On Yeses and Nos: The One Where I Received an Award

How often do you catch yourself daydreaming? I don’t mean gallivanting off to the moon, but those quieter aspirations we toy with, just plausible enough to sting when our brain is telling us there’s a 0.1% chance.

In Portuguese, there’s a wonderful expression: “we already got a ‘no’”— a little motto I’ve adopted over the years.

And now and then, amid life’s resounding chorus of ‘no’s, we stumble across an unexpected, sweet ‘yes’.

Back in 2017, I was a volunteer at the International Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA), held in Rio for the very first time. It was, quite frankly, mindblowing to hear in person the very scholars whose names I’d previously met only in photocopies.

At the closing ceremony, they announced that the next conference would take place in the Netherlands, and each attendee received an orange luggage tag as a souvenir and incentive. This was followed by a reminder that there was an award for people… like me. 

“- I’m going to the Netherlands!” I whispered to myself, heart quietly pounding. A kind colleague, without a hint of malice, chuckled spontaneously: “Do you know how much a plane ticket to the Netherlands costs?”

Oh, I did. But remember? I’d already got the ‘no’.

So, for three years, that bright orange tag lived on my pinboard, a quiet little nudge from Future Me to Present Me: Don't shelve the dream just yet.

And when the time came, I poured everything —heart, soul, the lot— into extracts of my MA work, all the while listening obsessively to Ella Fitzgerald’s Drop Me Off in Harlem. 

Then, one day, there it was. A ‘yes’ popped up in my mailbox: I’d been chosen as a Solidarity Awardee to present, at the 2021 AILA Congress, the talk Promoting Critical Literacy and Social Transformation in TESOL Materials: Challenges, Innovations and Students’ Entextualizations.

Now, spoiler alert: a pandemic struck, and the event was held online. But please make no mistake: this is not a text about one more ‘almost’ in my trajectory.

This is a love letter to daydreams. A public reminder that daydreaming is worth it and a self-reminder that even if the path is rocky and full of improbabilities, 14-year-old me would be thrilled by the woman she’d one day become. And maybe that’s the sweetest ‘yes’ of all.