How Can We Judge People for Their Choices When We Know Nothing About Their Options?
On grief, poverty, sacrifice, and the man I called Papu.
I lost my grandfather six days ago, and I still struggle with the idea that someone who felt so permanent in my life can suddenly exist only through memory, photographs, stories, habits, and silence.
My grandfather was my mother’s father. Roma. One of nine children raised in deep poverty in a Bulgaria that had very little softness for people born where he was born. He never learned how to read or write, not because he lacked intelligence, but because survival came before education. His parents could not afford school, so instead of classrooms, he entered labour. He started working at the age of 6.
There is something deeply emotional to me about the fact that my grandfather would never have been able to read the words I am writing about him now, and yet he is one of the people most responsible for the existence of the woman writing them.
I think that says something important about sacrifice.
People often speak about progress as though it appears suddenly, as though one generation simply becomes more successful or more educated through individual ambition alone. But when I think about my own life, the rooms I now enter, the education I received, the confidence I carry moving through spaces far away from where my family began, I know those things did not appear from nowhere.
They were built slowly through the decisions, endurance, and sacrifices of people like my grandfather and my mother.
And maybe that is why I keep returning to one question since his death:
How can we judge people for their choices when we know nothing about their options?
Because when I look at my grandfather’s life, I do not see someone who failed to work hard enough. I see someone whose entire life was organised around survival long before he had the freedom to imagine anything else.
He worked constantly. In fields, through pain, through exhaustion, through humiliation. I heard stories over the years about the way he was sometimes treated at work, the kinds of insults and disrespect poor Roma men often had to absorb quietly because refusing meant risking the little stability they had. And still, he continued, because his children needed food, because his family needed a home, because responsibility does not pause simply because dignity is wounded.
That is one of the reasons I struggle so deeply with the modern obsession with meritocracy, especially in certain Western spaces where people speak about hard work as though it exists inside equal conditions. Last week I was at the Brussels Art Expo, standing in beautiful rooms surrounded by polished conversations about ambition, creativity, investments, opportunity, possibility. Then only days later, I was back beside my grandfather.
The psychological distance between those worlds is difficult to explain unless you have lived it.
And is not because I ever felt ashamed entering those spaces, but because I became aware of how much of what people call “confidence” is often inherited through generations of stability, security, education, and protection.
My grandfather and my mother did not have those inheritances.
What they had instead were small, difficult choices made under pressure, and somehow those choices created enough stability for me to move through the world differently. They created the possibility for me to enter rooms they themselves would probably never feel fully comfortable inside.
And that reality follows me constantly.
Because every time I return home, I am reminded that there are still so many people surviving rather than living. People whose lives are still shaped by instability, poverty, exclusion, and physical exhaustion in ways many comfortable societies no longer even know how to see properly.
My grandfather was one of those people.
He was not an expressive man in the way people romantically describe tenderness today. Outside the family, people feared him sometimes. He carried a roughness to him, the kind older Balkan men often carry when life demanded strength from them too early and for too long. But inside the family, he was deeply observant, patient, and protective.
He believed in me long before I understood myself.
And what hurts me most now is not some dramatic memory, but ordinary things.
The way he listened quietly while everyone else spoke. The way he watched people carefully. The way he encouraged me without ever making it feel performative. And one thing I have not stopped thinking about since he passed away is the way he always ate last.
Always.
Even when there was enough food.
He would wait for everyone else to finish first. Sometimes he would not even sit properly with us at the table. And if my sister or I left food unfinished, he would quietly eat the leftovers instead of taking another plate for himself.
As a child, I found it strange. Now I understand that some people survive poverty financially but never psychologically. Somewhere inside him, there was always the little boy who learned too early that food disappears.
That is also why I think people misunderstand poverty so deeply when they reduce it to personal failure or lack of ambition. Poverty changes the nervous system. It changes the body. It changes how people rest, trust, eat, think about the future, and move through the world.
My grandfather worked harder than many people romanticising hard work from comfortable offices, networking events, and social media posts about discipline and success. Yet hard work did not make him rich. It damaged his body. It exhausted him. It shortened his life.
What it did create was something quieter but perhaps far more meaningful.
His children survived. His grandchildren received education.
A man who could not read still helped create granddaughters who could.
And I think there is something profoundly dignified in that.
There are thousands of men like my grandfather across Bulgaria, across Roma communities, across the Balkans generally. Men whose bodies absorbed the cost of survival so the next generation could stand slightly further forward than they were allowed to.
That is one of the reasons I care so deeply about the work I want to do in my own life. Because people like my grandfather are too often discussed statistically, politically, superficially, or through stereotypes, while the human reality of what their lives actually required remains invisible.
I do not want people from backgrounds like mine to feel shame about where they come from.
I want them to question why certain communities continue carrying disproportionate suffering generation after generation while societies comfortably moralise the consequences. It is easy to speak about suffering in abstract terms, until it has a face, a voice, and a history you have loved.
Near the end of his life, I remember sitting beside my grandfather and feeling something I still cannot fully explain.
Not only grief, but also a perspective. Because when you love someone deeply, especially someone whose entire life was built around survival, you eventually begin to understand that many of the things you once considered ordinary were never ordinary at all.
The tiredness you ignored. The silence.
The way they carried responsibility so naturally that nobody stopped to ask what it was costing them.
I think about my grandfather now and realise that almost everything beautiful my family has today came from people like him repeating difficult things every single day without the luxury of collapsing.
There was nothing glamorous about his life.
No inspiring speeches. No recognition.
Just work, sacrifice, routine, responsibility, and love expressed through endurance.
And somehow, despite all the hardship life gave him, he still remained the type of man who made the people around him feel protected.
A few days before he passed away, I told him that I was proud that he was my Papu.
I do not think I will ever stop feeling that.
Because the older I get, the more I realise that people like my grandfather carried entire generations forward quietly, often without ever fully understanding what they were creating beyond survival itself.
The long days of work. The exhaustion. The humiliations they swallowed.
The small decisions they made under pressure.
All of it slowly created something larger than them.
It created children and grandchildren who could think beyond immediate survival.
Who could study, travel, enter rooms they themselves were never given access to.
Who could sit in universities, galleries, offices, conferences, and speak with a confidence that was built, in part, on sacrifices made by people who never had the chance to experience those worlds themselves.
And maybe that is what moves me most when I think about my Papu now.
Not only the life he lived, but the possibilities his life quietly created for others.
Because some people spend their entire existence building bridges they will never personally get to cross.
And still, they build them anyway.