I have a folder full of memes

I’m sitting in reflection on my year and I can’t help but wonder if I’ve done all I set out to do. The short answer is no, of course. For I fear I am too ambitious and constantly fall short of my own dreams, no matter how much I pare them back to save myself the disappointment. At the end of 2021, I was feeling a mix of emotions. It was a year plagued by intense illness and a constant push and pull between my desire to be free–of anything and everything–and my desire to build a company that can sustain all of who I am. Yet I felt like I achieved neither, for my energy did not allow the relentless pursuit of a publishing empire and my illness trapped me in the basement of my very being. Freedom looked and tasted like being able to sleep in a quiet, cold room far away from where I really was… and that freedom was what I fantasised about every night to try and alleviate the pain of my suffering. 

I remind myself of these feelings now because earlier today I had a Facebook memory appear. Around this time last year, I decided to photograph myself with all the books I had published. I wanted to start a new tradition, documenting the tangible successes of my year–namely the books and all the hard work they represented–and also myself. Despite the turbulence of 2021, I managed to publish six titles. Four of them sans team. Just me and my sheer, foolish determination that most definitely kept my illness around longer than it needed to be. So today I was reminded of these photos and I was impressed, my first thoughts were “wow, I can’t believe I published six books last year” shortly followed by “it’s a shame I can’t take photos this year, I don’t want to bring attention to the fact I only published one book”. It’s funny, really, how quickly I forgot the true torment of my year while publishing those books. How much I suffered. How lonely I was. How I felt like a bumbling idiot. It’s funny how I took those photos to celebrate myself and now I’m using them to punish myself for how differently 2022 played out. 

Heading into this year I was determined to make Revolt work. I was determined to write a book again. I was determined to make my dreams come true. I remember meeting my friend Mish after she read one of the books I published–BTS by ARMY–and how quickly we started to anticipate what an amazing year 2022 would be. (Mostly because we had written 2021 off as the dumpster fire it was). I remember around September we started to make memes about BTS that were unique to just her and I. The memes were about our jokes and our lives and were carried with the faces of BTS. In my fevered-slash-chronically-ill-and-losing-my-mind states, I would often experience thoughts floating towards me. Perhaps less thoughts and more like messages or fragments of something else. Often, they would be dates or series of numbers. Sometimes I’d just think of the date at random, other times I’d accidentally write the date instead of the actual day's date I was aiming for. After a while, I started to tell Mish. We would joke about what these dates could mean. Then we would hold our breaths and wait to see if anything would come of them. I remember that since the start of 2021 I had been thinking about the month of October as if something big were coming. In September I started telling Mish that something was coming on October 12. Soon enough, it became a meme and we equal parts joked about, and anticipated, the fateful day. October came and went, life was no different and 2021 remained a dumpster fire. Time passed and I stopped seeing numbers, though I often wished the excitement of that magic would find me again.

A habit that I picked up over my many years of being a theoretical overachiever was going very hard on my new year’s planning. Once I started writing and publishing books I would attempt to plot a publication schedule at least one year in advance. I enjoyed these sessions greatly. There’s something about dreaming and planning that excites me in a way not much else can. I think about all the things I can write, and how they intersect with one another. How I can find other authors and other books that fit in with what I want to publish. How I can weave a story throughout everything I do in my business. How I can leap from one project to the next and live an ecstatic experience of creative bliss all year long. That kind of structure gives me the foundation I need to be flexible, respond to the world around me, and be truly free and creative. I need both in order to maintain a steady footing on the earth. A direction forward but without the fine details filled in advance. Signposts. Markers. A map, an ever-evolving map. You get the idea. 

In a chapter that I started but haven’t yet published (I say this so you forgive the repetition when you eventually see it), I wrote about my “big three” astrological placements. Gemini sun, Gemini moon, and Aquarius rising. All air. Intellect. Wit. Communication. Innovation. My world is inherently mentally driven. I sometimes feel like a balloon untethered from the earth. As a child, I used to have nightmares of floating off the ground when faced with danger. The danger itself wasn’t what made it a nightmare, it was the fear of becoming untethered as I shot up off the ground and couldn’t control my body back to earth. Being so intellectually inclined requires some level of grounding. Structure, routine, process. It’s not that I naturally veer away from such things. It’s that I crave them. They’re the natural balance to my head that’s in the clouds. The only way to sustain the immense amount of energy I expend in my pursuit of thinking and creating is to feel my feet on the earth. Ironic, considering I spend most of my time in bed. This process of grounding through planning–and the subsequent following through on plans–allows me to channel my energy and crafts purposefully. 

For 2022 I had many things planned. Many books. Many wonderful ideas. I was going to have my comeback after taking more and more time off of writing, and eventually stepping away from my company completely, as I continued to struggle with my health. By the end of December, however, I was faced with a new reality. I was going through an incredibly painful relationship breakdown with a close friend of five years; a group of people led by a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia was attempting to cancel me online through relentless attacks on TikTok and Twitter, and; my uncle had tragically and traumatically passed the day after Christmas. In the face of this distress, I embraced the fact that I did not want to do anything. I did not want to write. I did not want to have the company. I did not want for anything. I was done. My heart was in it, but it hurt so much that I couldn’t keep going. Everything became numb and instead of pushing forward with my plans, I chose to listen to the whispers of the universe before the inevitable sledgehammer of fate would return. It was time to stop planning and let life unfold in its own time… even if that meant I would be carried further away from what I wanted–that darkened room where I could rest and truly feel revived. 

What a terrifying thought. 

There have been a few defining features of this year. I started with an understanding that I was not going to have any plans, yet I intended to do more and live more than ever before. I believed that through this release of plans and control, I would be able to make more money and write more and be more myself than ever before. Secretly, I still harboured the original map I made back in 2019 that plotted my way to BTS. I hoped that by some form of witchcraft or divine intervention I would be able to meet them, to work with them, for my dreams to come true. My fear was that in letting go of my plans and stepping further back from my company I would be stepping further away from BTS and all I had attempted to build. 

In January I began to set my sights on becoming an influencer. I joined an influencer school and was learning the ins and outs of the algorithm and online community building. For me, this was an outlet that was adjacent to writing but didn’t require the same emotional input. I made content, I amassed new followers, I showed myself to the world as a writer and publisher. Yet, despite having books and a company to my name, I was not these things. I was not writing, I was not publishing. It wasn’t that I hid this truth, I told everyone. I was open and honest about my position. I shared my angst. Regardless, I felt like an imposter. Despite this, I was able to find great healing in taking up more and more space online. I showed people new aspects of myself, I was able to connect with others as Wallea, as opposed to Wallea the writer or Wallea the powerlifter, or Wallea the publisher. I started to vlog every day, sharing the ups and downs of my life. I started to share my poetry. I fell in love with filmmaking for the first time since I was in film school 11 years ago. 

It felt like I was doing something. And in the eyes of people who followed me, I was successful and accomplished. But the truth was that all I wanted to do was write, and I couldn’t. Every step I took tore me further and further from who and where I wanted to be. Yet who and where I was remained unchanged. This was an exercise in trust, and at no point did I truly know if I was on the right path, nor did I receive any sign of confirmation. Trust, blind trust. Numb and foolish. I dared to be hopeful time and again for I didn’t have another option. 

In March, as my strength returned, I was faced with something I had been putting off for the longest time. I ended my relationship of eight years. This set into motion a period of time where I bore witness to my ex’s life falling apart. For five months we continued to live together and I took every opportunity I could to be out of the house. I did not grieve, I could not. I had to hold everything together. I did whatever I could to survive. 

During this five-month period I travelled to Melbourne to see Mish twice, I saw my dad in Western Australia for the first time in five years, I went to Bali to meet with participants of the influencer school I was in, and I spent most of my days in Brisbane with friends. Anywhere but home. Despite my health improving, the travel plus the emotional intensity of my home life saw me regress around the time of my 29th birthday in June. I remember eating alone in my room and crying into my pillow while people sent me happy birthday messages online.

My ex moved out at the end of August and at this point I was completely done. I was beyond done. I went into the year done, really. The guilt and the complexity of the breakup was eating me alive. Now with the space to grieve, I was overwhelmed with built-up emotion. It didn’t explode out of me, it didn’t rush or gush or spew. It seeped. It was insidious. I made a vlog after visiting his new apartment and seeing that he was okay. I was so overcome with emotion. I don’t want to say I was relieved, but I was. It was bittersweet. More bitter than sweet. There wasn’t any sweetness at all, really. I digress. So I posted the vlog and it blew up. My inbox overflowed with messages from strangers who were worried for my well-being. I felt judged and misunderstood and incredibly vulnerable. The next day I posted a compilation of every vlog I had made for six months. Then I stopped. After living my life in a very public way every single day for half a year without a break, I stepped away… and I didn’t return. I was repulsed by the sight of myself. I was embarrassed for sharing so much. I didn’t want to be her anymore. 

It was around this time that BTS announced that they were going to be performing in Busan in mid-October. This was the opportunity that Mish and I had been waiting for. Finally, the stars had aligned and we were in the position to travel to South Korea. Mish excitedly messaged me. It was time. It was time. And I said no. 

In truth, during the five months of my ex and I living together, five months in limbo, so many things transpired that I cannot even begin to write. It’s not that people don’t know. It’s more like I’m still processing, it’s not time to share… it’s deserving of a different body of work entirely. It felt like I had lived many lives, some secret, some less so. I came out the other side depleted, broken, crushed. When I said no to Mish, it was because BTS felt so far away from me. They served as a constant reminder of the dreams I so badly wanted, but couldn’t get close to. I was so completely numb that just thinking of being in Busan looking at them felt foreign to me. Like it wasn’t my dream. It was too painful to let myself want it. It was easier to shut down and focus on surviving my current reality. 

When I told Mish no, I had legitimate reasons. The date that BTS were performing was the date I was set to move out of my family home. I was moving to the city with someone new. I was starting over. I was holding onto any sense of normalcy and comfort I could. All of my money that I made from doing freelance creative direction was needed for the move. I couldn’t see BTS and move house. I had to pick one. I chose survival. 

Within a few days, the sledgehammer of fate came to visit me. My invoices hadn’t been paid for a month and I was faced with the grim reality of urgently needing work so I could move out in October. I resented the notion, I was scared it would take me away from everything I was wanting to do creatively. I sat with myself for what felt like the longest time and realised that I had to find work that would support my own dreams, my own creativity, my own scholarship… instead of getting paid to support someone else’s endeavours. I found a job vacancy doing night shift at a newspaper printer. With no experience and no idea what I was getting myself into, I applied. Then, I watched as my life as I knew it changed rapidly and with great force–as is to be expected from the sledgehammer of fate, I suppose. 

I got fired from my creative direction role and my newfound relationship ended in the most brutal of fashions. I was now without my very public position as a creative, I was without a relationship, I was without income, and I was without a house to move to in October. It was at this point that I did what I should’ve done in the first place: I said yes to BTS in Busan. I felt dead inside, I truly didn’t want to go. But I knew I had to allow Mish to take me–drag me, even. And she knew the same. 

The same day that the sledgehammer came to visit, I got the job at the newspaper printer. I started with a 10pm-6am shift a day later. With my first pay the following Wednesday, Mish and I booked our tickets to Seoul. Just like that, I went from two years of near complete bed rest and constant illness that would see me falling asleep at 6pm… to suddenly being awake and doing physical labour throughout the night. Just like that, whenever I was working, I was illness free. I experienced no pain or fatigue. I would come home from work feeling something that I had been chasing for the longest time: Alive. 

A few weeks later while searching for a meme, I came across one I had made a year earlier. It was Namjoon with his fingers spreading his eyes wide, the original Wallea and Mish meme. Written across the image was “Waiting for October 12”. The date that never came. That was until Mish and I boarded our flight to Seoul on October 12, 2022. 

This was a moment of pure magic just for me. To you, it might seem that it’s a coincidence. That I’m making it into something it’s not. To me, it served as a reminder that my dreams are real and very much still alive. It was a timely reminder that everything will play out in a timeframe that is equal parts quicker and longer than I could ever expect. It showed me just how much I wanted to see BTS, to go to Korea, to write books, to publish, to relentlessly chase what I want. That’s what I held onto when I would cry in my car before work and when my days would blur into one another. When I couldn’t talk to anyone or show my face online. When I felt broken beyond repair. That’s all I could think of. I didn’t feel anything, all I could do was blindly trust that it was going to work out. That’s what the meme signified to me. Trust. In myself. In BTS. Trust. 

Even though I did not want to go, I went to Seoul. I went to Busan. I did whatever Mish asked of me because I had no ability to make choices for myself while we travelled. I trusted her and I trusted that I had to be there. My health dipped and faltered from the emotional rollercoaster that was showing up to a country I had dreamt of visiting for many years. I struggled to hold onto who I was. My identity shifted and warped while remaining unchanged. I had hoped that my first visit to Korea would be triumphant, a celebration, a rite of passage as I made my way to BTS. Instead, what it appears to have been, was the closing of a cycle. Though it was by all means the start of something new, it felt a lot like the end of everything I knew. I cried as we boarded the plane home, I didn’t want to stay but I didn’t want to go. The life I was returning to was not one I wanted. But to stay in Korea with a warped sense of identity and a major feeling of detachment from everything was not the answer, either. The trip unsettled me, and rightly so. I returned determined to get to a point where I could feel again. In order to do that I had to return to myself, return to writing, and hopefully through all of that… return to what truly made me feel alive: Bangtan. 

The end of October brought to me a confusing clash of new lows and a sense of direction. A plan. For the first time in 2022, I was ready to set something in stone. To experience the gift of complete clarity as to my plans while also suffering from such mental distress and discomfort… Well, it’s definitely something else. I knew what I had to do. I had the big 2023 goal of working with BTS set. Yet I was immobilised. I was stuck in a trauma response where I froze. My body would go limp and my mind would go blank every time I would attempt to do anything–admin, social media, editing–even the most mundane of tasks I could not complete. If I tried to push myself I would become so distressed that I would teeter on the edge of a mental break. I felt like I was about to snap.

BTS continued to torment me by sheer virtue of their existence. I felt like a failure. I had taken the entire year off and yet I couldn’t reply to emails. I still couldn’t write. And now I wasn’t posting online. I was doing nothing in the pursuit of my dreams except holding onto hope that they’d visit me, even in my most passive state. 

I shared this with my then-business partner and she immediately sent me off to work with a coach. There was no way I could get out of this alone, and for the first time in my life, I received help for my mental state. Two sessions with my coach later and I was writing again. From there, everything unfolded and flowed as if it were right on time. I wasn’t late to this return, I wasn’t overdue or behind… I followed the ups and downs of 2022 in order to be delivered to this moment. A reclamation of all that I am and all that I desire through the medium that sustains my lifeforce: Writing. 

It was all worth it. Every single minute of pain, heartache, disenchantment, and hopelessness. It was worth it just to write again. Today marks day 37 of writing in a row. In three days I will surpass the amount of time it took me to write Idol Limerence. A feat I thought I could never replicate, especially as I have attempted to write its sequel, Return to Bangtan, unsuccessfully since 2020. Ironically, I had to return to them, to myself, to writing, before writing the book. Which was the original plot–Echo loses her way and has to fall in love with being a fan all over again. I knew I had to live it first, I just didn’t think it’d look quite like this. 

So what does life look like now that I am writing and healing and growing and following my dream of working with BTS? I hope it comes as no surprise to you that it’s as uncomfortable as ever. The veil of my suffering has all but lifted, yet it’s not a sunny utopia that I see. Instead, it’s the four walls of the room my ex and I shared for eight years. There’s nothing on the walls but hooks from where our art once hung. I’m sleeping in the same bed and everything is relatively the same. Mundane. Monotonous. 

My life feels like a husk. A shell. A container for what was and could’ve been. Every friendship I’ve made here has drifted away. I work and sleep and write and barely leave my house. This life doesn’t fit anymore, but the new one I know awaits me is yet to arrive. I can hold it together, as long as I can keep writing. When I cannot, such as this week, I lose my tether to the earth and shoot upwards in terror. My childhood nightmare lives on, this time the danger isn’t the boogeyman, though. Instead, it’s my unrealised dreams and my own inaction toward them. The danger is me.

Here I am, one year on from taking those photos where I’m all in white, holding up my books with pride. I guess why I don’t want to take a photo with the one and the only book I managed to publish this year is because it doesn’t represent the journey. It isn’t the physical representation of all I’ve been through. It reminds me of my own shortcomings. It reminds me that I spent most of the year unable to do the most simple of tasks. Yet, despite all that I’ve been through, I did it. I published a book. Right as I returned from Korea and couldn’t keep my head above water, I made a book. I did it. 

For 2022 I believed that by letting go of my plans, I would be able to make more money and write more and be more myself than ever before. I wasn’t wrong. I achieved just that… all in the final throes of the year, no less.

As I head into 2023 I am stuck in this liminal soup. One life has ended and another is not quite here. All I can do is write and wait and trust. Unlike 2022, I do have a plan for 2023. It’s simple really, and one I am looking forward to sharing with you in great detail very soon–though we already know the gist: I’m going to write my way to BTS. These hands, this keyboard, this screen, your eyes. It’s happening. I’m uncomfortable out of my mind, I’m restless, I’m ready. Everything has ended, the cycles have cycled, the chapters have closed, and I’m still here believing in this dream more than ever before. Why? Because I have a folder full of memes that haven’t come true yet and I have nothing else to lose.