In 2023, I went with “magical thinking” for my word/s of the year. In Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking, it took magical thinking, a big feat of human imagination and reinvention, to go through her seasons of grief after the untimely loss of both her husband and her daughter.

(When is it ever the right time to experience loss when by it’s very nature it’s completely beyond our will, expectation, and control?)

I felt that I needed magical thinking myself to grapple with the anxiety and uncertainty of someone going through the immigration process while trying to build a stable life and fulfill my dreams as an author.

The year held its surprises: I got ill with Covid-19 for the first time, and even after recovery, my body doesn’t feel the way it used to. I felt increasingly limited energy and I wasn’t even able to take deep breaths until five or six months after I recovered.

It was also discouraging to experience the exhausting back-and-forth with government agencies just to get a valid ID or even a library card. An assistant facilitator position for week-long writing workshop I was invited for in Harvard was rejected because I didn’t have a social security number yet (a fault of the lengthy immigration process).

The entire year, I felt the weight of what it meant to be in a system built to dehumanize and penalize undocumented residents, even as it profits off them (yes, I still had to pay taxes — IRS has specific tax forms for those with undocumented status ).

But there were other surprises, too, that kept me hopeful about my choice to live here full-time.

I’ve struggled for so long financially, gritting my teeth, feeling grateful that I’ve always landed on my feet with work while at the same time feeling like I was called for something else.

When I finally began my editing business, it felt like a natural extension of myself as a writer and community organizer. Although it required a different set of skills from writing and it certainly has a “grind” aspect to it, it felt essential and authentic to myself in a way my past work and ventures never did.

The surprise was that last year, I found myself able to thrive on it financially. After having to resize and adjust myself for so long, it feels surreal to finally feel like I fit so well, that I don’t need to prove anything to be worthy of sustainable living that I enjoy.

Cultivating long-term thinking

For 2024, what life will I conjure up? What word/s of the year will take me by surprise? Some words that keep coming to me are: slowness, unearthing, ancestral thinking.

I’m making an effort to take a long-term view instead of always angling for things on-demand. I’m learning how to wait again, how to be patient, especially in the small things: lining up, waiting for the traffic lights to change, expecting responses, choosing shipping options.

The line between want and need has become blurred, and I need to redraw these boundaries for myself. I’m practicing making decisions for a future me and the ones who come after me, not letting a false sense of urgency make decisions for me.

Cultivating life in long-term means remembering what I really want my life to look like, what I want to do, even if nobody ever gets to see it.

For me, it looks like a life writing and reading. The older I get, the more I believe that it is my real work and purpose. Just as the bear knows it is meant to hibernate, fatten up, and then hunt again. Just as the birds know they are meant for flight and migration. Just as salmon continue the cycle of life in spite of its many predators and eventual sacrifice when it spawns. They still swim. They still make the journey upstream.

Why do I sometimes question the role of writing in my life? Why do I continue to resist or deny it as my calling?

Writing saves me. It will save the ones I love by extension. Writing and the adjacent work of editing and community-building will be a source of financial and emotional abundance for me.

I believe the words will always come as long as I persist with writing. I believe I will find a way to be in harmony with my body and mind so I can continue and bring to the page the books in my head.

Read “The Surest Way to Get a Book Done” over at Authors Circle.

Whenever I'm stuck on something or whenever I feel like everything coming out of my pen is unsatisfying or not up to the standard that I expect, I think about the process of other authors and what they went through -- and how long it really took -- to write their books. (READ THE REST)

—> Coming Next: Part 2 of “An Education”