This Time Next Year: My book project

The summer after my senior year of high school I was packing my bags for Santa Barbara, where I would be attending UCSB come fall. My mom gave me a going away party complete with a pink chiffon cake, bottles of champagne, and a quilt she handmade for me, colorful with butterflies. On September 1st of that year, two days away from departing, my mother returned home from a doctor’s checkup with the news that she had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Not believing that it could be serious, I insisted on pushing back my departure date a few weeks until I knew more about what was going on. By the end of the month I knew three things for sure: I wasn’t going to college this year, my mother had stage three kidney cancer, a form of cancer that only 20,000 people had ever been diagnosed with, and that God had abandoned me when I needed him the most.
With my brothers both out of the house and my father only home every other week because of work, this book begins with the nine months of my life that were radically transformed, causing me to question everything I’ve ever believed in, and ending up with the death that shattered my life and caused my family to fall apart. Being the only girl left, I wanted to rebuild us immediately, and in doing so, staged an internal struggle with what I wanted versus what I needed, leaving my family in Seattle to attend college in Texas, for my sanity, to get as far away as possible and have a fresh beginning without the memories flooding in.
The book follows my story, from the sad ending of one life through the new beginning of my own with stories both tragic and humorous along the way. Through college, the people that made me laugh and cry, family, spiritual strife, and relationships I clung to that were worth both nothing and everything in those passing four years. It’s about how I found myself surrounded by strong male figures who I trusted immensely; and the many women that would betray my trust. A story about recovering from grief, overcoming the emotional and physical challenges after being raped, and moving forward from the many negatives in life to form a new beginning. This is my journey to self- discovery and learning how to find myself and stand alone without the one person I needed to guide me, how my family came back together again, even though I abandoned them for a period of time. It’s about overcoming the anger, the fear, the immense sadness, and realizing that pieces of her lie within me, and that on the good days, I trust myself as complete because of her.