Why Doesn't Success Ever Feel Like Enough? This New Book On The "Filipina Millennial Monomyth" Might Explain Why

The "Filipina millennial monomyth" looms large in Mica De Leon's imagination. As an author and a woman in her 30s, she can feel it nipping at her heels, hounding her every move.

She first began laying down her thoughts about it in an essay that she later submitted to the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature back in 2022. (That this essay eventually came second to Atom Araullo in the essay category is something she really doesn't mind. "Achievement na 'yan sa akin!" Mica says jokingly.)

But what is the Filipina millennial monomyth?

"The monomyth is the hero's journey," says Mica, taking off a concept coined by Joseph Campbell to lay out the grand arcs of mythical characters. "Every hero goes through a cycle of leaving home, meeting a mentor, going through challenges, and then returning home changed."

It was a cycle of life that was supposed to end in victories and happy endings. But for her, her monomyths of a house and a car and a marriage and a loving family have instead become something of an unreachable bar.

"I don't consider myself one hundred percent successful, but I definitely got everything I wanted when I was in my 20s and younger," muses the best-selling author of the novels Love on the Second Read and Winds of War. "Everything I wanted back then, I already have, I think."

"But the expectations are still the same. Even if you're successful in other aspects but you're not getting what's conventionally successful for a woman… it feels like, no matter what you do, you cannot succeed."

So instead of trying to reach it, she's now trying to redefine it.

Her Palanca-winning essay is now one of the essays featured in Summit Books' Some Days I Wish I Was a Cat (P545), Mica's first book of non-fiction.

(Full disclosure: The author of this article is editor-in-chief at Summit Books. Mica De Leon is also an executive editor at this publishing house. Her other books are published by Penguin Books SEA.)

Reading through the book, you get a sense of barely contained rage. A vein of righteous, cathartic anger runs deep through the book, echoing our own howls of protest against the broken and the corrupt.

In essays like "Filipino Millennial Monomyth" and "Crying in a Jollibee in Kuala Lumpur," she unpacks the heavy price of society's expectations on women. In "The Audacity of Romance" and "Trashy Books," she confronts the misogyny and elitism that cage romance novelists (and romance novel fans) like herself. And in honest, heart-wrenching pieces like "Bedroom Negotiations" and "I Want Revenge But I Ate Dinuguan Instead," she comes face to face with her own traumas.

"That's the thing with trauma. You have to process it, you have to forgive yourself, and then you have to let go," she says.

"The thing that keeps it dark and heavy is because women can't talk about it without being questioned kung kasalanan talaga nila. Even up to now, society puts shame on the woman."

While editing and revising the book, she could not bring herself to revisit her darkest essays again. But she's glad she wrote them.

"I needed to put these things on paper to make sure that they really happened."

Some Days I Wish I Was A Cat (P545) will be released in November 2025.