the alchemical properties of journaling showed us how to turn isolation into creative solitude, confinement into connection, and confusion into clarity and calm.

Close your eyes and imagine the last time you tried to create. Who appeared? What did you hear? Maybe it was a critical parent, a competitive classmate, a teacher’s thoughtless remark, or a line from a rejection letter. Maybe it was a voice of unknown origin that you hear on loop: It’s too late, you’re not good enough, you’ll never get there. Write

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

It taught me that if you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.

the liminal space between no longer and not yet.

reading someone else’s words before I write always stirs something new in me.

time and calamity have a way of dispelling our illusions

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

The experience was kaleidoscopic. A sentence, an idea, an anecdote could turn the barrel, refracting and reframing my perspective.