FLIGHT PLAN

These two pages are the original artwork for my comic FLIGHT PLAN, created in ink and watercolor. The piece was published in Mekong Review in 2025 as part of an open call on the theme “hope in the everyday,” organized in partnership with RMIT University’s nonfiction/lab. The comic shifted as I worked. At first, I imagined a narrative about gratitude and mindfulness, the way small joys can anchor us. But on the page, that felt thin, almost preachy. I wanted to speak to a hope that felt more lived-in. Having experienced depression, I know how slippery hope can be, how it flickers between vanishing and returning. Sometimes it’s a quiet ember within; sometimes it’s the steadying presence of loved ones. Compressing that into two pages proved impossible. Eventually, I began to consider hope as idealistic striving—a reaching toward the not-yet. Not neat achievable goals, but the impulsive dreams that have carried me for much of my life. This form of hope is unruly, often all-or-nothing, perhaps shaped by my ADHD: the sense that I am either flying or falling. What emerged was a reflection on my shifting relationship with hope. From nearly six years of living in Brazil, I learned something about holding space for dualities—for joy and struggle, loss and abundance. This comic gestures toward that lesson: a hope less about arrival, and more about cultivating a gentler, wiser persistence.