Sometimes, you don’t even realize what you need until you’re given it, and then, you wonder how you ever got along without it. At least, that’s how I felt. I didn’t realize how much I needed to know what I was like at the age of three—before all of life’s challenges blew me off course. For the great majority of my life, I was a bona fide people pleaser. It was my way of coping, fitting in, feeling safe. Let me tell you, you do that for too long and you begin to forget what your essence is. Yes, we are many things. We have many facets to who we are. But all of us, have an essence, that part of us our soul recognizes and says, “Ah! That’s me.”
I don’t know what made me ask my parents that day, but something in me needed to know. “Who you were at age three?” my mother asked. “Well, you definitely had a mind of your own.” “That’s for sure!” my father agreed. “You were very strong-willed,” she said. If people were going left, I wanted to go right. It wasn’t so much a matter of getting my way, but of moving to the beat of my own drum. My parents reminisced about how imaginative I was, how I told stories from a young age, how daring I was, and for me, it was like I was meeting a part of myself for the first time.
Over the next couple days, I couldn’t stop thinking about that girl, me as a three-year-old. How brave she was! How original! That simple act of being reacquainted with that part of myself really sparked something within me.
From that one conversation, I realized that I wasn’t showing up as me, the real me. Even as I scrolled through my Instagram accounts, I didn’t see any of that three-year-old reflected back at me. I had been trying too hard to be someone else, someone more acceptable, softer, and everybody’s friend. I realized that I was totally playing small in my life so that other people would like me. To be a strong woman, to have the courage to live my own creative life, felt too lonely. But that three-year-old gave me a lot of courage. And looking over some of the drawings I did in the past three years, I realized that she had been there all along.
The drawing you see here, I created in August of 2019. And it’s called Momochan Conquers the World. I feel like she’s my inner child manifested on paper. I’ve had a blog and a website in the past with that name, but I always changed it to make it more marketable or more who I thought I needed to be. But now, I feel like she’s finally arrived, and she’s not going anywhere.
Momochan Conquers the World reflects my essence. She’s a girl who is going to forge her own path, a girl who is going to create her own destiny. I feel like I’m finally settling into my own skin after years of trying to escape it. I realized that the three-year-old I was had been waiting for me all this time. And now, I finally see her.