“Muli Akong Magsisimula” translates to “I Will Begin Again“, a realization that life is not exempt from failures and mistakes. Despite all, we always have the option to persevere.
It’s been years since I’ve truly written something that brought me joy. The current YA fantasy novel I’m writing “Si Sapira At Ang Aliping Itinakda” (Sapira and the Destined Slave) has not progressed beyond Chapter 10, and I had started writing that in 2018.
It’s easy to assume I’ve been stuck because I’ve been busy. Last year, I moved from Bangladesh to India, saying goodbye to one set of friends and saying hello to another. I left behind one school and moved to another. New country, new culture, new people. There are a lot of adjustments, a lot of getting-to-know, a lot of social maneuvering I needed to navigate first.
So instead of creating, I taught and slept. Cried and laughed. Adjusted and rested.
Somehow that emotional calibration is necessary.
But reading “Muli Akong Magsisimula” again brought a different kind of joy. Once an art has been created, it takes on a life of itself that refuses to disappear. In its quiet corner, it remains. Unnoticed perhaps, but present and persisting. It is even free to create derivatives, a version of itself that reflects contemporary changes in its society. It continues to say “I Will Begin Again” , in perpetuity.
This poem was a love letter that my younger self had written to me. Now, it is my love letter to the world.
When I return to writing now, it is because I chose to. I miss it, like missing a core part of my identity.
When I was younger, I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy. But along the way, in the midst of performative artificiality, I lost that joy. The constant need for validation where nothing ever was good enough had killed the artist within.
But now, perhaps motivated by a different cause, I don’t care about that anymore. Now, I care about preserving a part of me. Someday, when Bright and Rupert and Brave are older, faced with existential reckoning, they’ll read this version of me, and somehow that will give them strength.
I want them to hear my voice, telling them “Muli Akong Magsisimula” in a voice that used to lull them to sleep. I want them to hear the soft lilting of our mother tongue as it dances with rhymes and rhythm. Nais kong marinig nila ang ganda ng ating wika, gamit ang mga taludtod na nagkakanlong ng samu’t saring emosyon.
I want them to hear their accent in a foreign language I dared to teach, a subject I gave myself permission to assert equal footing to in an international arena, telling “I Will Begin Again”.
Someday, when they’re old enough, they’ll read this and they’ll give themselves permission to value themselves for exactly who they are. No more, no less.
Now when I’m creating, there’s joy again.
Buy “Muli Akong Magsisimula: Mga Tula” here or listen to them here.