Maia Nebula!

A new year is upon us, and it’s time to decide who I want to be for the next 365 days. It’s not like I’m trying on different masks, different personae to adopt. I feel that last year I slowly came into focus, and now it’s time to sharpen my lens and get rid of my blurry edges. I know what I want out of myself, so why wait to bring it forward?

As a mortal human being, I am aware that I have a limited number of days left on this earth. I have now grasped how finite this window of action is, and how quickly it’s shrinking. My immediate actions will set the tone for my later years, and it is my intention to increase joy and diminish pain and regret.

In a world that’s numb with consumption, I intend to push back with creation. I want to remind myself every day that everything that I do is part of a process, and the goal is to look back and find evidence of consistency. It is of very little importance whether I am good or not at the things I try. Showing up every single day is the only thing that matters. Success will inevitably follow.

Sometimes, when I look at my old blog posts, I contemplate my long-held dream of becoming a writer. By “writer” I used to mean someone who wrote fiction or poetry. A published author. From an early age I knew there was stuff in my head—I would spend most of my waking childhood hours sketching sequential drawings in an attempt to purge it all out. I wonder—and I’m sure this is not the first time I arrive at this question—whether my adult anxiety stems from the absence of a purging valve to let out the contents of my mind.

Convinced that writing was my calling, I made many embarrassing attempts at both fiction and poetry, all the while maintaining a couple of blogs (yes, like this one). Some of the stuff I made got published in school journals, and I was even invited to read at a poetry festival, so I’m guessing I wasn’t terrible, but it still feels like the attempts were embarrassing. As tends to be the case with anything you stop practicing, I stopped writing poetry and the well of ideas dried up. As for fiction, I don’t think I ever had a well of ideas to draw from. Or maybe there were seeds of ideas, but they just never sprouted.

An ex-boyfriend once told me I was nothing but a blog writer. His intention was clearly to hurt me, but I’ve increasingly warmed to the idea. I see myself as a diarist. My work may not bear witness to our tumultuous times, but it bears witness to the evolution of a single human being. That should be enough.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been exchanging frequent messages with my college friends in Japan. I’m frankly astounded at how easy it has become to read in Japanese (at least when it comes to messages). I’m yet to take on the challenge of a full book, but gone are the days when I dreaded replying to an email because I simply didn’t know how to express myself and I wasn’t sure what was being said to me.

When I think about the progress I’ve made these past months, I can’t help feeling a twinge of sadness for my perfectionist past self, a person who shut herself behind a wall of I can’t. I have no idea how I made the friends that I made with my years-long refusal to speak in Japanese out loud. How did I even survive college?

(Don’t believe me? Straight from the horse’s mouth: I was engulfed in shame over my dwindling communication skills.)

In order to analyze this past self, to understand her and let her go with kindness, I must keep in mind that I used to approach languages from a place of shame. Shame that I couldn’t just magically speak a foreign language (a very difficult one, to be sure) at a native level.

If I had a time machine, I would talk to my past self and let her know that everything is alright, that no one is expecting anything from me other than sustained communication as a sign of friendship. However, part of me would also use the time machine to convince myself (by force, if necessary) that I need to get those languages in top shape NOW. That’s the perfectionist in me talking, the side of me that won’t admit that I’m a human being with struggles. So what if Japanese happens to be my struggle. It’s a very good struggle to have, if you think about it. A blessing, even.

What I hope is for my perfectionism not to take over at some point and decide that I’m not doing great at exchanging messages, thus shutting down the whole operation.

(And if it does? I’ll just sneak out behind its back and start over. And over. Again and again, start over. Start over so much that it stops looking like starting over and begins looking like a habit.)

Yesterday afternoon, in the quiet of the kitchen, I was prying open a pomegranate and pulling out its arils when I noticed something unexpected happening to me: An idea was coming to me. Words were flowing inside my mind, arranged in patterns that I thought might be worth putting on paper—or rather, putting on screen—, and I didn’t feel like just letting them go in resignated defeat. This time, unlike myriads of other times, I wasn’t daunted by the prospect of having to sit down and think on my own for a while instead of literally anything else. When I say “literally anything else,” what I actually mean is peeling my eyes off the screen in order to glue them onto a different screen and give up my creative power in exchange for countless invitations to part ways with my money.

Anyway, that’s how I ended up writing yesterday’s blog post. Since then, a steady stream of words has been flowing through my head nonstop. I can feel it—it’s a nice little river with a pleasant murmur. But that’s not the only change I’ve noticed. This morning, I surprised myself with a burst of clarity at work. Beautifully crafted sentences poured effortlessly from my mouth, carried by my velvety voice. I hadn’t sounded this way in ages.

Although these changes feel a little abrupt and have taken me aback, I know they’re not an accidental occurrence. The thing is, I’ve been mulling things over. (I can’t help picturing my thoughts as spices simmering in wine. Tasty.) I’ve been paying special attention to the many instances where I’ve heard about someone doing something for themselves—writing, drawing, working out—and I’ve felt sorry for myself because I, unlike them, am incapable of such feats. The intolerable self-pity, which sometimes took the shape of self-loathing, bored a hole in my heart, and eventually it became a burrow for a certain discomfort that came to nest right there.

You know, it’s good to mull things over, especially if the matters you’re pondering are related to changes you’d like to bring about in your life. This is true even if you’re at the stage where you still feel utterly powerless. You think it over and over and over, and the discomfort within you grows and grows and grows, and you never know when the kernel will pop and you’ll just jump into action.

Now, jumping into action is easy. There’s usually a lot of emotional momentum going on to propel a first leap. It’s messy, beautiful and empowering. However, the real challenge lies in consistency. Can I keep it up? Am I really willing to go the distance and work hard to become the person I’ve been wishing I were? That’s the part that makes me nervous. But I suppose the fact that I’m writing these words and haven’t given up on this open tab with its handful of paragraphs proves that, at least today, I already am that person.