read Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill,” Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, and the hybrid art journals of Frida Kahlo.

“I don’t want to write about…” Or somewhere I do want to go: “I want to remember.” Or I start with the physical day: “Just now I see that the night sky has turned a washed shade of pale blue.”

Recovering memory is more like picking up shards of your past. But even that can be beautiful, because they can be reassembled as a mosaic, which, as the author Terry Tempest Williams says, is “a conversation between what is broken.”

“Here Come the Warm Jets” by Brian Eno and began designing;

Michael liked a lot of things about her project, including the fact that it had the perfect combination of constraint and variability built into it.

tried to journal about my stuckness and to dream about what my next steps might be, the voices of doubt and fear immediately chimed in. But what if you’re not well enough? they said. What if some known or unknown danger upends the plan? What’s the point of rebuilding only to have the ceiling cave in again? I do this sort of tango with fear perhaps

Whatever the voice says, make no mistake: It is not here to help you. Its aim is the total annihilation of the creative process.

My central preoccupation was no longer What am I going to do with my life? but Who am I and what really matters to me? I was unrecognizable to myself, and the idea of knitting a scarf or reading anything, much less War and Peace, struck me as not just naïve but silly. I felt like my life was over before it had even begun.

What would you write if you weren’t afraid? Set a timer for ten minutes. Don’t worry. No one’s going to read a word. You can shred