About me

About me

I was born in Russia, a country where history is always close at hand, as if it lives nearby, breathing down your neck and filling even simple things with the shadow of destiny. But if you look closely, my origins are a bridge between worlds. My parents once fled occupied Hungary during World War II, escaping the horror that could erase names, families, and entire peoples. They were part of a generation that survived thanks to memory and strength of spirit.

And before that, my ancestors belonged to the aristocracy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

This is not just a line about my origins — it is an imprint of eras where honor and duty were not just beautiful words, but the inner axis of a person. Perhaps that is why I often felt older than my years: as if voices lived inside me that carried the experience of generations who had survived empires, wars, journeys, and losses.

But the reality in which I grew up was completely different.

It was a different world, where what mattered was not origin, but the ability to survive, learn, and understand.

It was understanding that led me to the world of engineering. I received two engineering degrees — not because I dreamed of formulas, but because I wanted to understand how reality works. Matter. System. Cause and effect.

Engineering teaches a very important thing:

nothing exists on its own.

There is a chain. There is a mechanism. There is logic.

Even where, at first glance, chaos reigns.

But the deeper I delved into the laws of the external world, the stronger I was drawn to the internal. I felt that on the other side of the equations lay something much more complex — the human soul. Thought. Memory. Fear. Choice.

That’s how I came to psychology. It wasn’t an escape from technology — it was a continuation of the same question, only directed inward. I began to study psychology academically, but did not complete my degree: something important cannot be learned from books alone. The soul does not obey linear equations, and I realized that its structure hides an infinite depth that is easier to experience than to measure.

I have always been fascinated by cause-and-effect relationships.

Why do people make choices that destroy their own dreams?

Why do we repeat the same mistakes, even when we tell ourselves “never again”?

Why does our inner voice so often sound like an echo of our past?

This interest gradually and very quietly led me to where it had been leading me from the beginning:

to writing.

Writing was not a decision or a plan. It came as a necessity — as something that had been happening inside me for a long time, but was simply looking for a form.

At some point, I realized:

I don’t write to create stories —

I write to understand my own.

Each book, each article became a return to what had been lost between generations, between wars, between internal upheavals.

Writing became a space where engineering and psychology finally met.

Where logic and intuition could talk to each other.

Where it was possible to explore not only “how things work,” but also “why they feel that way.”

I became the author of several books and articles — about consciousness, inner silence, human fragility, and strength. But what became truly important to me was not the amount I wrote, but that strange spotlight that turns on inside when you work with text.

A writer is not someone who writes.

A writer is someone who is attentive.

To words. To the world. To pain. To themselves.

Sometimes it seems to me that I am not writing about who I have become, but about who I am becoming.

Each new book is an attempt to peel away another layer of illusion.

Every text is a dialogue with the silence we are used to drowning out.

Every word is a step towards oneself.

Today, I blog, write books, and share what I consider important: thoughts that are difficult to express; experiences that are familiar to many; questions that we do not always have the courage to answer.

I am not interested in the role of teacher or mentor.

I am more drawn to the role of researcher — someone who goes deep and comes back with notes.

Sometimes I think:

I did not choose writing.

Writing chose me when it sensed that I was finally ready to listen.

And perhaps this is the most honest path:

not to become what you dreamed of being,

but to become what you couldn’t help but become.

“Why I continue to write”

Sometimes I am asked — aloud or between the lines — why I continue to write. What makes a person return again and again to a blank page, which each time starts from scratch, as if no book had ever existed before?

I have long tried to answer this question rationally: habit, discipline, the need to share, the desire to understand. All these explanations sound reasonable, but they are too superficial. They are like the answers we give to others so as not to touch on what really drives us.

The truth is much quieter.

I continue to write because words are the only place where I can be honest.

Not in the sense of “honesty with the reader,” but in the sense of honesty with myself. In everyday life, we say what we need to say — so as not to hurt, so as not to reveal ourselves, so as not to scare away someone’s opinion or presence. But words on paper — they don’t tolerate masks. They bring out what a person hides even from their own thoughts.

Writing is a mirror without distortion. And sometimes the only thing you have left is a reflection that cannot be deceived.

But there is another reason.

A much deeper one.

I continue to write because the world forgets what is important too quickly.

We have forgotten how to look at the root of phenomena. We have forgotten how to hear the quiet movements of the soul. We have forgotten how to stay with ourselves without escaping into our phones, our habits, the noise.

Writing takes me back to a place where I can still hear my own silence.

Where thoughts live slowly.

Where meaning is revealed not in the first words, but in the pauses between them.

It seems to me that every person carries within themselves a story that is looking for a way out. Not necessarily a big one, not necessarily a heroic one — just a true one. A story that wants to be heard, at least by its author. And perhaps writing a book is not a creative act at all, but a way to listen to the depths that we rarely dare to touch.

There is a third reason — the most difficult to admit.

I continue to write because it is the only way to put my own life in order.

I do not believe in absolute chaos. In every experience there is an internal pattern, a form, a regularity. But it is impossible to see it until you bring everything out into the open. A word is not just an expression of thought. They are the form in which thoughts become clear.

I often start writing to figure something out, and end up realizing that the question was wrong.

Words take me further than I can go on my own.

And there is a strange truth in this:

I don’t write because I know — I write to find out.

But there is another reason that is almost never mentioned.

Quiet, humble, and perhaps the most genuine.

I continue to write because it is my way of giving thanks.

Giving thanks to those who came before me.

Those who lived through wars, resettlements, and long journeys.

Those who once survived so that I could be born.

Those who passed on to me not only my surname, but also a sense of the long thread of time into which every person is woven.

Perhaps I write so that this thread will not be broken.

Writing is a bridge.

Between the past and the future.

Between me and those who read.

Between who I was and who I am yet to become.

I continue to write because I cannot do otherwise.

Because at some point, words became not a tool, but a home.

And every time I sit down to write, I return to a place where the world comes together in meaning, and people come together in wholeness.

And perhaps that is why I am still here — on this strange, bright, endless road we call literature. Because in every word there is a chance to get at least one step closer to what we have been searching for so long: to ourselves.

“What I want to say with my literature”

When I think about what exactly I want to say with my literature, I realize that it is not one message, or even a dozen. It is more of an attempt to convey to people what cannot be conveyed directly. Something that can only be conveyed between the lines, in the pauses, in the breath of the text.

Sometimes I think that literature is the only way to talk about things that are too big or too fragile for ordinary conversation.

Everything else is just words.

Literature is meaning clothed in a form that can withstand the truth.

I write for those who have ever felt lonely among people.

For those who ask questions but are afraid that the answers will destroy their familiar world.

For those who feel that there is something more to reality than we are used to noticing.

And perhaps the main thing I want to say with my literature is that a person is much deeper than their biography, circumstances, mistakes, or victories.

That there is something in each of us that does not age, does not disappear, and does not break completely.

This is not the “soul” in the religious sense — it is an inner light that continues to burn even when a person has stopped believing in it.

I want to show that every person lives in several realities at once.

In the external one — where there is work, business, status, responsibilities.

And in the internal one — where there are fears, thoughts, dreams, intuition, silence.

And that the internal reality is always more important.

Not because it is more beautiful, but because it is real.

What is born inside determines everything that happens outside.

I want the reader, after closing my book, to feel one simple but powerful emotion:

“I am not alone.”

Because, in essence, a person is always struggling with loneliness — the loneliness of consciousness, the loneliness of choice, the loneliness of their experience. And literature is the only place where two solitudes can meet and become something greater.

I would like my texts to be not just stories, but a space where a person can stop and hear themselves.

I want them to be a place where the inner child and the adult can finally talk to each other.

I want them to remind us that meaning has always been there. We are just too busy to notice it.

I don’t write to explain life.

I write to restore the ability to feel it.

Sometimes it seems to me that all of modern culture is built on two mistakes:

the idea that a person must be strong,

and the idea that weakness is shameful.

But strength without depth turns into aggression.

And weakness without acceptance turns into despair.

With my writing, I want to restore the right to be fragile.

The right to doubt.

The right to search.

The right not to know.

The right to be imperfect—and yet still worthy.

If my writing can make even one person a little more honest with themselves,

a little deeper,

a little gentler,

a little more attentive—

then it is not in vain.

And also — I want to restore silence.

Not the kind that happens outside,

but the kind that happens inside.

The silence in which a person hears themselves for the first time.

The silence where frightening thoughts become understandable.

The silence where small truths cease to be invisible.

Literature, like life, does not begin with a story.

It begins with a pause.

And everything I write is an attempt to make that pause long enough for something real to be born in it.

To put it briefly, I want people who read my books to feel that their inner world is important.

That their silence matters.

That their thoughts deserve attention.

That their story is unique.

And that no one has the right to take away their depth.

I do not seek to leave behind a perfect system of thought or definitive answers—they do not exist.

But I want to leave a mark.

Not a mark in history, but a mark in the human heart — quiet, almost weightless, which only appears when a person is alone with themselves.

Everything I have written and will write is an attempt to get closer to what makes us human:

to our vulnerability, to our strength, to our fears, to our freedom.

To that inner space where we stop pretending and become real for the first time.

If my writing can help even one person hear themselves, then I have done what I came into the world of words to do.

Everything else is just the journey.

With gratitude and silence,

“Between Thoughts”

Zohar Leo Palffy de Erdőd

P.S. My family tree can be found on Wikipedia by searching for Pálffy ab Erdőd.