hopefully, mika

or, ramblings about tomorrow

Dear Becca,

Tomorrow my first book will turn one year old! It’s surreal to think that what once was an assignment became an integral part of my career.

I won’t bore you with my usual imposter syndrome lamentations, but I will say how it’s only now occurred to me that this is something I could celebrate beyond, well, posting about it.

I’ve had a handful of therapists through the years, and few things remain constant, such as my habit of not celebrating when good things happen.

It has to be okay, someday, for me to take stock of my accomplishments, big or small.

Except there’s an ever present fear that I will be seen as selfish or self-absorbed or self-aggrandizing. I spent a lot of my childhood catapulting myself from one end of a spectrum to another. At home and in the Christian spaces I grew up, I was loud and boisterous. At school, I never spoke unless spoken to.

I don’t even recall someone telling me off for “bragging,” but it is one of my greatest fears, so that must have happened at some point.

I’ve been feeling anxious all day because of this. It’s the same frenetic panic that rises every birthday or holiday season. My body is hyper aware that another fifty-two weeks have passed.

Have I done enough?

Have I been good enough?

I try to grasp onto the moments where parents or children have given me glimpses of my story’s impact. I try to cling to kind words from family and friends and classmates and professors and schoolteachers.

Sometimes, embarrassingly, the goodness all feels like white sands in my hands.

And I am left with her, the mole of shadows in my head. Or the little girl whose English teacher wrote, most plainly, how difficult it would be to make it in the writing world.

It was lofty, he seemed to think, to wish for more.

And it is.

I cannot deny that.

Maybe my words will end up like that parish library you wrote so beautifully about, forgotten and caged in dust.

These days, our words are ephemeral and eternal, precious and cheap. Goods to be stolen and art whose essence can never be emulated.

But before the blind mole burrowing in my soul came to be, before Mr. MacDonald gave his realistic advice, I was putting on Christmas plays like Jo March. I was building Christmas trees out of Legos and dolls, crafting a little merry mountain to call mine.

I was a storyteller, and I will always be that.

I say I write for the girls like me, who have hardly seen heroines like them in stories or on screen. I stand by that.

More and more, though, I feel like making writing my own again, before anything else.

For as much as my Danica is not like me, is braver than me, can cross more worlds than me, she will always hold that scrap of me, writing at the front desk of the tutoring center between tasks. Crying in the campus bathrooms.

She will always hold the part of me that couldn’t help but get it all out on the page.

That enough is something to be proud of.

hopefully,

mika