Say Yes to Yourself
A poet’s guide to living and writing.
IT WAS 5:30 in the morning when I began writing this. Early in my writing career I heard the Puerto Rican writer Judith Ortiz Cofer answer a standard interview question, and it changed the way I have operated for the rest of my writing life. The question was “How do you find the time to write?” and she said she didn’t find the time. She made it. Actually she said, “I have to steal time from myself.” Cofer said she woke up early to write, losing sleep on account of it. She said what I have often heard writers say. (Usually women writers, I have to note. I don’t as frequently hear a male writer say this.) She said that the world would just as soon give her other things to do with her time. No one was going to give her time to write. She had to take it for herself. Sometimes she had to take it from herself.
There are several quotes that I’ve collected over the years and copied on my computer that speak directly to this idea. I am not going to find them right now while I’m writing this, because if I take the time to open my Google Docs folder to locate the quotes, I run the risk of reading a news story that will compel me to pick up the phone and call my senator (a process that usually takes about twenty minutes of dialing, hanging up when no one answers, and dialing again for every thirty-second “Hello, my name is Camille Dungy, I am a voting constituent from zip code X, and I am calling because of Y-issue” conversation I have with a senator’s aide). Then I might fire off a couple of e-mails regarding the headline that caught my eye. And once I log on to e-mail to send those letters, I’d probably have to do something connected with work because someone would have sent me one of those e-mails with an exclamation point. And even if I managed to make it past the headlines and my e-mail, I might remember that I needed to buy those plane tickets, and then I’d end up on my travel search engine of choice, and while I was online I might find myself also buying a new pair of shoes because I am the reason target marketing exists. Or, heaven forbid, I’d land myself on Facebook or Instagram.
Sometimes, when I notice I’ve been on Facebook or Instagram too long, I think of that movie blank blank blank— this, by the way, is what I do when I am drafting something
and I don’t know some detail but I don’t want to go online to check the answer because going online to check would put me at risk of all the things I wrote about in the previous paragraph. Instead of going online, I type blank blank blank or put my best guess in bold to remind myself to go back and check my facts—so I am reminded of that movie whose title I will now type in bold, I think it was called The Days of Wine
and Roses. In it one of the characters started out addicted to chocolate, like she loved chocolates so much she couldn’t stop eating them if she got a box and wound up addicted to wine thanks to the man she falls in love with (I think, “I’ll look that up later”), and at the end of the movie someone explains to her that some people can be around things like chocolate and wine and not consume it in excess, but she had an addictive personality and couldn’t, and all I’m trying to say to you now is that I’ve learned from my relationship with Facebook and Instagram that I have a difficult time stepping away from social media once I’m on it.
Every time I think, “But everyone is on it,” I make myself think about writers I admire, who many of us admire, who aren’t. I don’t think Tracy K. Smith is on Twitter. I used to say to myself, “I don’t think TKS is on Twitter,” even before she was named U.S. poet laureate. Not because I think there aren’t really good writers who are active on social media and also figure out ways to manage their time so they can get their really good writing done, but because just writing that partial list of the things that I might have been doing now instead of writing took me twenty minutes. So that’s why I am not opening the Internet part of my computer to look up quotes by writers who speak directly to the question of how they make time for their own writing. I’ve got some really good ones on my Google Drive, and later today, when I’m in the waiting room at the doctor’s office and I have nothing to do but watch one of those HGTV shows they’ve always got on (which can totally suck me in if I let them), I can pull up my Google Drive and locate a bunch of those quotes to stick in this draft when I get back to it tomorrow.
About time and how we have to grab it for ourselves, Julianna Baggott writes: “You want excuses? You know what? That is where the world is generous. It will offer you excuses not to write by the fistfuls, it’ll jam excuses not to write down your throats!”
We have that quote because I did come back to this draft, two days later, to revise it and clean it up. I always remember what Yeats writes in “Adam’s Curse”: “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” Because I knew I could come back later, I knew I didn’t need to stop writing the original draft and run the risk of getting caught up in all the Internet distractions I know I have little willpower to avoid.
That, my friends, is one of the ways you can keep yourself from not writing. You can tend to your own modes of distraction, the things that catch you and absorb your precious time. Distraction in the guise of research is one of the most common forms of self-sabotage writers experience. You don’t need to look up the specifics of some detail right that moment. You just don’t. So you get the state wrong when you’re writing the short story that was inspired by that Internet video of the black bear that broke into a house and played the piano in what you think was probably Colorado. So what if you say it’s an upright piano when really it’s a baby grand. It is possible that your version will allow you to take your short story in a new and bolder and less derivative direction, so maybe getting the state wrong will turn out to be a blessing that will allow your story to untether itself from the Internet’s narrative. Alternatively you can always fact-check later in the day when you’re sitting in the dance studio lobby waiting for your seven-year-old to finish her ballet class. Using those types of waiting periods to make your
writing stronger seems to me to be an excellent way to use your time.
Victoria Chang wrote a whole book of poems in the car during the time she was waiting for her kids to
finish their dance classes. Which I feel is important to tell you, because it is important to say that stealing time from yourself doesn’t necessarily necessitate losing sleep.
Just so you know, that sentence with Chang’s name and the dance class info is in bold because I remembered the details sort of but knew I needed to check back in a later draft. Here’s a brief excerpt I found later from an interview about Chang’s book The Boss:
What’s interesting about the structure of the poems is that they began with no structure. They were written in an environment of extreme heat while I was sitting in a car waiting for my oldest daughter to finish a Chinese language class in sweltering Irvine in the summertime. I sat in a parking lot in front of this same tree every Saturday for months and wrote these long-lined things that weren’t poems.
What Chang lost were maybe fiftyfive minutes when many of us gossip with the other parents who are waiting for their own children to finish their extracurricular classes, or when we would be scrolling through our phones, or reading a magazine article about some pop star we have no reason to care about except for the fact that they are in the magazine we end up reading because what else are we going to do with that fifty-five minutes in the waiting room. I’m here to tell you one of the other things you could do with that fifty-five minutes in the waiting room is to take that time for your writing.
I’ve been typing nonstop for an hour. I am at the end of the fourth page of a Cambria, 12-point, 1.5-spaced document. This will take me only about twelve minutes to read. Think about that. If I had followed any of the distractions I could have offered myself during this last hour, I wouldn’t have these four (ooh, just now I crossed over to five!) pages.
There is an essay in my book Guidebook to Relative Strangers that would not exist if I hadn’t set up a routine of writing for twenty minutes every day. I used to regularly be able to wake up before my daughter woke up and get at least an hour of writing done. I’ve managed to do that this morning because she was up way too late last night, and so I think I will actually be able to get in about another twenty minutes before she comes and finds me this morning. But when I wrote that essay, “Differentiation,” my daughter had switched from the type of baby who slept really late (I’m talking till 9 AM; she was a dream toddler!) to the type of child who would wake up fifteen minutes after I woke up and come find me wherever I was. It didn’t matter when I woke up, she would wake up fifteen minutes later. For a couple of mornings I got up as early as 4:30 AM and she found me at 4:45, and that’s when I realized I had to find another way to make time to write. But my days really didn’t offer many options, and by the time everyone else was asleep, I was too exhausted to write at night. So I settled on writing for twenty minutes a day, whenever I could grab twenty minutes between family duties and work duties and so forth. I limited this writing time to twenty minutes. No more. No less. It’s probably obvious why I stipulated no less. I mean, I just told you I typed nonstop for an hour and didn’t even break the four-page mark. Writing takes time. I’ll also tell you why during this period I wrote for no more than twenty minutes a day. Think of it like any other exercise. Imagine starting a new workout program that asks you to run every day for twenty minutes. But one day you get really excited and you feel really good, so you run for an hour. It’s likely that the next day you will be really sore and you won’t want to run for your usual twenty. Or it’s likely that you’ll tell yourself the next day that the day before you ran for an hour so you can skip today’s twenty and maybe even tomorrow’s, and maybe the next
day’s...and do you see how that just devolved into your not making the time to run for twenty minutes at all that week and maybe not ever again?
So, anyway, I made this routine wherein I wrote for twenty minutes a day every day. And I recorded a lot of not particularly interesting things during those periods. But then I also recorded some very interesting things. When I did this “recording” I was careful about the kinds of things I wrote for those twenty minutes. I did the writing on my computer, which in my case makes me write differently than when I am writing longhand. Pay attention to yourself and how you write on different platforms. If you think you can just keep notes on your phone but then find that because you’re typing with your thumbs you’re not actually writing in a particularly fluent manner, you should probably find a different way. Find a way that encourages your best self, not a way that cuts your own legs out from under you. I chose to write for my twenty minutes on the computer, and that allowed me to think like a writer. When I recorded the things that caught my attention that day, I tried to remember to bring in all the senses. What things looked like and smelled like and tasted like and felt like both emotionally and physically. Just because I was writing for only twenty minutes didn’t mean I got to get away with not writing well. Don’t let yourself get away with not doing the best work you are capable of doing at that moment. When you find yourself saying, “No, I can’t,” figure out how to say, “Yes, I can.”
OH MY goodness, you guys, I just realized that I have been typing for seventyfive minutes (I can’t believe my child is still sleeping!) and I never hit Save! Wow. What if I’d lost everything!? We should probably talk about that. We should probably talk about terror and how to handle it as a writer. Which is a little bit like talking
about how to write honestly about awful things and a little bit about dealing with what some people call writer’s block.
In Guidebook to Relative Strangers,I write about the fact that I have multiple sclerosis. Which is not something I tend to talk about. When my parents read the essay, they were shocked. I mean, I didn’t tell my own parents, one of whom is a physician, about my condition for a year and a half! Now I had written about it in a book that was to be published by Norton. It made no sense to them. And, to be fair, it actually doesn’t make sense. Why would I write about something that I also consider to be quite private? Here’s how it does make sense: I was writing about the condition of living in my body as a Black woman, the mother of a Black child, the wife of a Black man, in America. I was writing about living with the constant background of fear and anxiety that shadows my life and, you know, it reminded me of what it means to live with a chronic
condition that may or may not hurt me in a debilitating way, that may not yet have changed my life in any particularly incapacitating manner but that could, at any moment, destroy everything I’ve come to love. Like my MS could. Like racism can. And there we had it. I was writing, in the essay “Body of Evidence,” and again now, about the fact that I live daily with more than one terrifying background condition. I was writing about how these conditions affect every decision I make.
Part of why I stumbled on the twenty-minutes-a-day technique is that I couldn’t steal too much sleep from myself since exhaustion can trigger MS relapses. I had to find another way to get the writing done. Here I am, telling countless strangers something I didn’t even tell my parents for a year and a half. But I have learned that writing honestly is the only way I want to write. No one has much time. Everybody is so very busy. If you give me your time to read my work, to listen to what I have to say, you are giving me a precious gift. I want to honor that by giving you my whole self. My authentic self. When I write I have to write honestly, openly. To tell you the truth, it has become so natural for me to do this that it didn’t occur to me that it was strange or scary to write about having MS until the book was already heading to the printer.
Which brings me to the issue of writer’s block. For some of you the idea that your book might someday be on the way to the printer might cause intense writer’s block. My book was at the printer, and my editor and agent kept reminding me that I needed to write some new essays to help welcome the essays that were at the printer into the world. Maybe we can talk about the ways that self-promotion can sometimes become a cousin of self-sabotage, but let me stay on point for the time being. They were asking me to write a new essay, and I was freaking out because I had this book of essays that was about to go into the world and, holy shit, anyone could read it, the intention was for everyone to read it, for it to become the talk of the literary world, but I was a poet, a poet who had sold very well for her presses, but now even more people were expected to read my work, and what if they didn’t like what I’d written? What if they wrote horrible reviews? What if they didn’t believe me? What if, what if, what if .... ?
I couldn’t write because all those what-ifs were too loud. And also, there were news headlines that were derailing me. From January to April 2017, I was a hot mess, y’all. I think it’s important to admit that. I’m not going to sit here and tell you all that sometimes, for some of us, it’s not very difficult to write. But some of you may have read the essay that I finally did write, that cracked me out of that period of silence. It’s called “Notes From the Lower Level,” and it speaks directly to some of these whatifs. And then I worked on a few poems, including one fast-paced prose poem (no fire breaks in that piece) triggered by the blazes in my beloved California. Later I fiddled with another poem called “The average mother loses 700 hours of sleep in the first year of her child’s life, or what that first year taught me about America,” a poem I’d mostly completed but that apparently was waiting for its proper title, which seemed to have required me to live through, and stare directly at, the American ugliness that is our current cultural climate. All of those pieces ended up being published on very public platforms, but I’d written them by then, and so that didn’t scare me anymore. If you’re taking notes, the tip I’m giving you right now is that one of the things we have to do as writers is evolve our strategies in ways that acknowledge, even incorporate, that which would silence us. A bit ago I told you the strategy I came up with because my child stopped sleeping late into the morning. Now I’m telling you other strategies I came up with when my own mind—my list of what-ifs— wouldn’t allow me to write.
I don’t actually believe in writer’s block. I believe in fallow periods. I believe fallow periods are necessary to restore the fertility of a field. I believe that if you’re not writing and you’re worried about not writing, you’re likely to one day write again. That if you’re not writing and not worried about not writing, you may have found new things to do with your time, and that’s okay too. I’ve said this for many years, that I believe more in fallow times than I do in writer’s block. But what I haven’t been as good about addressing is that even with fallow fields, farmers sometimes need to do a little work. Amend the soil. Sow seeds that speed regeneration. Work on the irrigation. So, during my fallow period between January and April 2017, because I was worried about not writing and knew that I needed to do some things to make sure I didn’t just abandon my fields, I started to work to figure out what I could do to help myself regenerate.
My husband gave me a little notebook. Tiny. It fits in the pencil bag I use as my wallet. In the tiny little notebook I took tiny little notes. At first, I set my Fitbit to buzz once an hour and I had to stop for one minute and write. One minute, folks. You can do anything for one minute! I mean, if I can hold a plank for one minute, I can write in an inconsequential notebook that long. I wrote for one minute eight times throughout the first day. Eight times on the second day. Then the school week started and I think I managed one-minute stints about four times, then three. And then for several days it was one minute maybe once or twice a day. Then one day it was one
Don’t let yourself get away with not doing the best work you are capable of doing at that moment. When you find yourself saying, “No, I can’t,” figure out how to say, “Yes, I can.”
minute and I kept writing, and my kid was at school or asleep or my husband was watching her, and that one minute grew longer, and I moved from the notebook to the computer, and by the time I got up, I had an entire essay. And it scared the piss out of me, I’m not gonna lie, because I had written directly into all those what-ifs.
Because when I was writing in that inconsequential notebook, I wasn’t really thinking anyone was going to read what I wrote, but when I started writing the essay, I went back and mined a lot of what I’d written in the tiny notebook, and so the essay turned out to be full of the kinds of thoughts that would keep me up at night, and it’s scary to think about sharing those intimate fears with other people. But—and this is a quote I don’t have to open the Internet rabbit-hole portal to look up because I have absorbed it into my very being—in her deeply important essay “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde declares, “My silence will not save me.” She is reminding herself and her readers that she needs to write directly into and against the fears and trauma and devastations that would otherwise silence her, many of which are designed to silence someone like her (a queer, Black child of immigrants who also suffered and eventually died from what was at that time a marginalizing disease. Think of the way HIV/AIDS used to be a hush-hush condition; the same was true for breast cancer because, you know, breasts aren’t something to be talked about in polite company). But to remain silent for some of us is to be an instrument of our oppression, and I choose not to remain silent. I choose not to be an instrument of my own destruction.
Way back at the beginning of this, I made the point of mentioning that the writer who told me she chose to steal time from herself was Puerto Rican. This detail about her is crucial to me. That she found a way to give herself a voice, even if it meant stealing time from herself to do so, meant that she was resisting a system designed so that we might hear less from her. It is important here for me to repeat the fact I mentioned earlier that I am significantly more likely to hear women speaking of the ways that they have to work to resist those things that would keep them from writing. Perhaps this has something—of course it has something—to do with the attitudes we still have about when and how much and in what ways women’s voices are expected to be heard. When I was suffering my silence during the winter of 2017, I was worried a lot about what people would think of what I had to say. I was worried so much I almost didn’t write what I needed to write. But I figured out how to trick myself into not remaining silent. Because I know my silence will not save me, I’ll do whatever it takes to write.
Yes. Trick yourself into writing if you have to. I mean, I don’t tend to eat
the broccoli and cauliflower they put out on those little platters at receptions, even though I know that broccoli and cauliflower are good for me. But if I cook broccoli or cauliflower with the right preparation, I’ve been known to eat a whole head. We trick ourselves into doing things all the time. If writing is something you value, find ways to make writing easier to do. Make the process of writing pleasant, even if what you are actually writing might be very hard.
Example: I wrote an entire book of poems set in the nineteenth century. Horrible things happened to people in America during the nineteenth century, and I had to research these atrocities because I was writing about them. If that were all the composition of my book entailed, I don’t think I could have faced the horrors. But, I will tell you, I actually have a lot of pleasant memories about writing Suck on the Marrow. This is because much of what I remember had to do with the mechanics of creating the poems. In that book I was also thinking a lot about form. I was thinking about how to build the structure that would hold my stories. I was thinking about line length. I ended up with lines so long that my publisher had to build a nonstandard format for my book. My characters were enslaved in their short lives, but I didn’t want them enslaved by short lines. I did this on purpose, and it was pleasurable to be focused on the architectural expression of the poem’s philosophy, even if the subject matter of the poem was the very opposite of pleasant.
What have I told you so far? You have to make time to write. No one else but you can give you that time, and it’s possible you will have to go to some lengths to access the time and take it. When you find time, protect it. Be aware of the things that will distract you from your mission and figure out how to prevent those distractions. I talk sometimes about the years I lived in San Francisco. I’d moved back to my beloved state after eleven years in the East, and I knew I was going to want to be outside playing every chance I got. I have always liked to write in a space with a window, but I knew that in San Francisco I would not get any writing done under such conditions. So I found an apartment with a walk-in closet, and I turned that closet into my office. I moved to San Francisco and went into the closet. And in that closet I wrote two books and edited two anthologies. I haven’t needed to work in a closet before or since, but I knew that a window in San Francisco would distract me from my mission, and I figured out a way to prevent those distractions.
I’ve told you to be aware of your own personal methods of self-sabotage. What are you scared of? What are you unwilling to share? How do you silence yourself? How will you overcome this self-silencing? You know, you can write a thing and you don’t have to publish it. Did you know that? It’s true! When I was writing “Notes From the Lower Level,” it did occur to me that even if I wrote it, I didn’t have to send it to anyone. And I didn’t for a while. Then I sent it to one friend who I absolutely trusted. Please, folks, find one friend you absolutely trust. One is enough, though you might need to find a new one at different stages of your writing career because your writing will change and your friend’s ability to be a good reader might change as well. Find someone who will read a piece and find grammar errors. Find someone, maybe a different friend, who will read a piece and tell you three things that compelled them and three places where they have questions. (You can give that prompt to someone. I haven’t patented it yet.) My reader did these things, and I realized that I hadn’t combusted or whatever I was afraid would happen when someone laid eyes on what I’d written, and so I got up the courage to send the essay further into the world.
We haven’t really talked about publishing. This is another quote I can tell you without looking it up (though I did later have to look up the author). German poet Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel said, “Publishing is to writing as the maternity ward is to that first dark kiss.” Which is to say, you probably shouldn’t be thinking about publishing when you are in the act of writing or you might end up reaching the creative equivalent of birth control.
Still, I do think you should set up a regular time to submit work that you feel is finished and ready to go into the world. I love that word: submission. It is in fact the best word for that act. I have to humble myself in the process of submission. To give over my trust to another reader. And often it will not go well. Usually it will not go well. That’s part of the process. You can’t please everyone. You shouldn’t even be trying to do that.
When I was in graduate school I had a friend, also in the program, who published prolifically. One summer I picked up his mail—his buckets of mail—while he was out of the country. Buckets and buckets and buckets of mail. Really, I think that by the end of the summer, he had three buckets of mail. He’d asked me to open correspondences from journals so that he could reply in a timely manner. This was obviously in the days before Submittable. (Submittable is so easy! There should be no excuse!) What I am telling you is that this friend had about three buckets of rejection letters. And one pile of about ten acceptances. Think about this for a minute. The guy is in graduate school, and over the summer he got about ten acceptances from literary
If writing is something you value, find ways to make writing easier to do. Make the process of writing pleasant, even if what you are actually writing might be very hard.
journals. A few of them were enviably good journals. Ten! That’s amazing. And when we started school again in the fall, all these acceptances were the talk of the class (and the talk wasn’t always generous, I’m not gonna lie). But I knew the reason he had those ten acceptances is that he had three buckets of rejections. It’s a numbers game, folks. The more you try, the more you succeed. The less you try, the less you succeed. This is true for everything. If you write more, you will write better. If you think about line length more, you will think about line length better. If you submit more, you will publish more. If you submit better, you will publish better. You’re also going to fail a lot. For instance, before I revised this essay I’d misattributed this next quote as something Keats wrote during those years when he was writing in the great race against the final silencing that we will all face sooner or later and that he didn’t want to face without having written as much good work as he could. Keats did write about failure—most of us who care about our art think about how we should deal with failure—but it was Beckett who wrote, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
IHAVE no idea what magical vector I entered that caused my child to sleep this late. It is now 8:15 AM. I have been typing this whole time and my arms are tired. All of me is tired because when I sat down to the computer, the sun wasn’t up and my mind was still a bit foggy from sleep. (I find that writing when I am still a bit sleepy is fantastic because my censors aren’t fully functional.) Now the sun is bright and the morning joggers have gone in to their breakfasts. My husband is about to come back from his morning bike ride, and the garage door may wake up the kid. I told myself I would write for as long as I could, until my daughter woke up, but I kept her up way too late last night and she’s sleeping in. Think about it, though. If
I had assumed she was going to wake up fifteen minutes after I woke up and I didn’t even bother to start typing this piece, it may not have been written. If I got to those points throughout the part where I was tempted to do Internet “research” and fell down the rabbit hole built of e-mails and Facebook and BuzzFeed and the news, I may not have written this part. Those pitfalls of self-silencing were easily managed by my just sitting down and typing for as long as I could.
Other reasons for silence might have been harder to avoid. It’s a pleasant Saturday, so my daughter doesn’t have to be anywhere for another few hours. None of us do. My parents are still healthy, and we don’t have to drive to the nursing home to visit them. I don’t have diabetes that would require me to eat on a schedule. I know writers who keep a mini-fridge and coffee maker in their offices so they don’t have to leave the room when they need to eat, but it’s not that easy all the
time. Your desk may be the kitchen table where your kids do their homework before and after school. There are obligations and interruptions in our lives all the time, and I’m not even talking about the silencing voices in your head.
There are so many things that our lives demand of us. I mean, the level of clutter I put up with in my house, many of you might not be able to stand. I’ve decided that I could have a clutter-free family room or I could have another book, and I want my obituary to tell folks about my writing, not how neat I kept my living room. But I like people to visit me, and so I do have to spend a little time making sure there’s a path to the couch and there aren’t piles of clean but unfolded clothes on the couch when you get there. My goodness, the time folding laundry has taken from my writing life! Countless hours! So many hours we can spend taking care of our loved ones. And I don’t begrudge this. I think of a June Jordan
quote in her book Some of Us Did Not Die where she says something to the effect of “What does it mean to be a
legend to all and a friend to none.” I value family and community and know these, too, take time. But still, I value my writing and believe it deserves my focus. I mean, I am amazed, thrilled I’ve had two hours of steady time to write this. Folks, I have not stopped typing that whole time. I’m nearly finished with this, a piece I thought would take me several days of stolen time to write. But if I hadn’t been able to write this long, I still would have had a solid start on a draft, which is more than I would have had if I’d stayed in bed or started surfing the Internet or whatever else I might have done with my time.
I started writing essays in earnest because once I had my daughter I got interrupted all the time. The way I’d been taught to write poems asked for long periods of uninterrupted silence. This is not a luxury many of us have. But instead of not writing, I just figured out a different way to write. When asked why she wrote such short poems, Lucille Clifton reminded people she had six kids. She figured out a way to write and still mother. For every problem there is a solution. Do you want to write? You are the one who will make that happen. You don’t just find the way to write. You make a way to write.
Every good thing comes to an end. My kid just came into the study and decided she was interested in what was inside the trunk I use as an ottoman, and so she has begun to take the piles of clutter that are on top of said trunk, counting out loud the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, up to 31 pieces of clutter she had to remove before she could open it. Because I have already made the time to write this morning, I won’t feel the least bit guilty about closing the computer and turning my attention to my daughter and whatever she discovers inside the treasure chest.
I hope you find wonderful things inside your treasure chest.