What gives me dopamine now? What manages the weather inside me, now that there are no antidepressants, no grandmother, and no vaping left to reach for?

I am afraid of what I might find when all the scaffolding is finally gone. I am afraid of the bleak open space that might be waiting underneath.

But I suppose that is exactly what this year is asking me to face.

So let us take stock of what remains.

I have my partner, who has been standing beside me through all of this, through the grief, the withdrawals, the unravelling and the rebuilding.

I have Szaffi. My fluffball. My little whiny, dramatic, deeply beloved cat who waits for me every single day when I come home from work, and every single morning when I have not yet opened my eyes, patient and certain that the world cannot properly begin until we are together. She is not wrong.

She has been with me longer than most. During the darkest chapter of my life, when I was living inside an abusive relationship and could not always find a reason to keep my head above the water, she was curling up next to me. She was always there. Quietly, stubbornly, warmly. She did not ask questions or offer solutions. She simply stayed, curled against me, purring, anchoring me to the present moment when everything else was pulling me under. I do not know that I would have kept myself together without her. I am not sure I want to imagine it. What I know is that I owe her a debt I can never repay, and that I am eternally grateful for every whine, every demand, every small warm weight of her that reminded me I was still here and still worth something.

I have Branko, my dog-son, another fluffy fool, who operates at one consistent emotional frequency: pure, uncomplicated joy. He is thrilled that I exist. He is thrilled that he exists. He is convinced, at all times, that he is the funniest thing in any given room, and honestly, he is usually right. We go on walks together, the 4 of us, and he announces our adventures to the entire street, crying out as though the world has been waiting for us to come and explore it.

And then there is Marcie. A tiny, furry little princess who has made her terms very clear: she will accept cuddles at any hour, she will present her belly to whoever is nearest, and she will receive the adoration of all those around her with quiet, graceful expectation. She too will walk with you, but she does it with a dignity the rest of us can only aspire to.

And then there is the rest of my family, back in Hungary. My mother, my twin sister, my brother.

My grandmother’s passing has changed them, changed all of us. There is no pretending otherwise. She was the gravity that held certain things in orbit, and now that she is gone, we are all quietly trying to find out where we stand in relation to one another. Who we are to each other without her at the centre.

We are trying. That is the most honest thing I can say. We are attempting to find a new way to be a family, or perhaps a better version of one , though it is slow and uncertain work. The truth is that each of us carries our own wounds, our own histories, our own private methods of surviving. None of us learned how to cope from watching the others. We all retreated into ourselves at some point and figured it out alone, in the dark, in our own languages and silences.

In some ways we are a family of strangers who love each other deeply. And perhaps that is where we begin, not by pretending the distance is not there, but by deciding, slowly and imperfectly, to cross it.

These are the things I have left. And written down like this, they do not look like nothing. They look like everything.