Aneta Gerginova

Most people tend to avoid being stressed. That is not the case for Aneta Gerginova, or Ani as her friends call her. “I kind of realized that this is my hobby: being stressed about something, and then dealing with this issue and finally being fulfilled that I did something useful,” Ani says.

Ani was born and raised in Sofia, as the lone child of Maria and Vasil. Yet she comes from a big family — she has two half-brothers, is an aunt to four nieces and nephews and has a lot of cousins on top of that. Once a year the whole family meets, a tradition that has continued for well over 200 years now. And with the whole family, Ani means “about a hundred family members.” Safe to say, she is a family person.

Anis hobby, stress, in one way or another, has caught up with her throughout her life. For example, when she nearly drowned — several times. “I used to swim in those things that keep you above the water, but I got out of them a couple of times, and I drowned a couple of times. But I survived obviously,” Ani says and laughs.

But stress also helped her get into AUBG, where she is a freshman now. She learned about the university from one of her cousins two years before she graduated and fell in love with it. “Because of AUBG actually I feel like I grew a lot as a person, because I knew then that I had to put something in my CV in order to be kind of special, to get accepted. And because of that I put myself out of my comfort zone, a lot of times.” That also included organizing a series of lectures on her own. The name of the program: “My Stress is my Change.”

Her bed is covered with a pink, fluffy bedspread, an innocent looking stuffed horse — its name is Jorko — rests on the head end. Ani sits next to it, wearing slippers which look like they were made of the bedspread. The appearance might fool visitors. Ani worked hard in order to be here. And it paid off. “I’m very happy, I feel like the world doesn’t know that, but finally I feel like I found the place where I belong, I found a group of friends that are for me, and I finally feel happy.”

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Sebastian Panny is a JMC student on exchange at AUBG. He very much doesn’t like to be stressed, but still enjoyed his time with Aneta.