Ten Years of Someday Mouse
This year I was hoping to showcase an elaborate booth display, mounds of new products, new stories, and a color rebrand for my beloved Someday Mouse’s ten year anniversary at The San Diego Comic Con International 2025, but instead I found myself taking a detailed inventory of everything that’s happened in the past decade.
My first self published storybook, The Adventures of Someday Mouse debuted at SDCC 2015. I survived a five car pile up less than a year earlier, and found myself uncomfortably writhing from a gnawing shame that surpassed the physical trauma of my car accident. In the same moment, I realized the haunting fragility of life as well as the searing pain of having lived inauthentically. It became clear that I needed to rearrange the hierarchy of my priorities, and that was precisely what I set out to do for the rest of my given life.
As I fought to realign with the aspirations I had ignored for so many years, I came to understand the many mechanisms within myself that created this reflex of avoidant behavior. It wasn’t a matter of eliminating procrastination, or finding better ways to motivate myself, or writing the perfect business plan. There were deeper systems in my psyche that made it seemingly impossible to achieve a life where I felt safe to express my authentic identity and live out my dreams. I wrestled with the different parts of myself that usurped my judgement in times of stress and fear, and I did everything I could to subdue them, punish them, or eliminate them, but in time I learned it was better to befriend them.
Despite feeling so behind in life, career, and love, Someday Mouse has remained a buoyant lifeline cradling my head above the stormy waters of a seemingly endless sea. It helped me survive a Pandemic that brought the world to its knees. It helped me survive a sexual harassment lawsuit that devastated the momentum of my tattoo career. It helped me survive estrangement from my nuclear family as well as an exodus from many of the communities I had previously navigated. It helped me survive an autoimmune disorder that made it next to impossible to work and financially support myself. It helped me survive and unpack years of bottled grief that needed patient attention to adequately process the compounded emotional stress. And the list goes on, but so does Someday.
If I’ve learned anything in the past ten years, it’s that Someday Mouse can survive anything and so can I. There is much to do before I am mentally, emotionally, physically, and financially sound, but this year I’m in a place where I can start to strategically reinvest back into myself. As I continue taking calculated risks to ensure Someday Mouse reaches the rest of the globe, I will choose to appreciate the silver lining illuminated by the sun pushing through the once dark and menacing clouds. I can’t change the past or the circumstances that left me vulnerable to adverse experiences, but I can choose to activate my power of choice in every present moment with the hope that the next ten years will be better than the last.