My friend Mariam—whom I’ve met only once in person but who feels like someone I’ve known since childhood—shared a social media post* last year on her birthday that began like this: I’ve had the very best year of my life. Reading that sentence then, as it does now, gave me chills. She continued: For brief …
We can embrace this moment, this time, however fractured and uncertain we feel, as an opportunity to figure out who we really are. If we are writers or artists of any kind who have never truly committed to a creative life, then we need to be that person. Now. Today. One or one hundred or one thousand words at a time. That’s how we not only persist but thrive.
In my particular search for meaning, writing works better than talking, better than reading, much better than thinking alone.
“I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.” ~ JK Rowling
I cup my ball of string in my hands—hands that look with each passing year more and more like my grandmother’s, age spots and all—and the theory of everything slowly unfolds.