Memoir Prompt #3

#3: What is your happiest childhood memory?

I did not love going to Disney World when I was a kid. I’m told I’ve been there twice, but I only remember the second time, I think. (It’s possible I’ve conflated the two trips in my memory.)

I remember the heat and the walking and the waiting. (Maybe I was born old - these are complaints I hear from parents all the time.) I remember desperately wanting to meet Mickey and spend an exorbitant amount of my mother’s patience and money to buy the iconic Mickey ears hat.

I remember being herded into the teacups ride to wait out a typical Florida torrential downpour where they had to shut down all the rides under threat of lightning. I remember boredom and disappointment. I remember the rain finally letting up and the lights coming back on and that we took advantage of the free ride to make up for the wait and feeling ill. (I still can’t handle amusement park rides as an adult. Motion sickness has plagued me my whole life.)

This sounds like a strange way to get to my happiest memory, describing the misery of actually visiting the “happiest place on earth”, but I appreciate you bearing with the scene setting - trust me, it gets happier now.

I remember that the rest of the day was cloudy and cooler, and, having had a rest, my feet weren’t so sore. Of course, post downpour, the whole park was soaked, or at best, dampened, but since no one else wanted to ride around inside a pool of rainwater, there was no line for the Go Karts. The teenagers running the show didn’t care enough to discourage us from going ahead with it, and we all had bathing suits on under our clothes so we figured: we’re soaking wet anyway, why not go for it?

I forget why we wound up in this configuration, but my brother was paired with my mother and I was with my father in a kart. I remember as he drove, realizing the absolute absurdity of racing around a track sitting in, to my small frame, chest high water and that strangers looked at us from across the way like we were insane. I was having the time of my little life and to this day, I pity anyone there that day who didn’t think to join in the fun.

Part of me believes that this was the day I realized that life is for living fully, and that means always being on the lookout for opportunities that others have overlooked and leaning into them wholeheartedly.

Memoir Prompt #2

#2: What is your earliest memory?

First there’s light - warm, baking sunlight.

Then there’s water, and it’s cool against my skin and the surface sparkles all around me.

I discover my feet under this shimmering surface, and as it shifts and wiggles and waves, my feet look like they don’t belong to me anymore. I wiggle my toes and I feel the greasy silt filter between them.

Somehow I know it’s my first taste of freedom; of mobility; of agency. I look at the ripples where the surface of the lake meets the beams supporting the dock to my right and I’m transfixed.

The water splashes behind me and I realize someone has come out to meet me - my father lifts me gently out of the water and I can see it bead up and drip off of my pale toes to fall back into the lake as he brings me back to the shore. It’s just three steps for him, but it felt so far when I was out on my own.

He sits me on his lap and I’m laughing about the whole ridiculous thing. What is this stuff? How did we get here? Why is this silly white daisy print sun hat on my head?

There’s a brighter flash to my right and I look in its direction. My mother has snapped a photo and I don’t understand what the camera is or why she’s on the dock staying dry when there’s this amazing lake to splash around in.

But I do know that I am me and I like this lake and I like the way the water and the silt and the summer sun feel.

Maybe I only remember this because I’ve seen the photo. Maybe I reconstructed a memory that didn’t actually exist before I knew it should be there. The sense memory of it seems so real to me that it basically doesn’t matter, and I have to wonder if this is why I love being near the water - I’m seeking that freedom and that joy and that one crystal clear moment of realization: I am me. This is who I am.

Memoir Prompt #1

#1: Was there anything unusual or unique about your birth?

The thing I hear most often from my mother about the day I was born is that she was starving because she missed both lunch and dinner. I insisted on being born at 3:56pm.

I know it was a frigid cold day, and that the day I was brought home, my father drove us through one of the worst storms of the season, 100 years after “the Great White Hurricane” with snow blowing sideways across the road and piling up on every surface it touched. When we arrived at my childhood home under many inches of snow, my Grandmother remembers my father coming back inside from shoveling every five minutes to make sure I was real - that I wasn’t a dream. 33 years later, this is and always will be my favorite part of my birth story.

I remember none of this of course, but my father had already been calling me “peanut” and, to him, that’s who I’ll always be. I was 8 pounds 8 ounces and born in 1988; years later, as an unrelated joke, a friend would begin referring to me as “Kocho” combining the shortened version of my name with the Spanish word for eight.

When I eventually turned 16, another storm would derail my one and only attempt to throw myself a birthday party. Two out of fourteen invitees would manage to make it to my house in the snow and would suffer through my one and only attempt at making cheesecake.

Every year on my birthday, I will misremember the time of my arrival to the world or fail to acknowledge it at all. I’ve rarely ever celebrated it on the actual day, and to some people this is strange, but to me it’s how it has always been. I was born to parents who prefer convenience to tradition, and it was much more convenient to bake a cake and entertain sleepovers with 13-year-old girls on a night where they didn’t have to muster the energy to go to work the next day.

According to the Zodiac calendar, I’m an Aquarius and have a tendency to be distant, act against the grain, and believe that I can fix the world’s problems. I’m not sure if these qualities would have come to me naturally if I had never read about them, or, if by knowing them I’ve been given permission to live up to them, but, as with any vague emotional identifiers, I do recognize myself in the description.

Eventually these qualities will contribute to the strange and winding road I will travel through life, sometimes doubling back on itself, sometimes careening off into the wilderness. I like to pretend to ignore pseudo-spiritual “voodoo”, but I have to admit that I like the idea that the alignment of the earth in relation to the stars around it somehow had a hand in organizing the star stuff I’m made of into the person I am. Only time will tell.

The New TNML

Firstly, I want to say how much I’m looking forward to coming back to this project. I am excited about having a creative outlet again and to get back into some kind of regular writing practice. I also want to thank everyone who was so supportive of the original blog. There is no way I could have done so much with it without knowing I had so many of my favorite people cheering me on. You can still read everything I posted back then on the “TNML 1.0” page of this site which effectively serves as an archive of that work. Going back to it now, some of it makes me laugh, some of it I’m still really proud of, and some of it makes me want to crawl out of my skin. But that’s the writing process for you.

Secondly, I want to acknowledge my abrupt hiatus from TNML 1.0 and explain a bit of where I’m at now. I found myself at the time overwhelmed by my self-imposed once-per-week schedule of content output on the blog and I was showing signs of burnout, both within the project and in my “real” life (the blog was and is very real to my experience, but couldn’t be inclusive of everything I was going through). It was around that time that I realized I had too much on my plate and that I also wasn’t in the right career for the person I had become and how I wanted to grow.

So I took a break to focus on finding not just “a good job”, but “the right job”. After some false starts and setbacks, I did finally find a great opportunity back in September. The new position has had many challenges, starting but not ending with trying to figure out how a whole new industry works and where my responsibilities really fit into the new role.

For those who might remember a lot of my journey through the original project, I was also learning to live with Anxiety and Seasonal Affective Disorder. I’m still working on it, and probably will be for the rest of my life. I don’t have everything figured out and I likely never will. I think I often pretend to know exactly what to do, and I wish I hadn’t done so much of that in the original TNML.

Then came more life changes and we all got smacked in the face by the Covid-19 pandemic, which we are all still living through. A chorus of social media inputs told me that quarantine was the perfect time to start being creative again and to go back to writing. I wanted to do it, but I had no gas in the tank and no idea of what I wanted to do next. I knew I didn’t want to go back to writing the same kind of blog posts anymore because I’m just not the same person I was then, personally or creatively.

The truth is, I don’t think this reincarnation of The New Me, Lately is going to look very much like version 1.0 at all. I certainly won’t be publishing on a weekly basis anymore - that turned out to be a pace I couldn’t maintain long term. I hope to have something to put here every month, but I’m not going to hold myself to that. Last time I got caught up in trying to please my readers and I started seeing it as an obligation rather than an opportunity. This time around, while I really want you all to love what I’m doing, I’m going to try to stick to what I really feel like creating and only post when I’m ready to share it with everyone else.

Lately I’ve been remembering a dream I have to someday publish an actual book, and there’s no way I will ever do that without getting back to writing something again. I still have no idea what that book will look like. Last time around, I found myself really enjoying giving advice based on my own experiences and finding ways to translate my knowledge and the things I was learning into a resource for others. I think now, for the most part, I feel like I can close that chapter.

I think the new The New Me, Lately will be a home for writing experiments in whatever style I find myself gravitating toward. I’ve always enjoyed reading Memoir and Personal Essays, and I want to dabble in writing these styles in the near future. The first real creative work I intend to share (hopefully in the coming week) is more of a Journaling experiment from the early days of quarantine. I may even someday give Fiction writing another shot. This might wind up more closely resembling a loose collection of writing prompts. I hope you’ll stick with me while I figure it out.

However this project turns out, I hope that you all enjoy it and maybe even get something from it that you can take with you in your life. A blessing and a curse I’m coming to reckon with is that I love to be in service to others - so much so that I often forget to act in service of my own interests. I’m aiming to make this project a fulfilling creative outlet for myself that could show other people what it looks like to try earnestly, and probably to fail and try again.

If you’ve been with me since the beginning, thank you, from the bottom of my heart. If you’re new here, please take a look around and I hope you all come with me on whatever this project is going to be. Either way, please feel free to subscribe to updates and/or follow the Instagram page (@thenewmelately) so you don’t miss anything.

Newest and Latest

I’m back! Sort of!

It’s been a long time. Things are weird. But I’m finally coming back!

I’m working on getting TNML 2.0 off the ground so stay tuned to this space as I link my old content and begin creating new stuff.

I don’t really know exactly what this will be yet. I don’t think it will be the same format as before - I’m playing around with treating it more like an outlet for random and periodic creative bursts and less like a scheduled release of curated content. If that appeals to you, I hope you’ll subscribe (ya know…when I figure out how that works on the new site…)

You can also go back and enjoy everything I created the first time around in the archive. Click on the page “The New Me, Lately 1.0” to see how this project started and grew and eventually overwhelmed me. But I’m back at it in a healthier way at a slower pace this time around.

I love you all and thank you for checking back in!