Someday Mouse 10 Year Anniversary
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 steadfast. Surviving a Pandemic that brought the world to its knees and choked us out of existence for years, a sexual harassment lawsuit that devastated my career despite trying to protect the innocent involved, estrangement from my family, an autoimmune disorder that made it next to impossible to work or support myself financially, an economic recession followed by skyrocketing inflation, social unrest that spawned the largest protest in US history, 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. I still have a long way to go before I am financially sound, but this year I’m in a place where I can start to slowly reinvest in myself and take smalls risks with the hope of growing my business. I also hope that the next ten years will be better than the last.