These Days—
Oh, hey, hello. Welcome to my love letter, where I talk about creative life, writing life, and life in general.
It's been a minute since my last letter.
Alas, after announcing that I would be doing this monthly, I have dropped off the map. Agh. Back to seasonal letters!
I'd like to blame this on being busy, and that's certainly been part of it, but it's not just that.
I've drafted three separate letters over the past few months, about the Asian American hate crimes, about covid, about life post-newbery.
But I haven't sent any of them.
I have felt raw and exposed, and while I am so incredibly beyond grateful for the way my career has changed in the past few months, I've never been entirely comfortable with attention. I often feel like a laundry list of flaws, and I'm convinced that if anyone looks hard enough they will see all of them.
That mindset can making writing hard.
Or I guess, the writing isn't hard, but putting my writing into the world definitely is.
But I'm being gentle with myself, and I finally feel like I'm coming back to myself, settling back into my skin. So, hi, hey, hello!
Happy spring. 🌱
This time of year always surprises me, when the cold recedes and green bursts back into the world.
Maybe this is a universal human feeling--to be surprised by the inevitability of change.
Or maybe not. Maybe it's just the result of me growing up in Hawaii and still being in awe of seasons.
I'm trying to wean myself off generalizations--a habit I hadn't even realized I'd formed during the pandemic. It's been an isolating year, and the illusion of a universal experience has been a comfort.
We're all at home. We're all on Zoom. We're all navigating unprecedented times.*
Of course, that universal experience has included a very bold asterisks, which is maybe too easy to ignore when you're in a bubble and haven't seen other humans face to face in months, and the strange, vast expanse of life outside your pod has become more hypothetical than real.
In reality, though:
*Life has been different for parents, for single people, for the elderly, for the very young, for people of color, for essential workers, for those in the service industry, for anti-vaxxers, for people who got sick, for the people who lost loved ones, and the list goes on.
That asterisks is not an asterisks at all, but rather a wrecking ball to the illusion of Universal Experience.
A few months ago, for me, the thought of scattering the human experience into a thousand directions felt impossibly lonely. But now, the cold is receding, the green is emerging. People are getting vaccinated, there is an end in sight. And change feels surprisingly inevitable.
This season feels a bit like stepping back into the world, and I welcome the strangeness, the vastness. All of it.