The past year was so hard and so beautiful.

I first launched The Olly Project on April 27th, 2018. I had been working on it incessantly since that January, and while my article output slowed over the year as I struggled through my own storms, the joy that I felt from writing and publishing never faded. 

This article is in honor of this anniversary. Here is a collection of moments that I believe to have defined my own self-growth - they are some of the most pivotal moments and stories that I carry with me since I first launched it. 

The church is moving and breathing - a sea of color spills through the aisles. People are slowly moving to their seats, sadness making our legs heavy and our muscles ache. Spots of family members shrouded in black are scattered through the first few pews, and Hunter squeezes my hand as we slowly work our way towards the lower middle. My mom is close behind us and we are quiet, tugging our sweaters over our fingers, as if that will make this moment less painful or anxious. The sun beats down on the glass windows in the entrance way, filtering into the church with a dusty, peaceful glow. The people I have met and grown close to over the past year – Natalie’s friends, family members, teachers, and community - surround us. We are the only ones from Seattle. We come representing many people from our rainy city. Mentors, professors, friends, family – my body not only feels like mine but also the bodies of those who feel this loss for her deeply and who could not be here to express it. 

We sit and wait. The air is thick with all of this feeling. 

I see Lukas and Natalie walk in alongside Dani and Bobby. The gentle conversation dies down and it knocks the wind out of me to watch them all walk so slowly. The preacher begins to speak, and his words become blurred and unintelligible as my eyes focus on Dani’s hand rubbing Natalie’s hair slowly, so, so slowly. Their reliance on each other to get through this day – this hour, this second – is unmistakable. You don’t even have to look at their faces to feel the indescribable pain that shrouds itself over, into, and through their bodies. You can see it in their shoulders. 

Natalie walks up to the microphone and takes a deep, shuddering breath. She is so beautiful, but I have to grab Hunter’s hand in order to keep looking at her. I watched my best friend lose her father on Thanksgiving and in this moment, I watch her lose him all over again.  There is a large wreath of flowers spun together into a beautiful spray of yellow & white color on the stage behind her, and as she struggles to speak, a handful of petals fall onto the floor. I begin to cry, too –her dad telling her that he is right there with her. I can’t tear my eyes away but even if I could, there is nowhere to look that isn’t painful. Everywhere I look is sadness. So, I just keep looking, and feeling, and praying. 

A slideshow begins to play on the two screens next to the stage, and we watch Natalie and Lukas grow up with their dad. Cute baby pictures dissolve into beautiful moments spent travelling together which fade into their parent’s love story. Dani and Tuan at high school prom, in Germany, in college, getting married, playing with their babies, and growing older together. We giggle and we cry, watching as a simpler life plays above us. These are moments that I have never experienced but can feel their intense specialty in the church today.  

We wait in a long line that winds around the church afterwards. When we reach her, the three of us embrace and hold each other as she shakes. It is an inhuman day – a day that shouldn’t exist. The amount of pain that their bodies are being asked to handle is impossible, and yet, they’re all still standing, and the grief feels a little simpler to understand when we are all together. 

The road is slick with rain and sleet. Viciously rocking back and forth against the window, squeaking and squalling in violent protest, the windshield wipers are going as fast as they can. The light is the halfway kind of light – the kind in between dim and dark, like the world is dozing off into a deep slumber. It’s so hard to see anything between the cement gray of the road and the gloomy gray of the sky – the trees are dark and looming above us as we wind through harsh rockfaces and peaks of the pass, climbing and climbing towards the summit. We break through the mild warmth and incessant rain of the lower hills and suddenly, the rain turns into fat, wet snowflakes that begin to collect along the sides of the two-lane highway. 

I am behind the wheel while Joey sits in the passenger seat. For most of this drive from Los Angeles to Seattle, we have laughed, sang along to our favorite musicals, eagerly discussed our dreams, and done a lot of quiet hand-holding. It’s my turn to drive, and I am more nervous that I’m trying to let on about driving through Grants Pass in the dark, in the rain, with Joey next to me. My first experience driving on a freeway as a fifteen-and-a-half year old was also in the dark on I-90E towards Spokane while the rain poured down in torrential waves, 18-wheeler-trucks swaying and merging all around me. Even as an experienced driver now, there is something primal that makes my palms sweat when the backlights of the car in front of me fades from a clear, defined light and diffuses into a hazy red glow in the rainy landscape. I turn the music down and we drive in silence as I focus intensely on keeping the wheels between the painted white lines as water collects underneath the wheels, making us hydroplane occasionally. My heart jolts and my breath catches in my chest each time this happens – Joey doesn’t say that my nerves are making him nervous, but the tightness in his mouth and fingers gripping the door say otherwise. We have two or three more hours until we reach Eugene. 

There are no exits or rest stops until after we get through the pass, and by that time my nerves are so shot that my legs shudder in relief when I get out of the car to switch with Jo. This is the first multi-day road trip that I have ever attempted without my parents, and we are doing it across multiple passes that are slowly shutting down with the bitter winter weather closing in during early December. Joey is a great driver. While we promise to split the driving down the middle, he drives more than I do, and I’m happily grateful for that. He is the one who pulls us into the hotel valet in Eugene, where the freezing air feels more refreshing than biting. I’d take anything over the sweeping black landscape that threatens to crush us underneath all of that rain. We are so numbed out by the hours speeding above the Californian landscape towards Seattle that the restaurant we eat at for dinner feels like a fever dream. Sitting in a solid chair for the first time in 8 hours instead of a moving car makes me dizzy. But we are safe, and we are happy. 

 My client from the writing center is in tears and frustrated. She is a Somali woman moving to a new apartment with her husband and three children, and the stress from the rental agreement and the move is making her so flustered that I decide we need to stop working on the academic paper in front of us. Instead, we print out the rental agreement and start to go over it. The terms of the lease are outlined in heavy tenant jargon, making it difficult for me to understand and almost impossible for a non-native English speaker. We break it down together, and she breathes a sigh of relief. However, she didn’t see the apartment space before signing the document, which actually details that there is only one bedroom for all three children instead of the two she thought it had. There isn’t enough room in this apartment for their whole family. This brings another wave of anxiety and I take a deep breath myself.  This is the part of being a writing consultant that I wasn’t expecting.  

This re-shifting of priorities and focuses during a consulting session is an element that brings me a lot of joy. Writers bring themselves into their writing, and I was able to experience that this year. Reflection pieces are saturated with their humanness. It can be easy to instinctually separate a writer from their writing and forget that there is a person behind the text. But moments like this, in the small gray cubicle nestled into the corner of the library, remind me that this separation is almost impossible to do if you want to work with writers to improve, construct, criticize, and adapt their writing to become the best work they’re capable of. 

This means that sometimes, my role of writing consultant becomes like a touchstone into an emotional world that requires compassion and guidance. Breaking down rental agreements, soothing fears and anxieties, crying with a writer over a painful moment that they would like to reflect on for an assignment, or finding new words and phrases for something not able to be expressed in the English language means that I am thrown into the ocean of complex writing every session that I tutored. It was a beautiful experience learning to be a lifeguard in that ocean. 

             I made a lot of choices this year that put my own happiness first when it came to old, tired, worn out connections. This meant leaving relationships with people who brought out the worst in me –ultimately, it meant realizing that no one gets to follow me or watch my social media updates without my permission. I learned the power of the block button, and the unfollow button, and the “remove friend” button. I have control over who gets to see my life online. This meant friends of friends and old relationships and people I’ve never met before – the amount of people who I followed who I didn’t know personally was absolutely ridiculous. Almost none of those friendships or connections brought me wholeheartedness – only numbers on a screen or updates that I don’t need or want to see. The people who do really matter and care about what I’ve been up to will give me a call – and sometimes the people who I really want to call, won’t. That was a hard lesson to learn. And just because they don’t call, doesn’t mean I should. 

Through the privilege of loving Joey, I have also had the privilege of loving and being loved by his big, loud, fun, Cuban family. Four siblings and more aunts, uncles, or cousins that I could ever talk to in a single day – they have been a source of intense love and connection for me. I have never dated someone with such a huge network of people. They make me laugh until I almost throw up but it was absolutely terrifying getting to know them – can you imagine a whole house full of people who are sharp as nails and absolutely hilarious? As someone who has never been the comedian in any room, building those relationship was intimidating and overwhelming and one of the best experiences of my life. I love that my relationship with Joey has also brought me relationships and friendships with people who feel like my family, too. He is my heart outside my body, where all of the voices narrow into one sound. Thank you, Jo, for trusting me with the people you love.

At 8am on a Thursday morning in early April, I sat in a room full of Somali and Hispanic women learning how to sew reusable bags. After three months of organizing, planning, emailing, calling, networking, and budgeting, I finally managed to get the first of a short lineup of local Seattle artists into a tiny, colorful, beautiful family room in Bailey Gatzert Elementary School. Happily chatting and struggling to pick which colored textile would look best on the inside or the outside of the bag, this morning is going to be spent making art with our hands, together. 

As Seattle becomes more gentrified and siloed by race and economic status, there is a great need for cooperative community resistance to the forces that seek to silence and oppress immigrant families – how parents perceive themselves impacts how their children view themselves and their peers. Especially as different immigrant groups separate themselves from other immigrant communities because of this fear, creating opportunities that bring us together rather than separating us is even more important.

This morning’s art workshop is one of those opportunities, and it starts with parents and radical collaboration between communities and the arts. The arts have proven to be one of the most effective methods for self-expression and community building. These monthly workshops for immigrant artists in the community are meant to guide parents and families in order to create art that highlights the beauty and pain of family, home, and the different yet similar experiences we share so that we can better come together to resist that painful anti-immigrant narrative spread throughout the United States and Seattle.

So on that early, gray Seattle morning, I scooched my chair in around the faded tablecloth, and watched happily as Kalina Chung led the ten women and myself through what it means to reuse old clothes – what do our clothes mean to us? How does our conceptions of home reflect themselves in our clothing? Where do we see ourselves incorporating our old clothing and our countries of origin into our lives today? We sew, we talk, and most importantly – we share an arts experience with our hands.  

I’ve learned the importance of stretching the limits of my own capabilities and realizing that as an adult person, I may disappoint people with my “no”.  Right around the deepening of fall turning into winter, I found myself in a complicated space with my relationship, balancing several jobs, wading through schoolwork and friendships, doing my best to make it through each day without falling apart. As we moved through October, November, and December, I struggled to get all of the revolving parts of my life up and off the ground – to keep myself up and off the ground. 

Ultimately, I had to let the writing center know that I could no longer work for them during Spring Quarter. This was a choice that felt really sad to me – I knew that two part-time jobs, an RA position, and full-time courses would probably break me apart. I had to pick a piece to say goodbye to, and that meant giving up my time tutoring students with whom I had grown close to. I had taken a class specifically for this job, worked and struggled with a supervisor whom I didn’t particularly like, and kicked ass on my way to become a better writing tutor. Giving up on it felt like giving up on months of struggling my way through all of that muck. But I did anyways, which was absolutely the right decision to make. Saying no meant that I learned what boundary was the most important for my health and loved myself enough to respect it.    

Since I first launched The Olly Project, the relationship that has changed the most is my relationship with myself.  I made it my mission to understand and advocate for my worthiness this year. There was a very sad girl inside my heart last spring, before I published this website. I had heard some very hurtful words from people I loved. I can now look into my own heart and every single aspect of the life I’ve built for myself today and feel nothing but pride at how brave I have been. I am worthy of the life that middle-school me dreamed of when she pictured the young woman who would be in college someday. And if and when the winds change to alter my course, I have faith that I will be okay with that. 

Thank you for reading what I write. I am constantly amazed by the words you give me in response. 

Peace and love and all of my hugs,

Olly xoxo