I call out —
“thank you”
as he departs back to his room.
Staring at the ceiling, I give in to a glass of wine. To take the edge off. A double splash for good measure, before corking back the bottle.
“Just write about this moment, right now.”
Okay.
“If you had all the _____ in the world, what would you do?”
A simple warmup question. For some, with money, they would buy a home. With money, they would quit their job.
At my turn, I say without pause:
“If I had all the time in the world, I would capture my family’s history.”
And I catch myself. There. Barely finishing my sentence without feeling the tears spring up and the tightness catching in my throat. I think no one notices. I’m practiced in catching and staving it away. So I shift my eyes expectantly to the next person, willing the attention and the question to rotate onward. And the icebreaker continues.
There have since been at least two moments where I spoke the same intention aloud, and the same occurrence swept through my body — suddenly and unexpectedly and immodestly. My tears will rush out for three chokes; just enough to let me know they’re there, and that I need to follow them.
Dolphins wayfind for humans adrift, right? Maybe my tears are the same.
I share this with a therapist in my complimentary consultation, trying to explain some of my fog. And why I thought it might be a good idea to speak with her, the one with a practice around somatics and race and trauma and feminism.
“So I’m like, okay. I’ve cleared space. I don’t know why. I don’t know what it looks like. And now I’m just waiting for whatever opens up.”
The voice on the phone mirrors sagely.
“It’s the unknown.”
I like this woman, but in this moment, I think about therapist tropes.
Later, while googling for “children’s book illustrators” because I don’t trust myself to draw 30+ pages of Haba’s story — I reflect on the damning balance between doing things imperfectly & quickly on my own; and searching for support in community with others. Surrender perfection and jump in the middle. Go fast alone, go far together. The voices in my head argue & standoff, louder than ever. This season is one of releasing old patterns. But what to do, when they contradict each other?
In vague inklings, I think about how much matching with an illustrator is like matching with a therapist. You hope to find someone with the right styles, someone who understands your identities. You browse a directory looking for key words and details. In this case, I find myself scrolling for Asian surnames. Yes, Pan-Asian, because the selection isn’t that large. Yes, also like therapists.
Where am I getting stuck, and what are the stories untold?
This is the hardest section to write.
This is the section where I procrastinate by checking Facebook and Signal and Linkedin and Medium; only closing each space before I see notifications I don’t bear to answer.
This is the section where I finish my first glass of wine and pour another. Whisking the glass back with me to the writing desk, I notice it’s probably an over-generous pour.
This is the section where I want to “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” and call it a night, while I nurse a book and an early-hangover in my childhood bed.
This is the section I need to write. Where I sense my way toward the answers, questions, or things I’ve hidden from myself long ago.
