Happy new year!

Every year it comes back. New year, new me. ปีใหม่คนใหม่. Uus aasta, uus mina. Or whatever languages you speaking in.

But I don’t feel that.

Something has changed within me. (Yes, Wicked reference. I contain multitudes and musical theatre.)

But I am not a new person. I am a combination. A collection. Of things I have been quietly gathering my whole life.

This isn’t my first website. It isn’t my first time writing. It isn’t my first attempt at building a voice.

It’s a return. And maybe something I’m trying to regain. I don’t fully know what this will become. A journal? An archive? A small digital apartment with the lights always on? But I feel hopeful.

Unlimited--in a quiet way.

I didn’t plan this version of myself. Not when I chose to study history. Not when I picked up translation gigs more than ten years ago. Not when I sat in that Eastern European history class in college, listening to a lecturer who spoke about culture from the other side of the world with so much conviction. Not even when I fell into Kobo Abe’s underground worlds--those quiet, surreal tunnels where identity dissolves and reforms.

None of it felt like a master plan.

And yet--somehow--it connects.

Everything clicked in a way I never expected. I am not new.

The “old me” is layered, expanded, sharpened. The future me is, ironically, an even older version of myself--the one I haven’t fully met yet, but who is forming as I gather all these pieces and learn to articulate them into something finer.

In a world where I spend so much time creating voices for others, this is where I want to hear my own again.

Also, yes, I meant to post this in January. It is now the end of February. But we can count Lunar New Year. And at least it’s not Thai New Year in April. (See? Still on time. Technically.)

Uus aasta.

Vana mina.

This is not a reinvention.

It’s a continuation.

To be continued! :)