The Initiation

Back then, everything revolved around him.

It was almost as though I had stopped existing for myself.

As if I had dissolved into my femininity and every cell in my body was focused on making him feel good.

I was happy too.

This was not destructive compromise or conscious self-abandonment.

It happened almost invisibly.

More instinctively than deliberately.

I longed for him.

I had waited to love someone.

To give everything.

There was only one thing I never considered:

What would happen to me?

This is a strange temperature of love.

The closest comparison I can imagine is motherhood, even though I am not yet a mother.

I believe the two may resemble each other because somebody appears in your life and takes over the leading role.

Almost completely.

Sometimes completely.

When you reach a critical level inside this apparently healthy but quietly self-erasing dynamic, fate intervenes.

After a long workday, we prepared for an afternoon ride.

We were cycling together around MOM Park.

The sky was grey.

The sun did not have enough strength to break through the thick layer of cloud.

We were already rolling downhill.

Faster.

Faster.

Then suddenly everything disappeared.

I have no idea what happened.

I woke inside an ambulance.

I could hear a conversation.

They were discussing whether my skull might be fractured.

He was beside me.

Agitated.

The sight had shaken him.

And so had the thought that, if luck had not been with me, he might have lost me.

But I was lucky.

At the hospital, they discovered that my skull was intact.

My scalp had split open.

The impact had also caused a severe concussion.

When I was wheeled out after they stitched the wound, my sister and her partner were already waiting in the corridor.

Excited.

Frightened.

The pure, almost physically dense love I felt there is impossible to describe.

I had to stay in hospital for two days for observation.

That gave us time to talk.

And gave me time to think.

I learned that I had been unconscious for around twenty minutes after the impact.

I had also experienced a seizure.

My eyes were open.

I responded to no sound.

I lay on the asphalt with blood pouring from my head.

It must have been terrible to witness.

Sometimes I imagine how I would have felt if he had been lying there instead.

If I had been forced to see him unconscious with a bleeding head wound.

The thought is horrifying.

Strangely, throughout the entire event, I remained calm.

No fear of death.

No panic.

Perhaps somewhere deep inside I sensed that everything would be all right.

Still, after I woke up, something had changed.

I was no longer the same person.

A new life began.

With a new hierarchy of values.

A life in which every minute is a gift because I now know how quickly apparently ordinary things can disappear.

It is not self-evident that you wake up in the morning and feel well.

It is not self-evident that you go to work, study and move forward.

It is not self-evident that people love you.

That they do things for you.

That they stand beside you.

These are not automatic accessories of life.

They are privileges.

Care.

Grace.

Lying in the hospital bed with my head hurting, watching the drops move through the infusion tube, I celebrated the birth of my new self.

And I felt grateful to the universe simply because I was still here.

Because I was loved.

Because people helped me in trouble.

He sat at the end of the bed.

Watching.

Holding my hand.

Listening to my breathing.

Lost in his thoughts.

What if I were not here?

What if the story had ended on that road?

Instead, a new woman was beginning to emerge.

More complete.

Happier.

Wiser.

Do not wait until fate has to hit you over the head to remind you that you belong here and that you matter.

You should know it already.

And the people who love you should know it too.

You should all understand the weight of the simple fact that you exist.

That you are here.

That you matter.

That you are unique.

You occupy a place nobody else can fill.

Some people feel sorry for me when they hear the story.

There is nothing to pity.

There are many ways to wake up and become wiser.

I happened to choose one of the more dangerous ones.

I could have died that grey autumn afternoon.

I could have left everything and everyone.

Something did not let me go.

It felt as though millions of invisible hands were pulling me back.

Perhaps you can understand that only if you experience something similar.

Perhaps my words sound empty if you have never been there.

Still, I hope they plant one small seed in your mind.

Perhaps one day, you too will wake as a different person.

Closer to something that cannot really be named or held.

Something all of us search for.

We fight.

Fall.

Then stand up for the thousandth time.

We keep moving because we want to come closer.

And all the while, it is already inside us.

Always.

Everywhere.

Perhaps that is what happiness is.

After the accident, I became conscious of something else:

To love and be loved means vulnerability.

It requires enormous trust.

The other person knows your weaknesses and your flaws.

And in that kind of closeness, a person can sometimes wound herself without even realising it.

How?

Very simply.

You dissolve so completely into the shared world of two people that you stop noticing that you no longer exist independently.

That forced me to ask:

Is complete dissolution what it means to be a woman?

I realised the answer was no.

To be a woman means acceptance.

Receiving.

Care.

Devotion.

Love.

But all of that while you remain present too.

---

Water does not stop being water simply because it takes the shape of the vessel around it.

And I do not need to stop being myself simply because there is somebody in my life whom I love deeply and around whom I naturally adjust many of my thoughts and actions.

Being a woman also means enormous strength.

Creative power.

The ability to bring things into being.

For everything to work, however, we must learn where to draw a symbolic boundary.

We have to preserve one part of ourselves.

One small seed that remains what it has always been.

It stays itself.

That is what makes a woman truly strong and magnetic.

A part of her remains unconquered.

Never completely reachable.

And through that, she becomes fully herself:

A radiant wonder.

Authentic portrait photography does more than create a flattering image: it reveals character, presence and personality.

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For the professional context and practical side of portrait photography, visit the BANHALMI professional website. Related art series, books and exhibitions are preserved in the BANHALMI ART archive.