It’s Time To Write My Book

A few days ago I made a comic.

It started with a woman staring into a mirror and not recognizing herself.

Not literally.

Just that feeling we get sometimes when life has quietly carried us somewhere we never meant to go.

The exhaustion.

The loneliness.

The strange grief of realizing you’ve drifted away from yourself.

The comic ended with boxing gloves, loud music, a dusty punching bag, and a woman remembering she was stronger than she felt.

When I finished it, something clicked.

I realized I’ve been trying to write this story for years.

Not this exact story.

All of them.

I started digging through old journals this week and found entries from 2020. Some of them made me laugh. Some made me cringe. Some made me want to hug the version of me who wrote them.

What surprised me most was realizing that she and I are having completely different conversations about the same experiences.

The woman writing in those journals thought change was mostly a decision.

The woman reading them now knows change can also be grief.

She knows healing isn’t linear.

She knows confidence disappears sometimes.

She knows you can lose yourself and find yourself more than once.

And suddenly I could see the book.

Not a memoir.

Not a self-help book.

Something between a scrapbook, a journal, a comic book, and a conversation across time.

Part illustrated stories.

Part journal entries.

Part lessons learned the hard way.

A collection of observations about being a woman, getting lost, growing up, starting over, and learning how to come back to yourself.

The journals are going in.

The comics are going in.

The messy parts are going in.

The notes from Future Me are going in too.

So this is me saying it out loud.

I’m starting the book.

I don’t know exactly what it will become yet, but I think that’s part of the adventure.

And honestly?

I think I’ve been writing it all along.