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by Lourdez Olanda (Author), Alex Mankiewicz (Illustrator), Kenneth Hughes (Editor)
This is my story. Not the polished version, the real one. The one with wrong turns and uncomfortable truths and moments I still don't fully understand. It is the story of a woman immigrated from the Philippines who joined the U.S. Navy with an intention to pay for her mother's cancer treatment, spent seventeen years in the aerospace industry, and somehow ended up sitting with strangers through the darkest nights of their lives in a candlelit room in Southern California. I did not plan any of it. I just kept saying yes to the next thing, and the next thing, until one day I looked up and realized my life had become something I never could have imagined.
This book is about that journey. It's about what it cost, what it taught me, and what I'm still learning. It moves through my life, across countries, across ceremonies, across grief I wasn't ready for and joy I didn't expect. It's extreme traveling externally and internally, funny in places, because life is funny, and I've never been able to keep a straight face about my own story for very long. It's hard in other places, because some of what I've been through was genuinely hard and I'm not interested in pretending otherwise.
I organized the book around fourteen thresholds - moments in my life where something ended and something new began, whether I was ready or not. Not milestones. Not achievements. Just the places where the ground shifted and I had to find a new way to walk. Each one asked me the same thing, in a different language, from a different country, at a different point in my life:
Are you willing to listen?
