<aside> 🔴 Summary: I want to make a workbook!

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I learned English with these! Let's Go English workbooks

Writing workbooks in Vietnamese

One page from the Let's Go! 2 Workbook

I found myself thinking about textbooks, workbooks and exams frequently these days, probably because we don't do them as often at the collegiate/graduate school level? I filled out so many workbooks growing up, there were workbooks for every single thing. At a certain age, I remember realising how my life would be easier, how my grades would be higher, how people would treat me better if I tick all the right boxes and get all the right answers. Ever since this realisation, I have learned to excel at school. To be an academically consistent person who is capable of filling any kind of blanks being thrown at her (except Math, that shit is cursed) is something that made up most of my identity.

Thing is, workbooks are designed with an answer in mind, and they are there to guide you to said answer (unless you're bad at math, then you will flip to the end of the workbook and find the solution, plug it in, and claim the answer anyway) Filling in a workbook is a performance. It is a life-long process of learning and reinforcing and believing that if you fill it out perfectly, you will find an answer. So what happens when you grow up and grow out of workbooks and there are no definitive answers on how to live your life or deal with traumas, what do you do?

My therapist recently introduced me to the concept of ambiguous loss, and it was illuminating. I often referred to certain events in the past as second-hand PTSD but still often feel unsure about this labelling, and ambiguous loss seems to offer a much better description to what I experienced. I plan to design the workbook around this concept of Ambiguous Loss, and learning to grapple with vague but traumatic experiences.