When I ask how you are, or how your day was, you can say anything…except fine. And if you ask me, I’ll trust you with the truth.

I Begin Again

“There is a state of mind which is not accessible by thinking,” writes Lynda Barry in her creative workbook and graphic memoir, What It Is. “It seems to require a participation with something, something physical we move, like a pen, like a pencil, something which is in motion—ordinary motion, like writing the alphabet.”

For writers, a day spent writing is a good day—always. A day spent writing is de facto better than a day spent avoiding writing. It means a writer has successfully silenced the voices, summoned that wild confidence, transmuted it into courage, and faced down the contents of her deepest interior, because that is where our sentences are formed. And

didn’t feel quite that same sense of disorientation. In fact, I felt uniquely prepared for exactly this kind of apocalyptic isolation—a talent no one would want but I had nonetheless spent much of my adult life honing.

As Anaïs Nin wrote, “When we go deeply into the personal, we go beyond the personal. We achieve something that is collective.”

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.

I believe that welcoming subjectivity into our lives opens the doors to seeing the unseen. Subjectivity offers us a way of seeing from different angles and myriad perspectives. It fuels an examination of a nascent point of view and helps bring clarity to the amorphous, fuzzy concepts and questions we grapple with. It is only when we experiment and

I don’t believe going through something hard makes us wiser or stronger or braver by default. But the transitional moments in our lives offer the possibility for a new beginning.