Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

time and calamity have a way of dispelling our illusions

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

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

It is possible to alter the course of my becoming.

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

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

“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.

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