Taking Stock of "What is"

It's so easy for me to turn in on myself, to turn my back on the what I love to do when things get hard. This morning, I went on Instagram and saw updates from other friends pursuing their dreams as writers. Just seeing their faces (not even reading their posts) made me feel like a loser because I'm a writer who is not writing. 

It has been one full year of me "not writing." In 2019, I set a goal for myself to write and submit personal essays to various online publications to try and find my voice. I published one article in Huffington Post in Fall of 2021, which was the most exhilarating, life affirming, professionally validating thing to ever happen to me. When people reached out to me to tell me how much the article affected them, I knew there was nothing else in life that was going to make me feel so complete. I told most of the people I knew. 

That following year, still riding the high of my first byline, I submitted to one or two places total but didn't persevere. In Fall 2022, I worked closely with a writing coach to pen a follow up article to my Huff Post one and submitted it to an adoptee anthology of sorts. I expected to get in and was devastated when I didn't. After that piece was rejected, I submitted quietly to a place that doesn't reject anyone. It published to a relatively small audience and I didn't tell a soul about it. As a result, I forgot I had even published again. 

I need to learn how to better handle rejection. No, let me put it this way, I am going to learn how to handle rejection because not submitting is killing me. 

To hone my craft I joined writing retreats, author webinars, hopped on journalism seminars with editors to learn how to get published, I took 2 non-fiction writing classes at UCLA. I attended a webinar with the AAPI woman who adapted screenplays for the Netflix show, Pachkino. All of this over approximately 5 years. I dabbled but never dove in. 

An adoptee's post about National Adoptee Remembrance Day caught my eye. There she wrote about all the horrible things adoptees appear to be more susceptible to; depression, loneliness and of course, taking their own lives. (Oh, right. That's what the remembrance is all about). That took me to a link about Nicole's Chung's new book, When We Become Ourselves. 

I can't wait to read it. I tried to see a talk she was giving in 2021, shortly after I read "All You Can Ever Know," a Korean adoptee memoir, but there was no space. I was in shock and disbelief that there were enough people interested for the webinar to be at capacity. I emailed an organizer to say I was a Korean Adoptee and disappointed the talk was full. She couldn't get me in, but a few weeks later, a copy of "All You Can Ever Know," showed up on my doorstep. That was a really kind gesture.

Nicole Chung's new book is going to be amazing, I know it. It's strange that I haven't purchased it yet. I wonder why that is? I suspect there's a part of me that doesn't want to read another KAD's words, because what I really want to do is write my own. Not necessarily a memoir, but something, anything.