1. You suck and you know it. You will watch Stuck in Love on your laptop that afternoon you were too sad to take a nap. You will fall in love with Lily Collins. You will tell yourself: I think I want to write in English…so people from all over the world will understand me. Haha. No. You will only want that because you wanna be cool.
2. You’re not cool. That’s why all the kids hate you. So you will spend your free time on one of the benches at the forest park, scribbling poems on your composition notebook. You love rhymes. So you will keep making rhymes even though the grammar is off. You will write sonnets about fall – even though you live in the Philippines, for heaven’s sake. You will pen haikus starring leaves. You will curate verses about shiny rocks and flowers kissed by bees. It’s funny how when you will most want to die, you will find life in almost everything.
3. You will dream of getting a poetry book published. You will browse international magazines and press on your three-year-old Samsung phone during Physics. You will think about the reading fee and count how much you’ll need to save each day to make 10 USD by the end of the year. You will walk your way home to school every day, bearing the heat of late afternoon and the worry that your parents might find out–news flash: they will find out. And then you will spend your savings on something stupid like a skater skirt.
4. The summer after your ninth grade, you will send two poems to an online magazine. You wrote them years ago but never dared to take them out of your diary. One day, for some reason you won’t remember when you’re writing a feature article about it, you’ll be brave enough to take that chance. You will write an email, attach the files, then hit send. They will get back to you six months later. Then, you will squeal at the acceptance email and run to your mother: I did it, Mommy! I freaking did it! Loooooook! You will be the happiest you’ve ever been since you were thirteen.
5. You will dream of bigger horizons. You will chase brighter skies. You will turn your trauma into masterpieces and think: Damn! Look at this fine piece of art! (Don’t worry, this one will be addressed in therapy.) You will send out emails in magazines with big names and fancy promises. Months later, they will reply with various arrangements of words to spell rejection. Your Submittable account will resemble a broken stoplight. You will start to believe you’ll never reach your destination. Maybe, you never even left home.
6. In spite of life happening—or maybe because of life happening—every now and then, you’ll be off your rockers and go into a submission spree. You will never get lucky.
7. Somewhere in the middle of the pandemic, your poem about self-harming will be featured in a mental health journal overseas. You will be paid for the very first time. You will buy some ice cream and think of your words printed somewhere in Saskatchewan. While the vanilla melts in your tongue, you will stare outside your windows and whisper: I think I can do this. I think I want this life.
8. You will apply for a writing scholarship offered by a professional poet. By some kind of miracle, you will get in. You will attend Zoom meetings every 7 in the morning in a state of utter disbelief. You will treat every session like a grand occasion. To be fair, it is a grand occasion.
9. You will keep on submitting to magazines hoping for acceptances. The answer will be no or static silence which is, you know, still no, just more brutal. Once, your mother will find you sulking in the darkness of your bedroom and even before she asks anything, you’ll say: Everyone rejected me. She will give you a hotdog on a stick and a cup of hot chocolate. You will ask her to turn the lights off when she leaves.
10. You will wake up one morning and decide to reject your rejections. You will stitch a book of prose and poems out of your failed submissions. You will remember what your kindergarten teacher used to say: you can either find treasures in the trash or make treasures out of it. You will spend the next three months over caffeinated, sleepless, and drunk in the dreams that keep you off the ledge.
11. You will tell yourself you deserve to be heard. You will convince your inner critic you are competent enough to stand on your own. You will think of the child you were and the empty shelves in the library she ran her fingers across and think: someone needs to hear these stories crowding my head. So, like the crazy girl you are, you will self-publish your chapbook. You will put it out online, but that won’t be enough so you will have it on paperback, too.
12. People will pay you for your book. You will pinch yourself so many times. No, you will not wake up. No, you do not want to.
13. You will write for online magazines, journals, blogs – you name it. You will still get rejected. But there will be days when an acceptance email sings its way into your inbox and the stings of the rejection slips go quiet just for a while. You will write truly, madly, deeply. For yourself. For your friends. For strangers. You will write to bury skeletons. You will write to perform exorcisms and resurrections. You will write to escape reality and also to face it. You will twist words into anything you want them to be. You will get paid for this sometimes. You will be able to take your mom out to dinners because of it. You will be tired. You will be sick. You will take your antidepressants and stare at an empty page for the next five months after your diagnosis. When your drive returns, it won’t be in downpours, but in drizzles. You will be thirsty. But you have a kinship with waters. Before you know it, you will be flooded again.
14. You will never stop writing. You will never stop submitting. You will never stop getting rejected no matter where you are in your career. You will be twenty with another collection. You will thank God. You will thank your mother for her genes. You will thank Rad Bradbury for saying that you only fail when you stop writing. You will thank every victory, every fall, every road that brought you here.
15. At twenty-one, you will become a staff writer of the online magazine where you began your journey. You will be working with your favorite author on projects. In fact, you will be mentored by several authors from all over the world and you will wonder why at thirteen, every Friday in that forest park, you ever thought you’d be alone.
16. You will host your first writing workshop for the the youth from different planes of the globe. You will announce your mentorship program. You will break down at 2AM in your hotel room and fall to your knees in gratitude. Again and again, you will thank your angels. Again and again, you will thank your stars. And again and again, you will pick up the pen and go back to a blank page where you began.
17. Hey you, little dreamer. Who loves language the way she wishes she would be loved. Who tears into novels during lectures, lists collocations in another notebook, and searches for the meaning of the words in the dictionary instead of relying on context clues. Who thinks of a thousand ways to say “I love you” and “I’m sad” without actually using those words–because then, what else is poetry for? To the girl who should be in therapy instead of at the forest park every freaking Friday. Who seeks the wisdom of classic writers rather than asking her mom to find her a creative writing teacher. Hey you—yes you—with scars on your wrists, stories under your tongue, and dreams by the tip of your fingers…you will make it. You will save yourself with the lifeline of your verses and you will do the same to others in the future. Just give it time. And yeah, kiddo, your peers don’t like you right now but one day, they will ask for your autograph. So go, just go home.
18. Go home and watch Stuck in Love.
Fransivan MacKenzie is a storyteller born and raised in the Philippines. She is the author of the books “Out of the Woods,” “Departures,” and “i remember that it hurt.” Her works also appeared in Transition Magazine, The Racket, Abandon Journal, CP Quarterly Review, and more literary journals all over the world. In 2023, she became a staff writer for Germ Magazine, the platform that provided her first international exposure. She founded the Fransivan Mackenzie Poetry Mentorship Program to promote literacy while breaking financial barriers.