Sometimes, I think that love’s got a coat rack for all the costumes it wears every day.
Love looks different, depending on who’s looking.”

― love and its many faces

Isa has been one of my writing heroines since early college when I first discovered her blog. Her entries were like mixtures of short stories, poetry and love letters all in one lovingly inked page. She wrote the way I wanted to write, like a giant warm hug and an assurance that things were going to be fine.

Found: Letters on Life, Love and God is Isa’s first book and I couldn’t be happier when I heard. Her loving, grace-filled messages would reach thousands of girls who had to hear what she had to say. Found is a series of letters on different topics and different situations of the heart and the living. When you find a letter that matches what you’ve been needing to hear, believe me when I say Isa wrote it for you.

This book, to me, is written like a lovechild between Sarah Kay’s poems and The Little Prince: heartfelt life lessons colored with timely reminders and beautiful depictions of Isa’s loving words. If I could take this book apart piece by piece, I’d tape all my favorite letters and illustrations to the wall for daily reminders (but I won’t.)

To testify, here’s one of my favorites: to the girl who has misplaced her joy.

Housekeeping note: This entry used to have images which were lost in migration. Accept my apologies over what this post could have been.

Finally, here’s a letter from me to the wonderful Isa, my writing heroine from afar.

To the girl with much farther to go,

The first time I met you, at Better Story Project, there you were, as warm and charming as I had yet to discover you were. “Apple? We’ve never met, but we’re Twitter friends!” Welcoming, too. Those days, I was just a reader of your writing. Then I became a fan, then a follower. Every word dripped with honey and sunlight, even the words that talked about struggle. Or lostness.

Isa, you remind so much of the kind of girl I want to be. Like sugar-stirred tea, the warmest of sweaters in chilly weather, or the much-needed breeze on a humid day. You remind of relief, and comfort. The kind of person people look forward to, and the kind of girl who has clearly been through a lot and come so far.

But my favorite thing about you is that you still have much farther to go. You still have people to win over and their hearts to console and soothe. You still have words to write, pages to print them on, hands to put them in. You still have so much love to spread all around, even after you’ve already spread around so much, and that is the reason you remind me of who I want to be.

Thank you for reminding me who I am by writing letters to who I’ve been and who I’ve yet to be, and thank you for reminding me that I too have much farther to go.

With love,

The girl who is thankful the world helped her find you