I love hearing people’s complaints, the smaller and more oddly specific, the better.

The other week, a friend texted to tell me she had a minor bout of food poisoning and that it sucked. Later, she apologized—she’d forgotten I was in the middle of intense chemo nausea and worried it might have been annoying to hear her complain. On the contrary, I said. I never want my friends to feel like they can’t complain. There is no hierarchy here. I don’t believe in the suffering Olympics. In fact, I love being trusted with complaints. Maybe because, when I was younger, I didn’t feel I could express them out loud.

Growing up, our household didn’t really do complaints. To complain was to signal helplessness—like staying stuck inside the problem instead of moving through it. It was also, subtly, a form of ingratitude. We were a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps family. You kept going. You didn’t dwell. You certainly didn’t air your grievances.

But unspoken doesn’t mean nonexistent; the grievances just have nowhere to go.

Which is why today’s guest essay and prompt by my friend Kate Bowler—on a creative way to catalog complaints—felt like being handed a permission slip to get a few things off my chest.

I started the week feeling low, the kind of low where even the most ordinary things—getting out of bed, showering, walking the dogs, facing sunlight—felt inexplicably hard. When I sat down to write, I could feel a long, unwieldy list of grievances hovering: some personal, some existential, many about the state of the world. (Good grief, the state of the world.) The kind of list so ponderous you don’t even want to begin.

So instead, I lowered the stakes. I began writing small, specific, mildly ridiculous complaints—and within minutes I was laughing. I felt lighter. Not because anything had been solved, but because something had been named.

So, before I turn you over to Kate’s essay and prompt, here is my own partial but highly official record of grievances:

I am not here to complain about cancer. I am here to complain about the clipboard with the pen attached by a string that is always exactly two inches too short. I am here to complain about hold music that sounds like someone learning the flute against their will. I am here to complain about the form that asks me to list “all medications” in a space the size of a Post-it. I am here to complain about the phrase “just a quick pinch,” which feels, at best, aspirational. I am here to complain about the scale being placed in a high-traffic area, turning weigh-in into a public performance.

I will not complain about nausea, but I will complain about hospital waiting room TVs permanently tuned to a cooking show where someone is emulsifying something aggressively dairy-based while saying “you can really taste the richness” at 9:14am. I am here to complain about the MyChart notification that says “You have a new message from your care team” and then refuses to load. I am here to complain about the architecture of hospital gowns, which open in the back and behave as if privacy were a group project.

While I’m on a roll: pee pads. Thanks to two extraordinarily small foster dogs, my house is now a museum of pee pads. They are hideous. Surely we can design something better—more discreet, more dignified. Speakerphone calls—specifically, the kind conducted in my immediate vicinity by a man (my husband) who claims headphones hurt his ears. (He would like it noted that his complaint is that I complain about this.) Phone chargers: too many kinds, and somehow never the right one. The fitted sheet that comes off one corner of the bed every night as if it has its own agenda. Autocorrect confidently changing my name to “Sushi” and then acting like I’m the problem.

Writing this list made me wonder: what is the value of a complaint?

A complaint gives shape to something that would otherwise just hover—the feeling you keep circling, the moment that won’t quite settle. Voicing it draws a boundary and says: this belongs somewhere. Ideally not just… inside me, forever. That, on its own, is a kind of self-respect.

It’s also a bid for witness—not necessarily for repair, just for someone, somewhere, to register it. To nod. To say: yes, I get it. Something shifts when that happens—not because the past changes, but because you’re no longer carrying it around like a loose object with sharp edges.

That’s what Kate’s essay and prompt help us see: left alone, certain complaints loop. Especially the bigger grievances, the deeper hurts. They replay, revise, grow slightly more dramatic each time you revisit them, quietly harden into resentment. Naming them doesn’t erase them, but it can give them somewhere to go—a folder, a drawer, a slightly less central location than the inside of your own head.

And as Kate’s essay makes clear, that small act makes room for something else—something lighter, even a little joyful. (See the bottom of today’s newsletter for a few of my small joys.)

P.S. If you want a soundtrack for your journaling today, I suggest Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.” A complaint disguised as a bop. Filing grievances has never sounded so good.

Prompt 379. The Complaints Department of the Universe by Kate Bowler

For many years now, my best friend and I have been filing paperwork with an organization known as “The Complaints Department of the Universe.”

This department does not appear to have a physical address. It has no website (though we suspect the user interface would be terrible). It almost certainly has beige filing cabinets.

If you were to call, you would probably hear something like:

Press 1 for missed opportunities.
Press 2 for unresolved conversations you replay in the shower.
Press 3 if someone really should have apologized but absolutely did not.
Press 4 if you’re calling about extremely bad timing. **Please note that wait times for bad timing are longer—partly because this is our busiest division, partly because the universe enjoys irony above all else.**

Despite its lack of addresses, we know the department exists. We have been submitting complaints for decades. Whenever something happens that is genuinely, spectacularly unfair, one of us sends the other a message:

ADDING THIS TO THE LIST.

It is important to note that not everything qualifies. Someone finishing the good hummus at a party does not merit a formal filing. Neither does a slow line at the grocery store, unless the slow line somehow contains the person who once steamrolled your heart in 2017.

No, the List is reserved for the larger injustices. The List is the official ledger of grievances currently awaiting cosmic review.

The job you nearly got until someone moved the goalposts.
The friendship that dissolved without explanation.
The moment you realized an apology was never coming.

What makes something List-worthy is not simply that it hurts. Life bruises us constantly in small, ordinary ways. What distinguishes a complaint worth filing is that the story never resolves. It simply… stops. No explanation. No closure. Just a loose thread that continues to snag on things for years. And because the human brain dislikes both randomness and pain, we keep retelling the story—to friends, to strangers, to ourselves while brushing our teeth.

These are the sorts of incidents that clearly require documentation.

Eventually we realized we were not trying to punish anyone. We were simply waiting for someone—anyone—to stamp the form and say:

“Yes. That was terrible. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.”

I think this is why the Complaints Department has helped me clear a path for joy. I realized that I had been carrying certain stories around for years—moments that never resolved, conversations that never finished, apologies that never came.

For those of us (all of us!) who have lived long enough for life to rob us, scar us, and make its mark, sometimes we need a bit of emotional decluttering before anything lighter can enter the room. I found that once I allowed myself to be deeply, officially grieved, something shifted inside of me. Maybe the story no longer had to live entirely inside of me—after all, it was recorded in the vast filing cabinet labeled Unresolved Human Matters. And once my ache had somewhere to go, a little room opened up again—for lighter things. Occasionally, even joy.

This is your prompt:

Imagine that the Complaints Department of the Universe has finally sent you the proper form. Write a one-page complaint.

Include:

• Case number: Make one up (the longer and more official-sounding, the better).
• Incident description: What happened? Be specific. Someone didn’t hurt you in general—it was Linda!
• Nature of grievance: What felt unfair, unresolved, or particularly haunting about it?
• Requested action: Acknowledgment, please and thank you.

The past is a locked door. But perhaps, if we can place our stories, for a moment, into the vast administrative archive of human experience, we might imagine that someone, somewhere, is putting down other people’s paperwork to nod and mutter:

“Yes. That one definitely belongs on the List.”

I’d love to hear what this prompt brought up for you—and what journaling to it made space for. Share your grievances and your joys (small or large) in the comments.

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Today’s Contributor—

A four-time New York Times bestselling author, award-winning podcast host, and professor at Duke University, Kate Bowler studies the stories we tell about success, suffering, and faith—and how we can all learn to live with more hope and joy when those stories stop working. Her books include Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, No Cure for Being Human, Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day!, and her latest, Joyful, Anyway. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her family and continues to teach do-gooders at Duke Divinity School.

Kate and I recently talked about ambition monsters, spectacular failures, and a whole lot more—you can listen to our conversation here.

After filing my complaints, a few things that brought joy this week—

1. Setting up painting supplies on the dining table. Then being too tired to actually paint, but leaving them there anyway—an open invitation to tomorrow’s version of myself, who has more energy and, hopefully, better follow-through.

2. Nigella Lawson’s chocolate Guinness cake, made for Easter. The only time in recorded history (of my life) where the cake itself rivaled the frosting. A destabilizing experience. Unbelievably delicious. I will be thinking about it for some time.

3. Rewatching a video of two friends who’ve been besties for nearly half a century, telling the story of how they met. My closest girlfriends are my chosen family, and I love to imagine us decades from now—still interrupting each other, still spilling truly premium tea, still laughing at things no one else finds funny. May it look like this.

4. Brainstorming something very fun for this month’s virtual creative hour, which I’ll be hosting with my friend Hrishikesh Hirway—musician, creator of one of my favorite podcasts (Song Exploder), and a truly delightful human. Think: album listening party meets journaling club. It’s happening Sunday, April 19, from 1–2pm ET. You should come. It’s the kind of thing you’ll be glad you said yes to. Save the date.

Our monthly creative hour, aka Journaling Club, is part of the paid subscription—if you’d like to join us, you can upgrade here. We’ll send the Zoom link and everything you need the day before.

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I came across a video the other day—a young woman describing years of illness and suffering, and the moment she hit a wall and thought, I can’t do this anymore. What changed, she said, was shifting that thought—one that kept her looking at “closed doors”—to something very different: I’ll figure it out.

It stayed with me, because I recognized the feeling immediately—that moment when something inside you quietly gives out.

Two years ago, when my leukemia returned for the third time, I felt something close to that same edge. I had to resume chemo—this time indefinitely—and prepare for the reality of a third transplant somewhere down the line. I felt defeated, almost paper-thin at the prospect of beginning again. For weeks, I could barely get out of bed. I couldn’t imagine how to keep going, let alone what “figuring it out” might even mean.

Some of you may have heard me talk about the advice I was given: live every day as if it’s your last. I understand the spirit of it, but in practice, it filled me with a kind of frantic pressure—an insistence that every moment be meaningful, every family dinner special. It began to feel like a kind of existential claustrophobia—no room for the ordinary. And respectfully, I came to believe it was terrible advice.

What I needed was something gentler—a way of being that didn’t demand so much of me.

Since then, I’ve been trying to live each day as if it is my first: to approach it with the curiosity, openness, and sense of wonder of a little kid. To leave room for small, unremarkable joys. Less urgency. More play. To wake up not asking, What do I need to accomplish today? but What is there to notice? What might surprise me? What feels even slightly enlivening?

It’s been a small shift, but a significant one—the kind that doesn’t change everything at once, but quietly reroutes your sense of what matters. When I’m able to step into the day with this spirit, I find myself less concerned with optimization, less obedient to the script I’d been following without quite realizing it. In its place: a greater willingness to follow the strange impulse, the small tug—things that don’t make sense on paper but spark a kind of private delight.

Which is why, when I was in Los Angeles for work a few weeks ago, I texted my friend Tee, who runs a small dog rescue, and asked if I could stop by between meetings. You know—just to visit. She said yes, and mentioned a fresh batch of puppies that had just arrived. Phew, I thought, a little disappointed, a little relieved. Fostering puppies isn’t really my thing, and so I was safe from the temptation to grow my weird little wolf pack.

And then, mid-visit, a call came in: a bonded pair of senior chihuahuas had just been dumped at the animal shelter and needed a foster. Tee handed me her phone to show me a photo. They weighed two pounds each and looked scared, and alarmingly cute. Possibly mother and daughter, definitely soulmates.

You already know what happened next.

Twenty-four hours later, I flew home with two new foster dogs—the “baby grandmas,” as we started calling them. I spent the plane ride drafting their adoption profiles, instinctively shaping them like personal ads:

Baby Grandma 1 (The Mother)

Italian widow energy.
A tiny black nose the size of a pea. Zero teeth.
Peaceful. Pure. Sweet. Chaste. Devout, possibly.
Has buried three husbands (emotionally).
Remembers the war (unclear which one).
Arthritic and unbothered.

Baby Grandma 2 (The Daughter)

A wildcard, with two walrus teeth (decorative).
Silly. A little flirty. No real plan.
Trembles unless held skin-to-skin—ideally in a bra, as ordained.
Flops onto her back and poses like a French girl.
Currently seeking a heated cat bed and intense emotional entanglement.
Easily overwhelmed by existence.

This little writing exercise felt both entirely unhinged and completely natural. Only later did I recognize the impulse as childhood muscle memory. At age eight, when we lived in Tunisia, I kept a journal of all the stray dogs on our block—naming them, writing their biographies, pasting their photos onto the page.

There’s a particular kind of logic to the things your eight-year-old self loved. They’re easy to dismiss as impractical, unnecessary, or beside the point. But the things that don’t make sense on paper are often the very things that make us feel most alive, that return us to ourselves.

Which brings me to today’s guest contributor, Piera Gelardi, whose work sits at this intersection of imagination, play, and possibility. In her new book, The Playful Way, she writes about shifting from a life driven by pressure and perfectionism to one shaped by curiosity, flexibility, and joy.

Her essay and prompt today offer a reminder that imagination is not frivolous—it’s generative. Sometimes, the way through isn’t to force ourselves to believe we can do the impossible. It’s to adjust our sightline, notice what comes into view, and step—however tentatively—through that opening.

Prompt 378. If Just 3.5 Percent of Us Believe by Piera Gelardi

People be like “that’s not realistic” as if the entire universe is not a living miracle beyond our wildest imagination. —James McCrae

I was sitting in a bustling café in Union Square with my friend Sophia Li, a journalist and climate advocate who radiates optimism like she has sunshine flowing through her veins. We were talking about the state of the world (you know, light conversation for a Tuesday morning) and whether she thought playfulness had a role in solving big problems.

“Look, the scale of challenge we face is immense,” she said. “But if we keep being doom and gloom, saying it’s a ‘dumpster fire,’ we’ll get mired in that pessimistic belief and inaction. We have to remember that imagination actually makes us more human, more empathetic, better problem solvers. It lets us step into other people’s shoes. We think play is all lighthearted fun, but it actually opens roadblocks to help be more unified as a collective.”

I sighed and said, “It just seems so hard.”

Sophia’s eyes twinkled. “Let me tell you about the three-­point-five percent rule,” she said. She told me about Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth, who studied 323 civil resistance campaigns over the last century, including the Philippines’ Freedom Movement and the South African antiapartheid movement. Her discovery: it only takes the active and sustained participation of 3.5 percent of a population to create serious social change.

Think about that. Just 3.5 percent of people, dreaming up a different existence and acting on it. That’s all it takes to reshape the world.

Before any change happens in the real world, it has to happen in our minds. We have to dream about what could be before we can create it. That’s where most of us get stuck—­we’re so focused on what is that we forget to dream about what could be. We walk around with invisible boxes, built from our past experiences, our biases, our fears—­the voice that says, “That’ll never work,” or “Things have always been this way.”

These boxes excuse us from trying and risking disappointment or sounding “crazy.” But the boxes? They’re imaginary. We built them, which means we have the power to break them down and build a new existence beyond them.

The next time you notice yourself throttling what you believe is possible by trying to “be realistic,” remember that dreaming is a reality expander. Whether you’re doing dress rehearsals in your mind, escaping to imaginary clubs when your spirit needs a boost, or envisioning solutions that don’t yet exist, imagination allows us to go from passive acceptance of what is to the architects of what could be.

This is your prompt:

Start your morning with a small mental stretch using your coffee or tea ritual to prime your brain to search for possibility.

1. Sit with your morning beverage and take three easy breaths.

2. Look into your cup and imagine it’s a portal.

3. Visualize one of the following:
   —Yourself at a future date, achieving something you’re working toward

   —A childhood space that brought you joy or comfort

   —Having coffee with someone you miss or want to connect with

   —Having coffee with your past self—what do you want to tell yourself?

   —A place you’ve always wanted to see

4. Close your eyes and briefly imagine the scene in detail.

5. Open your eyes, return to the present, and take your first sip.

Now write about where your portal took you and what came up. Feel free to repeat every day this week.

I’d love to hear what this essay and prompt opened up for you—

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Today’s Contributor—

is a creative entrepreneur, speaker, and artist passionate about bringing play into every room she enters. Her new book The Playful Way is a guidebook to finding more creativity, connection, and joy in everyday life by tapping into the power of play. Piera co-founded the influential media brand Refinery29 and its magical pop-up 29Rooms, earning recognition as one of Ad Age’s “50 Most Creative People” and Entrepreneur’s “50 Most Daring Entrepreneurs.” Through her new company NoomaLooma and her energetic keynotes, Piera helps people unlock their day-to-day creative superpowers.

Celebrating Six Years—

The Isolation Journals turned six on April 1—that’s six years of writing, noticing, searching, trying to make sense of our lives together. To celebrate, I curated a selection of greatest hits from our archive—newsletters, essays, interviews with extraordinary artists, creative workshops, daily journaling challenges, and more.

The Greatest Hits

Six years of the Isolation Journals, in your words—

Thank you for creating this one-of-a-kind community and for changing my life forever. The Isolation Journals got me through the uncertainty and isolation of the pandemic, helped me discover my voice, launched my personal writing journey, and connected me with friends I cherish. —Abby Alten Schwartz

Living within this “living, breathing” community for the past six years—where I can be seen, heard, and loved unconditionally, while I wade through the muck, joy, fear, curiosity, grief, unknown, and celebration of this life—sheds light into the darkest shadows of my mind, spirit, and soul. Thank you, dear Suleika, Carmen, Holly, for creating this safe haven for us all. My gratitude is beyond words. —Pat Taylor

Happiest of anniversaries to an amazing community! Suleika, Carmen, Holly—may you bask in all the beauty and connection you have generated for so many. Thank you for leaping when the world was uncertain, for trusting the community with your words and thoughts, and for sharing so many incredibly inspiring people— lifting each person up. So much love for you all & this community! —Rhonda Willers

Six years in, the community that you have built has often felt like a lifeline—sometimes a cozy den, and always a place of vulnerability, discovery, and inclusion. I have loved every prompt and 30-day project. You created this without knowing what it would become, but with an open heart, curiosity, and an intuitive sense that many of us yearned for this even if we couldn’t name it. My gratitude to this extraordinary trio and the talented friends they have shared with us. —Amy Harbison

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Not the work itself, but everything around it: the structures, the income streams, the commitments we make in order to keep making anything at all. The scaffolding that, at its best, supports the work—and, at its worst, begins to overtake it.

This question came into sharper focus recently when I got the chance to meet a writer I’ve long admired from afar, and suddenly, somewhat improbably, we found ourselves deep in conversation about a thorny topic. We ended up speaking very candidly about the economics of creative work—what it takes not only to make something meaningful, but also to build a life in which you can keep making it, as the stakes and expectations begin to rise. At one point, they said something I haven’t been able to shake: that for creative work to endure and scale, you have to build a kind of machine around it. The trouble, of course, is building a machine that supports the work without devouring it—and without devouring you.

It’s a question that doesn’t resolve itself neatly, and one I suspect many carry, whether they name it or not.

Today’s guest contributor, Mason Currey, writes directly into that tension. In his essay below, he turns toward a question that sits just beneath the surface of creative life: how to begin—and keep going—when the practical realities of time and money feel unresolved. What emerges is a meditation on permission—how easily we defer it, how long we wait for conditions to stabilize, and what becomes possible when we stop waiting. It’s the kind of piece you finish and then keep thinking about hours later, mid-walk or mid-conversation, when something in it clicks into place.

After reading Mason’s words, I found myself writing—and then writing some more. What began as a journal entry slowly unspooled into an essay about the time I nearly broke myself, in more ways than one, trying to write my first book. I’ve shared it below, following his essay and prompt.

Prompt 377. Art, Money, and Permission by Mason Currey

For as long as I’ve thought about becoming “a writer”—well before I knew what that meant, when it was just a vague aspiration to join the world of books that I so loved—I have felt a background dread about one thing: money. How was I going to find the time it would surely take to do this amazing thing, at the level I hoped to do it, and also support myself?

Becoming a writer takes a lot of time: time to read, think, experiment, go down wrong paths, start over, start over again. This is true of any creative field, and we all know that these efforts may not attract a reliable income, or any income, especially when you’re just starting out. This thought cast a shadow over my early efforts to write, and very often kept me from writing at all.

Finally, more than twenty years after I first began fretting about this, I am publishing the book that I wish I’d had at the start: a deep dive into how some of my favorite writers and artists confronted this same dilemma in their own lives. But what I’m realizing now, on the eve of publication, is that my book is not really about money at all. It’s about permission. What’s most inspiring to me, and what has kept me endlessly reading about writers’ and artists’ lives, is seeing how these brilliant creators extended to themselves the permission to do their work, even when the world did not seem interested or at times was actively opposing their efforts.

I felt this perhaps most powerfully while listening to a radio documentary on the poet Bernadette Mayer, a few years before her death in 2022 at age seventy-seven. Mayer was one of the most important poets of her generation. She published more than thirty books, and her poetry workshops were a formative influence on legions of young writers. But she just barely made ends meet, as the radio documentary revealed. The year before the program aired, Mayer made $17,000—hardly what we imagine for our most celebrated writers.

What really stuck with me was how Mayer talked about this: not bitterly, but with a kind of amused shrug. “As a poet, I always tried to earn a living as a poet,” she said. “I know it’s stupid, I know it can’t be done. But I figured—let’s do it.”

I can’t type out that quote without grinning. It is stupid trying to make a living as a poet—or a painter, a composer, or another type of artist. Very often it can’t be done, or can only be done with great difficulty (and great luck). But it’s also thrilling, deeply satisfying, and can yield rewards far greater than money.

As a young writer, I couldn’t tolerate this level of uncertainty. I thought I had to figure out how being a writer would “work” before I could start. What I realize now is that creative careers rarely “work” in this sense. You can’t game it out in advance, like you might with a more conventional career. It’s always a gamble, and no one but you is going to give you permission to take that risk.

I didn’t know how to do this when I was starting out. But in writing this book, I was gathering together models of how one might do it—building up a permission structure for myself, and for my readers, as we embark on the funny, impossible, important work of bringing something new into the world.

This is your prompt:

What kind of permission do you feel you need to pursue your dreams, creative or otherwise? Whom do you imagine giving it to you? Could you give it to yourself? What would that look like—is there a structure you could create in your daily life that would feel like permission?

I’m so curious what this essay and prompt open up for you—
I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

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Today’s Contributor—

is the author of the Daily Rituals books—Daily Rituals: How Artists Work and Daily Rituals: Women at Work—featuring brief profiles of the day-to-day work lives of more than 300 brilliant minds. Daily Rituals has long been a companion. I’ve returned to it at times with the specific, slightly desperate hope that someone, somewhere, has figured out a way to do this that doesn’t require breaking yourself in the process. His forthcoming book, Making Art and Making a Living, continues that inquiry; I had the chance to read it early and contribute a few words that appear on its cover. Mason lives in Los Angeles and writes Subtle Maneuvers, a twice-monthly newsletter on the creative process.

A Book Deal, a Breakdown, and a Breakthrough by Suleika Jaouad

I was 27 when the thing I wanted most arrived: a book deal—my first—and, with it, enough money to quit my day job at a real estate company and move to a cabin in the woods to devote myself entirely to writing. I imagined a kind of monastic bliss—long, uninterrupted days, pages accumulating steadily, obediently, as if the work itself were eager to be made.

Instead, my dream writing life looked like this: days that closed in on themselves, hours where the ideas went nowhere, writing and then deleting, and then deleting some more. More often than not, I ended the day on the floor, curled into a tight, defensive ball, like something in the room was coming for me, though the only real threat was the blinking cursor on my laptop, three feet away.

I told myself this was normal. Writing is hard; you push through. So I did what I’ve always known how to do. I worked. Each morning I sat at my desk and applied discipline with a kind of grim devotion. There was a one-month stretch in which I finally got into a groove and wrote sixty pages, but when I read them back, I could see immediately that they were all wrong. I deleted them and began again. It felt deeply defeating but also, at the time, like proof of seriousness. I was willing to suffer for the work. I took that to mean I must care enough to do it well.

I stopped taking weekends. I stopped seeing friends. I watched my savings dwindle and responded the only way I knew how: by tightening the vise. More hours. More effort.

What I didn’t understand was the toll of writing a memoir about the aftermath of illness. The work required me to return to some of the most painful experiences of my life—without any real support for doing so. I would begin writing a scene and feel something in my body start to spike—a kind of internal alarm, a deep exhaustion that made it difficult to sit upright. I’d lie down on the floor to steady myself, then berate myself for the interruption. Why are you like this? Why can’t you just write faster? What if you can’t actually do this? Get back to work.

At first, it came in flashes—the anxiety, sharp but passing. Then it began to stay longer. And then, eventually, the panic attacks arrived.

It took me a long time to understand what the panic attacks were telling me…

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can read the rest of the essay here. It’s a tender one, and I wanted to share it in a more intimate space.

Continue Reading

For more inspiration—

On Secrets and Why We Keep Them
An interview with Dani Shapiro, bestselling author and host of the podcast Family Secrets, where we talk about the ethics of writing memoir, the weight of secrets—and what lives beneath them.

Read Me, See Me, Like Me
A letter from Jeanne, who wonders what the point of writing is if it never gets published. In this installment of Dear Susu, I write about rejection, the fleeting nature of publication, and the borderline mystical process of creating something from nothing.

Notes from Journaling Club: It Was Manna
A glimpse into our virtual Creative Hour—part two of our exploration of what happens when the examined life moves off the page and into community, where we drew, wrote, and shared stories of our best creative gatherings.

Everything feels too loud right now.

The headlines, the endless scroll, the churn of feeds—the constant swell of opinion and urgency. And if I’m not careful, my inner life begins to echo it—an ongoing commentary, a reflex to name and explain, to steady myself by turning experience into language, as if naming were a form of control.

I’ve always been a verbal processor. I reach for words to make sense of what I see and feel. And yet, my deepest knowings have arrived in the absence of language—when I’ve stopped asking, stopped trying to make sense of things in real time, and allowed myself to sit inside the not-knowing.

On this first glimpse of spring, I find myself wondering what it might mean to lower the volume.

At our farm, spring doesn’t arrive so much as it begins to loosen things. Light stretches across afternoons. The chill recedes degree by degree. The ground, sealed in frost just weeks ago, gives a little underfoot. There are small, improbable gestures everywhere: green shoots pressing up through cold soil, the first crocuses opening and closing again as if unsure of their timing, a thin hum of insects returning to the air.

If you weren’t paying attention, you might miss it entirely. Then one morning it would seem as though everything had bloomed at once—though the change had been gathering all along.

On my walks with the dogs, I’ve been trying to notice the in-between—the almost, the not-yet. The places where something is happening, but not announcing itself. A certain warmth to the light along the river. The way the trees hold their breath before leafing. The soft return of sound after a long stretch of winter quiet. It requires a different kind of attention—the kind that doesn’t reach immediately for meaning.

It makes me wonder how much else moves this way, just below the threshold of my awareness—obscured not only by the noise around me, but by the noise I generate myself.

Because not all of that noise is imposed. Some of it I cultivate. I fill my days, my calendar, my mind. I reach for distraction, for structure, for language. I try to get ahead of what I’m feeling by explaining it, as though understanding were something I could arrive at early, before the feeling has fully taken shape.

But what if the noise is not incidental, but intentional? What if it is how we avoid the parts of experience that cannot be managed or resolved?

Today’s guest contributor, the poet Rebecca Gayle Howell, offers another way: silence not as absence, but as attention—a way of tuning ourselves to what is already there, waiting to be heard. A way of listening without interruption. In her essay—and in the erasure poem that accompanies it—she explores this kind of attention.

It’s a subtle shift, but not an easy one: to approach writing not as assertion—declaring, explaining, meaning-making—but as reception. To allow something to arrive, rather than forcing it into form.

Erasure poetry makes this visible. So much of writing asks us to add. Erasure asks us to remove—to let things fall away, to listen for what remains.

I think about the spaces that hold things together—the pause between notes in a piece of music, the silence that gathers in a conversation, the white space on the page where words can breathe and rest. Meaning lives there, too. It lives not only in what we say, but in what we leave unsaid.

In nature, nothing rushes. The shoots do not hurry themselves into bloom. The trees do not argue with the season. Everything emerges according to its own internal timing, which cannot be forced, only tended.

The promise of spring, to me, is not that we will become something new, but that we might become quiet enough to notice what is already beginning. That we might tend to what is emerging—not by insisting, but by paying attention.

Today’s prompt invites you to try that. To write, and then to take away. To listen for what reveals itself there.

Today, in community—

Our next Journaling Club gathering is happening today—Sunday, March 22, from 1–2pm ET. It’s the second in a two-part series about what happens when the examined life moves off the page and into community. We’ll share stories, write together, and listen for what emerges. Paid subscribers can find everything they need to join us here.

And if you’re not yet a paid subscriber, it’s not too late to become one and to join us.

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Prompt 376. The Hand that Erases by Rebecca Gayle Howell

In the contemporary idiom, erasure poetry is most often used against texts. Texts that we need to challenge because of the lies they tell or the harm they cause. I respect many who engage the technique in that way, but it is not the tradition in which I work here.

In poetry—and to be honest, in my life—I increasingly want silence more than sound. In silence I feel tuned by a presence not my own, one kinder and smarter than me, of which I am a part, but not the whole. I do not need to ask things of this presence—and, in not asking, I do not interrupt its divinity. I listen. I receive, instead.

Thomas Merton defined prayer this way. He was a Trappist monk who lived in an abbey just twenty miles down the road from the small Kentucky town where I grew up. I never knew him, as he died seven years before I was born, but I read him voraciously in the first part of my life, and no book mattered more to me than Contemplative Prayer. In it, he writes:

In the “prayer of the heart” we seek first of all the deepest ground of our identity in God. We do not reason about dogma of faith, or “the mysteries.”… We learn recollection, which consists in listening for God’s will, in direct and simple attention to reality. Recollection is awareness of the unconditional.

Merton, too, was a student of poetry. I have come to believe, through my own study of the art, that poems are made of silence, not sound, that the sound arrives in the poem only to point like a fast arrow to the revelation hiding in the quiet, there between the lines and words.

“Only the hand that erases can write the truest thing,” wrote Meister Eckhart, another Christian mystic, whose writing Merton loved. In these words, I learn that we must let go of what we want to know—to find what we need to know. I have tried. As I worked, I found that what I needed to know aligns with a different passage from Eckhart: “Nothing in all creation is so like God as silence.”

Here I have practiced a poetry of silence that writes, not against, but alongside a text I have loved my whole life. I have come to these first three chapters of the Book of Genesis, repeatedly asking them to teach me that we can still be made in the likeness of God, that we can still learn how to be quiet, how to be with.

This is your prompt:

Erase Genesis begins with an epigraph from Meister Eckhart: “Only the hand that erases can write the truest thing.” Spend 10 minutes freewriting toward a truth that has been difficult for you to accept. Then, when you’re done, make an erasure poem of what you’ve written. What reveals itself in new ways, once you start lifting this truth into relief?

I’d love to know what this essay and prompt reveal for you. You can share in the comments—or keep it just for yourself.

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Today’s Contributor—

Rebecca Gayle Howell’s work has received critical acclaim from such outlets as The Los Angeles Times, Poetry London (U.K.), Asymptote, Limelight (AUS), Publisher’s Weekly, MINT (India), Ms. magazine, and The Kenyon Review, and she has been translated into Spanish and German. Among her awards are the United States Artists Fellowship, two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. Howell’s most recent book is Erase Genesis, available for pre-order from Project Poëtica/Bridwell Press. She writes the newsletter Behold.

For more Inspiration—

Creation Through Elimination
What happens when writing asks you to take things away instead of add? An essay and prompt on the paradox of erasure poetry by Natalie Warther, with examples by Mary Ruefle, Tom Phillips, and Jenny Holzer.

Shame Shepherds & Grace for Fuck-Ups
A letter from Calvin, incarcerated since age 18, who longs to tell his story but can’t get past the weight of shame. In this installment of my advice column, Dear Susu, I gather wisdom from a shame shepherd, a writing mentor, and a pen pal on death row on how to begin anyway.

On Moons, Birds, & the Color Green
A glimpse into our Creative Hour—on artistic preoccupations, the beauty of repetition, and the quiet return of spring. We spend time with a poem by Ross Gay and write into its promise.

As a child, imagination was my primary dwelling.

I had a trunk of costumes and wrote elaborate plays whenever my parents hosted dinner parties. Guests received hand-drawn ticket stubs at the door and were ushered into the living room theater, whether they liked it or not.

My bedroom closet was just big enough for me to lie down in. No windows. Total darkness. Glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling. I’d drag in my comforter and a pillow, close the door, and curl up there for hours inventing whole worlds.

I’ve been longing to return to that state. When the world feels relentlessly heavy, imagination becomes a refuge—not an escape, but a way of refueling the spirit, of making sense of things.

The poet Lucille Clifton once wrote, “I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder.” Poetry and art, she believed, are less about answers than questions.

I’ve been reading a lot of fiction lately and itching to write some myself—to inhabit characters the way you inhabit a dream. In that world, linear time collapses. The limits of reality loosen. You can follow a thought all the way to its imaginative edge.

So today I want to try something a little different.

Instead of beginning with my reflections, I’m going to start with a poem by Amanda Quaid. It sent my imagination wandering in unexpected directions—toward a question I hadn’t considered in years: what we might become, if given another chance.

After you read it, you’ll find the prompt—and then my own response, straight from the pages of my journal.

375. Patient and Daughter Appear Closely Bonded by Amanda Quaid

My toddler takes a bite of tater tot and tells me
she wants me to die.

The social worker says I should respond and not
react to things like that

so I ask why she says she wants me to die
as though it’s just

a thought-provoking notion that has never
crossed my mind.

She thinks for a moment, chewing, her tiny lips
stained with blueberry juice.

“I want you to die so you can show me
how to die.”

I take that phrase and tuck it in my breast—she’s
given me a gift, I know,

a task or blessing or could it be—would you not
call it permission—

“And you could come back as a peacock!” she cries
with a grin

“And so could I, and then we could be friends!”
She cackles at me and I smile

back at her and see us in the next
go-round, two peacocks

preening our plumes in the Sri Lankan sun,
finally peers and bickering

over the last mangosteen
in the grove.

This is your prompt:

Write about what you’d come back as.

I sat with Amanda’s prompt for a while. Here’s where my imagination wandered:

Another Life

What form might a life take if it were allowed to begin again?

My first thought: Lentil.

Our senior rescue dog. Eight pounds, hairless, mostly toothless—a creature whose devotions are simple: love, the warmth of sunlight. Lentil is a Xoloitzcuintli, an ancient Mexican breed whose name comes from Xolotl, the god of fire and lightning and who guards the sun on its daily passage through the underworld. For thousands of years, Xolos were believed to escort the souls of the dead across the river to the afterlife.

We brought her to Mexico last month, where she finally made sense. Back home people study her with a puzzled expression, unsure what to make of her. But there—where Xolos are revered—strangers stopped us constantly.

Qué hermosa.

She spent most of the trip lifting her face toward the sky, eyes narrowed against the bright white blaze of noon, paws stretched out as the warmth settled into her small body. As if basking were a form of prayer.

I thought: yes. In my next life I will come back as an eight-pound Xolo. I will lie naked in the equatorial sun. I will chase iguanas through the underbrush and keep watch at the threshold of the in-between.

But as I sat with the question, I realized, I do not want to be a dog. I don’t want to be a domesticated pet who sits politely for a treat. I’ve already spent too much of this life trying to be a good girl, learning the rules and hoping I got them right. I don’t want to spend another life being tamed.

More animals appeared, each auditioning enthusiastically for the role, and each swiftly dismissed.

I do not want to be a jaguar racing through the jungle. I have already spent too much of this life running, as if the days themselves might be caught and held.

I do not want to be a workhorse lowering its head into the harness, pulling many times its own weight until the day it finally kneels to the ground in exhaustion.

I do not want to be a magpie collecting bright objects without quite understanding why.

And I do not want to be a chameleon adapting so thoroughly it forgets its original color.

What do I want to be, then?

Perhaps a waterfowl. Over the weekend our pond filled with migratory birds returning from their winter sojourn. Geese and ducks settled noisily onto the water, wings beating the air into brief silver storms. Later they rose again and arranged themselves into those improbable V-shaped lines across the sky.

Scientists believe migratory birds navigate by sensing the Earth’s magnetic field—a map written somewhere in the body.

How do they know the way?

I like the idea of that: being carried across continents by a compass no one can see.

What about butterflies? The monarch in particular captivates me. Wings like stained glass, the color of flame. Creatures so delicate they seem almost theoretical—and yet they cross entire continents, traveling thousands of miles.

No single butterfly lives long enough to complete the round-trip journey. It takes generations to finish what the first one begins.

Extraordinary journeys, back and forth across the sky. And yet the arrow of time still only points forward.

Then my mind plunges, somewhat reluctantly, into the sea—to a creature that has long frightened and fascinated me, one that lives by a different logic entirely.

The immortal jellyfish.

A drifting bell of almost pure water. Moving through the slow breathing of the sea, living by tides rather than timelines.

When threatened or injured, it can reverse its life cycle—folding its adult body back into its earliest form. Scientists call the process transdifferentiation: the body rewriting itself.

Another way of inhabiting time.

Where the ending is the beginning.

Not the ladder.

The tide.

If this spoke to you, send it to a friend.

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Our Next Gathering—

Our next Journaling Club gathering takes place on March 22 from 1–2pm ET—save the date! It’s the second in a two-part series exploring what happens when the examined life moves off the page and into community.

We’ll shape the conversation together—through your stories and your questions, which you can share with us here.

Save the Date

Today’s Contributor—

After working in theater for most of her life, Amanda Quaid began writing poetry in 2023. “Patient and Daughter Appear Closely Bonded”—one of her first poems—was awarded the Bridport Prize. Her debut collection, No Obvious Distress, was a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize and was named Memoir of the Month by The Independent. She was raised in New York City, where she works as a dialect coach and lives with her husband, daughter, and chihuahua. She founded and co-edits the ekphrastic poetry journal Metphrastics.

From the Archive—

The Immortal Jellyfish & Intuition
On rendering sea creatures in watercolor, scanxiety, and the creative process as a kind of Rorschach test.

Carrying Complicated Grief
A Dear Susu column about a mother who discovered her late daughter’s journals and wonders: Can I destroy her writing?

When Shit Hits the Fan
A conversation with the wise and wondrous Nadia Bolz-Weber about finding meaning in the quotidian, how acts of service can be an antidote to darkness, and why joy isn’t frivolous or naive—but necessary.

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Much of my life has been lived in lists. I have 2,200 of them in the Notes app on my phone. Countless journals filled with them, too. For years I tried to keep things separate—one notebook for to-dos, another for proper writing—but eventually the system collapsed under its own administrative burden. The lists and the entries began to mingle freely, like party guests who discover they have a great deal in common despite having been issued very different dress codes.

How could I not have seen they were one and the same—two configurations of the same mind, leaving parallel tracks in the sand?

Sometimes I go back and reread to-do lists from five or ten years ago and realize they form a strange, fragmented memoir: what got crossed off, what didn’t (and may never), what appears again and again, gently insisting—seemingly unmoved by the passage of time or my better judgment.

Something as ordinary as a grocery list or an index can become a portal to transcendence. A fulcrum. A cascade. A song. A memoir written sideways. What happens when we move from naming to meaning? Even a catalog can begin to sing.

My friend Mara’s dad keeps a list in his phone under the name “Forgotten.” It’s a running record of things he forgets. On his list: chicken paillard. Montclair, New Jersey. Chartreuse. Two different kinds of pasta—cascatelli and radiatori. The names of Mara’s creative writing professors from college. I find it hilarious and oddly moving—it reveals not just the quirks of his mind, but what he values, what he wants to hold onto.

Last week while on vacation I began keeping a list titled:

Things I Don’t Want to Forget

1. Falling asleep to the sound of Jon singing on the roof, minor chords stitching themselves into the dark.

2. Laughing with Liz across a courtyard—each of us in our own hammock, texting each other memes instead of speaking, like two extremely lazy carrier pigeons.

3. Swimming with Lentil. Discovering she loves the water if it is warm and we are skin to skin. Two mammals remembering something ancient, amniotic.

4. Devouring a 600-page novel in one day—disappearing so completely into another world I forget the architecture of my own.

5. The relief when an important, prestigious work event was canceled. The almost indecent lightness in my chest. Asking what that relief was trying to tell me.

6. Papa Hédi in the ocean, backstroking with glee, face turned skyward, grinning like a boy. “I love it! I love it!”

7. A sleepover with Jon and two friends—grown adults asking, with full sincerity, if we were little kids, what would we do tomorrow? Waking up and watching Interstellar at 8:30 a.m. on the projector. Pajamas. Pancakes. The universe expanding before coffee.

8. Taking a digital Sabbath. Leaving my phone at home for the day. Walking into nature untracked. The glare of my nervous system lowering. A dimmer switch I forgot existed.

9. Swimming in the lagoon. A school of iridescent fish circling a single clump of seaweed. Hovering above them in my snorkel mask for five full minutes. A small galaxy, self-contained.

10. Rewatching Something’s Gotta Give. Diane Keaton sobbing in white as she writes a play. Jack Nicholson smirking. “You’re a woman to love.” Possibly the greatest romantic comedy ever made.

11. Leaving the Catan board out on the terrace overnight. Returning to find the birds have colonized it. Cardboard tiles flung across the grass and wedged in tree branches. Wooden settlements gnawed at the corners. Hunting for missing pieces becomes its own game—longest road: the one beneath the palms.

12. Skinny dipping at sunset with my two college best friends. The moon’s marbled surface above us. We name what we see in its veining: dog’s head, footprint, baby in a womb. Three women floating, mapping our imaginations onto the night sky.

Today’s guest contributor, Beth Kephart, is one of those rare writers who can take the smallest form—a list, a fragment, a scrap of language—and reveal the vast emotional and creative terrain hiding inside it. In her essay below, she turns her attention to a deceptively simple question: when does a list stop being a list and become art?

What follows is both ode and invitation—an exploration of how something as humble as a catalog can transform into rhythm, movement, and meaning.

I hope you’ll savor her words.

And then try making a list of your own.

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In Community—

Inspired. Engaged. Connected. Those were the words that surfaced at the end of last Sunday’s Journaling Club, where Holly and Carmen reflected on what happens when the examined life moves off the page and into community.

It was the first of a two-part series exploring why journaling with others can be so powerful—and how to deepen your creative practice in the process. If you missed it, you can watch the replay below. We’ll continue the conversation on March 22 from 1–2pm ET—save the date!

Watch the replay

Prompt 374. The Literary List and the Art of Transcendence by Beth Kephart

Decades ago, in my first writing workshop, a writer among us in that old stone building on that hilltop in Spoleto responded to nearly every prompt with a list. Lists about love. Lists about flowers. Lists containing the seed of a story.

They were always very beautiful lists.

They were lyrical, and lovely.

But they were lists, and this was my first writing workshop, and I had questions: Was a list a story? Was a list enough? Was a list taking the easy way out, or was it a higher-order genus of writing, a kind of poem I personally had not mastered?

I wanted the fine lines explained. The difference between a grocery-story list and a literary list, say. Or the difference between a checklist and a poem.

Across the years, the questions have hovered. Tracy K. Smith’s short poem “Soulwork,” for example, is list as art, as interrogation, as transcendence, but how did she do it? Katie Manning’s “What to Expect” is a beloved prose poem that uses—not just for its base but for its whole—the material lodged in the index of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, so that it begins:

Expect accidents. Expect acne, additives, age, and airbags. Expect alcohol, allergies, and altitude. Expect analgesics. Expect animals, ankles, and antidepressants. Expect autopsy findings. Expect bathing, bending, botanicals, and breaking news.

“What to Expect” is an index list, but something—what is that something?—makes it infinitely compelling. You read it, breathless, up to the very end. You stop, with Manning, at her yoga and zinc and ask yourself what just happened.

And then, of course, there is Pablo Neruda and his Odes to Common Things—a book of short-lined odes that often read like lists of attributes. The stuff of a table, a chair, an onion. The stuff of socks and scissors. The stuff of a cat:

O little
emperor without a realm,
conqueror without a homeland,
diminutive parlor tiger, nuptial
sultan of heavens
roofed in erotic tiles: …

Surely no laundry list, grocery-story list, honey-do list, checklist. But a list, just the same—one full of power.

If we can master the list, can we master a poem? If we can master a poem, can we master a prose poem, an essay, a memoir, a novel, a work of unclassifiable hybridity?

I believe the answer is yes.

In contemplating the literary list across the years, I have come to some conclusions:

Every literary list is conceived around a fulcrum, a thing, in dictionary-speak, “that plays a central or essential role.” Think of the fulcrum as an object (that cat) or an idea (soul work) or a catalog (what to expect).

Every literary list is a thing of parts, each roaring with specificity. Don’t neglect the specificity. Neruda’s cat isn’t some mere tabby with a soft tail and green eyes and uncut toenails. Neruda’s cat is, among other things, the very “nuptial/ sultan of heavens/ roofed in erotic tiles.” Try equaling that.

Every literary list becomes a cascade, a movement. It seems ironic, does it not, that a list, a bit of writing that sounds like the most static, going-nowhere thing can become (and, indeed, in literature must) become symphonic—rhythmic, fluid, rising, falling, gathering a song within itself.

It will never be enough—in literature or in story—to name the attributes of a person, a moment, an era, a thing. We elevate our lists, and the odes that sometime contain them, by reaching meaning, a previously unforeseen something.

There is joy in this process. We begin with what we know. We extrapolate toward story and meaning. When we are alive in the process—even grateful for it—our readers will join us on the journey.

This is your prompt:

Try your hand at a literary list. Begin with what you know—maybe “Flora and Fauna in My Mind’s Eye” or “Ways to Get Out of a Dinner Party” or “Things I’ve Learned the Hard Way.” Maybe it’s an everyday list—laundry, grocery, or to-dos—elevated. Let it cascade into a movement, reaching for previously unforeseen meaning.

Further reading:

• On Deciding by Beth Kephart

• Soulwork by Tracy K. Smith

• String Theory by Sonya Huber

• Jubilato Agno, Fragment B [I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry] by Christopher Smart

Beth’s essay first appeared on The Brevity Blog.

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Today’s Contributor—

National Book Award finalist is the award-winning author of some 40 books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, a paper artist, and the author of the bestselling Substack The Hush and the Howl, where she writes of life, story, and art. My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera was a finalist in the 2025 Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award. “Conversations with Women in Blue” won the 2025 Creative Nonfiction Prize from The Porch. In June 2026, Beth and her artist husband are offering a unique workshop series focused on the quest for beauty, love, and remembrance; writers will have a chance to share their work in real time in small-group settings.

From the archive—

• The Complete 30-Day Journaling Project: Thirty days of prompts, reflections, and creative invitations inspired by Rilke’s call to live the questions, to stay curious and let the unfolding lead.

• Read Me, See Me, Like Me: The first installment of my advice column, Dear Susu, on cataloguing a life and the reminder that nothing is wasted—not even a to-do list.

• The Loveliness of Lists: A replay of Journaling Club, where I answer questions from the community about life and the creative process, followed by a live writing session built around one of my favorite prompts for getting unstuck.

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On our third morning in Mexico, I climbed unsteadily onto a paddleboard in a lagoon, sweating from the heat and from fear.

I have never trusted dark water. I prefer my bodies of water transparent or metaphorical. Murk suggests danger. Sharks. Strange creatures. The unseen and unnamed. I fear anything moving beneath a surface I cannot read.

My friend Liz, by contrast, was grinning with excitement. She had heard there were manatees in this lagoon and spoke of them with pastoral confidence. “Don’t worry,” she said, serene in the way of someone who does not Google “local shark fatalities” before entering even a hotel pool. “Manatees are the cows of the sea.”

Jon, who had declined to join us, sat safely on the dock behind us, reading aloud from an article on his phone about microbes and cave-dwelling fungi in cenotes. “Just don’t drink the water,” he called as we paddled away. So helpful.

This is what vacation has been: a rotating cast of preferences. We rented a house near the beach and filled it with friends and family. Put a group of very different people in one place and reaching consensus—on even the smallest decisions—becomes its own art form. A/C or open windows. Miles-long beach walks or languishing in a hammock. My father urges us into his daily ocean swims. Jon refuses on account of too much seaweed and lowers himself into a chaise lounge. Liz wades in and within sixty seconds declares the water “too tuggy-wuggy,” her rebrand for what may well be lethal rip tides. I dive under a cresting wave, glimpse what I am certain is a fin (a floating buoy), and sprint back to shore. Papa Hédi calls us wimps and keeps swimming out.

Historically, in groups like this, I appoint myself diplomat. I read the room. I smooth. I adjust. I make sure everyone is fed, comfortable, accommodated. I love doing this. I am good at it. It can also be tiring—this overinflated sense of responsibility I assign myself.

So on this trip, I am experimenting with two unfamiliar skills: holding my ground when I want something different—and, at other times, allowing myself to be carried somewhere I would never go alone.

Back in the lagoon, I stood shakily on the board as Liz paddled ahead with reckless optimism. “Isn’t this magical?” she shouted back to me. I had never paddle boarded before and was certain I would fall, Jon’s warnings about contaminated water still echoing in my ears.

To my surprise, I did not fall.

I steadied. I felt strong. I sliced my oar through the lagoon’s lacquered green surface and wound through the mangroves, occasionally steering into brush but mostly finding a rhythm. We drifted toward a deeper seam of shadowed water. A couple passing in a kayak leaned toward us and whispered that there was a massive manatee just below.

My body wanted to stay on the board. Or better yet, turn back for the dock. Liz pulled on a snorkel mask and handed me one.

“I’m scared,” I said.

“It’s the cow of the sea,” she said again, as if that settled it.

We slipped into the water. I grabbed her hand. My heart pounded as we peered down and watched the enormous, gentle creature move with prehistoric grace, grazing on algae along the lagoon floor. For ten minutes, I forgot to be afraid. I was transfixed.

Later that night, back at the house, Jon latched onto a single phrase—“They really do got seaweed”—and began repeating it over and over, playing with its rhythm and cadence, as he does when a line captures him. Normally, I would put in my noise-canceling earbuds and retreat. I prefer quiet; Jon’s instinct is to turn anything (and everything) into song. But Liz began harmonizing. The refrain became a chorus. Thirty seconds later, they had swept me in. I joined them. Three voices, mildly off-key, singing about seaweed.

I am beginning to suspect that love—romantic, familial, or forged in friendship—is not about seeking your reflection. It is about being stretched toward someone who will never be you. Sometimes that stretching is expansive and joyful. Sometimes it is humbling—a kneeling. Sometimes it is paddling toward the manatee when every instinct says turn back.

What if love is not recognition, but revelation? What if the point is not to find someone who wants exactly what we want, exactly when we want it—but whose differences teach us what we would otherwise fail to notice?

Today’s guest contributor, Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, writes about this kind of love in her essay “Before Her.” Some of you will remember Lucy as the author of the epilogue to When Breath Becomes Air, her late husband Paul Kalanithi’s luminous memoir. I remember weeping over those final pages—undone by her grief, the clarity with which she held it, and by the refusal of her prose to look away. It is a book that altered me, reshaping the way I think about love and mortality.

In “Before Her,” we meet Lucy a decade later. With that same clarity, she reflects on the way certain loves transform us—not through sameness, but through difference. Through attention. Through the stretch of becoming more than we were before them.

Today’s prompt invites you to write about someone who has shown you another way of loving—someone whose difference expanded you, unsettled you, or revealed something you could not have seen on your own.

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Join us at Journaling Club—

We’re gathering today—Sunday, March 1, 2026, from 1-2pm ET—for our virtual hour of writing and conversation for paid subscribers. It’s a space to create together, to think alongside one another, and to find both inspiration and accountability.

Today’s session is the first of two exploring what happens when the examined life unfolds in community—how this practice reverberates beyond the page. We’ll gather again on Sunday, March 22, 2026, from 1-2pm ET to continue the conversation.

You can find more information and the link to join us here.

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Prompt 373. Before Her by Lucy Kalanithi

There are two kinds of people in our family: an introvert and an extrovert. I’m not the introvert. I’m the talker, the what-are-you-guys-up-to-er, the group-chat initiator.

When my daughter was six, I read an essay that claimed, almost as an aside, that extroverted children love cheetahs and dolphins, while introverted children love house cats. I laughed out loud: nothing ever truer. We have two house cats (so far). No dolphins.

I’d assumed, vaguely, that when you have a child, they’d show up as a little you. As a little me: a snuggler, a person who reads the room and adjusts. Then this particular child arrived in her stubborn self-contained glory, and entire parenting strategies vanished. She’s just so not-a-pleaser. Tricks my mom used on me and my sister—she describes us as “biddable” children—are no use here. One of the great lessons of parenting, it turns out, is that the child is not you.

She’s eleven now. I know her patterns, and she knows mine. They play out something like this at a barbecue: I circulate, chatting. Out of the corner of my eye, there she is, whispering with a friend high in the treehouse, then giggling as she sprints down the hill. Then she’s crouched in the corner of the yard on her own, head tilted toward the base of the fence. I make my way over and squat beside her.

“Time to head out?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Look at this worm first.”

We stay still for a while, watching the miniscule creature wind its way into the dirt and disappear. As we turn out onto the sidewalk, she takes my hand, mentions a little drama she handled at the swings. Sometimes I ask how the party went, but more often I just squeeze her palm, looking forward. Her stories come in sideways.

She makes me realize that love lives in all the places where we are not the same—not just in the swell of parenting, nor the comfort of seeing yourself reflected, but in the daily work of showing up spacious and present for someone who is fully themselves. Or not present, if that’s what the introvert needs.

We’re home, and she pads up to her bedroom to read. After a while I knock.

“Not now!”

So it’s downstairs to my own things, and a small bowl of strawberries left on the counter. Before her, I wouldn’t have seen that distance—her time alone—as another way of loving. Before her, I wouldn’t have noticed that worm.

This is your prompt:

Write about someone who showed you another way of loving. Maybe in how they pay attention, how they teach you to listen, how they show up, or simply in how they’re different from you. What have you learned from them? How have they changed the way you love?

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Today’s Contributor—

Dr. Lucy Kalanithi is a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and a leader in patient-centered care. A Yale School of Medicine graduate, she trained at UCSF and Stanford and is a fellow of the American College of Physicians. She wrote the epilogue to When Breath Becomes Air, her late husband Paul Kalanithi’s #1 New York Times bestseller, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and translated into more than 40 languages. She is the award-winning podcast host of Gravity and has appeared on NPR, PBS NewsHour, and in major publications. She lives in the Bay Area with her daughter.

“They say it takes thirty days for something to become a habit and those thirty daily prompts did just that! I now have a morning ritual that I look forward to. Some days I lose track of the time and other days I just write down my favorite quote—but I’m writing. I have added music, along with a candle and a five-minute pre-meditation.” —Crystal

If you’re craving this kind of daily creative ritual, our 30-Day Journaling Project is archived and ready for you—complete with musical pairings and video conversations with Jennifer Garner, Jon Batiste, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Michael Bierut to spark creative inspiration. It’s there whenever you’re ready to begin.

30 Prompts for Living the Questions

Dear Friends,

It is my delight and honor this week to be helming the Isolation Journals, while our beloved Suleika takes a much-needed and long-overdue vacation. We love you, Susu! And we all strongly support the vision of you lounging on a beach chair in a warm clime, sipping a refreshing beverage out of a coconut, whilst Lentil (who is hopefully wearing a tiny straw hat) gazes at you with adoration!

It is also my delight and honor to have the opportunity to celebrate and introduce Jonathan Miles, who will be offering up our prompt this week. And that is the last time in this dispatch that I will be referring to him as “Jonathan” because that just feels weird and wrong. To his friends (and we are all friends here), he will always be Jonny—and we do love ourselves some Jonny Miles.

I am at the age now where some of my friendships are many decades old, and so I can say with joy that I have known Jonny Miles since the final days of the 1900s. Way back then, in those more innocent times (were they, though?), we were both baby journalists and aspiring fiction writers, making our way in the world. We met through this wonderful circumstance: I wrote a book called Stern Men (my first novel), which Jonny gave a rave review in Slate Online. The Internet was still pretty new back then, and—get this!—we freelance writers often used to sign our pieces with not only our names, but also our email addresses and phone numbers, with the hope of catching the eye of an editor and maybe getting another job. (It’s true! In fact, it wasn’t until well after Eat Pray Love was published that I took my email, phone number, and home address off my website! I was still that hopeful and hungry for work!)

Anyway… back to our tale.

The write-up that Jonny offered for my novel was the best review I had ever gotten, and to this day it is still the best review I’ve ever gotten. Not only because he was praiseful, but because he really, really got it. He could see everything I was trying to accomplish in that book, and he caught every single arcane literary reference I had tucked in there. He saw me. That’s why it felt so magical. He really saw me.

So I reached out to a stranger by email to offer my thanks for his kind review, and found out he was a very smart and funny guy named Jonny, who was living in a cabin in the woods of Mississippi with four big dogs and a lovely new girlfriend. We started a delightful email correspondence—and thus began a friendship that is now over a quarter of a century old.

Over time, Jonny and Cat moved up north, and I convinced them to move to my corner of rural New Jersey, where they still live to this day. They still have a ridiculously large pile of dogs, but also added a pile of children—and we all became family. Then the pandemic hit, and for reasons that are too complicated to explain here, Jonny’s wife Cat convinced Suleika and Jon (and Carmen!) to move nearby for the duration of the pandemic—and the family got even bigger.

This, children, is why it’s a great idea to put your email address and phone number on the Internet! (JK, don’t do that.)

I have many favorite things about being friends with Jonny. I love to sit at his table when he is in the mood to prepare a feast, and nobody can prepare a feast like Jonny. I love listening to him play music in his living room with his insanely talented kids, raising up a glorious ruckus as if they are some family of musical geniuses straight out of an Appalachian holler. But most of all, I love being his writer friend.

My wish for all of you is that you each someday have a friend like Jonny—somebody who really sees you as an artist, who understands what you are all about creatively, and who celebrates and supports your work for many years on end.

Jonny has always been one of my first readers for all my work, and I am one of his—and I proudly assert that I am his biggest fan. (Although that’s an audacious assertion, because many in the literary world admire my friend.) As a novelist, Jonny is just as complex and daring as he is as a chef and musician—and he will never take the easy path. Each one of his books has tackled some impossible karmic puzzle, or has been told in some brave and unusual new way. He never shies away from moral dilemmas or artistic conundrums that would leave a less courageous writer shaking in their boots. As you will see by the prompt he has offered this week, even as a child Jonny Miles was not afraid to look darkness in the eye, to feel big feelings, and to shirk easy conclusions.

Every time Jonny writes a new book, I tell him, “This is your best one yet!”—because it is. Each novel has been bolder and better than the last. That’s the beauty of knowing a fellow creator for so many decades—you can watch them grow, watch them step into their greatness.

Jonny’s new book is called Eradication, and guess what, you guys? This one really is his best novel yet. I could sit here praising it all day long, but let’s just say that the legendary book critic Ron Charles, in what might have been his final review for the Washington Post, has officially declared it “an instant classic.” And so it is.

Only my courageous writer friend Jonny could place an entire novel on an island filled with goats, throw in one man with a terrible set of moral decisions to make, and create from that stark world a book that is as funny as it is frightening, as humane as it is scary—and, for better or for worse, incredibly timely.

I am so proud of you, Jonny. Thank you for being my brother, and for being the best. Over to you for a prompt!

And rest up, Suleika. We will keep a candle burning in the window for you.

Love,
Liz Gilbert (email address, phone number, and home address redacted!)

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Our Next Journaling Club—

Mark your calendars for next Sunday, March 1, 2026 from 1-2pm ET—for our virtual hour of writing and conversation, where we create together and find inspiration and accountability. We’ll be talking about how a daily creative practice is enriched by community, both the online and the in-person kinds. Paid subscribers will receive the Zoom link the day before.

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Prompt 372. When Doves Cry by Jonathan Miles

Picture a skinny little boy holding an old-timey BB gun. It’s mid-afternoon in a Phoenix suburb, the arid desert light blanching everything in sight including the soda cans the boy has been lazily plinking. The boy is alone: a “latchkey kid,” in the parlance of the times, occupying an empty house and yard until his parents return from work. He’s bored. The cans don’t stand up very well once they’re riddled with excess BB-holes and aren’t as much fun to plink. He’s already guzzled a six-pack of his mother’s Tab for these targets and another twelve ounces might burst his insides. And then he spies, on the branch of a Palo Brea tree, a bird.

That little boy is me. I’m eleven years old, and aside from shoe scorpions and garage black widow spiders and the few unlucky fish I’ve hooked at a park pond, I’ve never killed or harmed anything in my life. So I don’t know what I’m thinking as I line up the bird—a small Inca dove, gray as wood ash—in my gun sights. Not malice, I don’t think, though recklessness can be a form of malice. Curiosity, perhaps. The dumb haze of childhood boredom. It’s a distant shot; I’m sure to miss. The BB gun pops as I pull the trigger. I don’t miss.

Tears go springing from my eyes before the bird has even touched the ground. I’m sobbing by the time I reach it, and though the bird is still, I pump a dozen or more BBs into its head to ensure no suffering, using my forearm to wipe the tears from my cheeks between shots. I kneel beside it. “I’m sorry,” I tell it, over and over again, the gravity of what I’ve done—killing—so heavy upon me that I’m not sure I can stand back up, now or ever. Gravity, and shame: guilt so piercing that I find myself scanning the yard for possible witnesses, human or otherwise, envisioning their scowls of disgust and unable to conjure even a single word in my defense. Aside from a lizard scaling a concrete block wall, though, there are no witnesses. I’m all alone. Just me and my crime.

How do you right a wrong? I hold the warm bird in my hands, gently, as though not to injure it, my eyes still leaking tears. I’ve seen my cat, Miss Kitty, kill birds, and while I wish she wouldn’t do that, I’ve never deemed her kills criminal or immoral because Miss Kitty always eats the birds she catches, just like the Inca dove must’ve eaten ants and beetles. Gradually, a form of atonement becomes clear: I need to eat the bird in my hands. Eating it is the only way to square what I’ve done.

The problem is that I’m eleven and know neither how to clean a bird or cook one. The former turns out to be easy, a pocketknife being all I need to carve out some purple slices of meat. My latchkey kid cooking repertoire, however, is a single dish: the Triscuit pizza recipe on the side of the Triscuit box. I lay the slices of meat on some Triscuits and slide them into a toaster oven. As the oven glows orange, I can see my face reflected in it, my eyes puffed, my cheeks still glossed. The toaster oven dings.

What happens next will go ricocheting through the next forty-four years of my life. I carry the Triscuits to the counter, take a deep breath, and then, a small bite. Instantly, the sobs return. But I’m not crying for the bird this time, or rather not the bird alone. Because it isn’t until this moment, when my teeth encounter the meat, that I understand, with a lightning strike of realization, where meat comes from: not from the Safeway butcher case, swaddled in cellophane, no, but from sentient animals, from living breathing mothered fathered creatures, like the bird, that don’t just die for my supper but are killed for it. Behind nearly every meal I’d ever savored—my mother’s lasagna, my grandmother’s roast beef, the pepperoni dotting my Triscuit pizzas—was an animal someone had slaughtered, was a face that someone had made sure I didn’t have to see. Nature wasn’t separate from me: Nature was me, and I was nature.

This would be a tidier story if I’d ended that afternoon a vegan. But I didn’t. I finished eating the bird that afternoon and still eat meat today—but never without the twinging awareness of where it comes from, what it means. Only by taking a life was I able to apprehend life’s—and death’s—true dimensions, dimensions expertly concealed by modern life. Behind almost everything we do, I learned—don leather shoes, swipe on lipstick colored red from crushed insects, rest our heads on down pillows—there’s a figurative bird. Or there was.

This is your prompt:

Write about a scalding experience that gave you knowledge—wanted or unwanted—about the world and its ways. What illusions were shattered? How did you contend with losing those illusions?

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Today’s Contributor—

Jonathan Miles is the author of the novels Dear American Airlines and Want Not, both New York Times Notable books, Anatomy of a Miracle, and most recently Eradication. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, where he served as a columnist. In 2024 he toured as a multi-instrumentalist in the band of the Grammy-winning artist Jon Batiste. He currently serves as Writer-in-Residence at the Solebury School in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and makes the best pork ribs east of the Mississippi.

If you fell off from our our 30-Day Journaling Project in January, or just felt the need to ease into the year, you can find the full 30-Day Journaling Project archived here—along with musical pairings and video conversations with Jennifer Garner, Jon Batiste, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Michael Bierut for creative inspiration.

As community member Laura wrote, “I started the 30 days strong then got behind and will likely spread it to 60 days or even use the prompts all year—they are magical.” They’re ready when you are, whether you’re picking back up, like Laura, revisiting, or just beginning.

30 Prompts for Living the Questions

There are versions of ourselves we imagine we have left behind, only to discover they have not gone anywhere at all—that they’ve been quietly waiting, humming beneath everything that came after.

For me, that version lived inside a double bass. I began playing at eight, and by adolescence, classical music was no longer a hobby but the axis around which my entire life revolved. I practiced every day of the week and spent my free time taking part in concerto competitions, youth orchestras, summer music camps. At sixteen, I was recruited to Juilliard’s pre-college program on a full scholarship, which required weekly pilgrimages to New York City: a seven-hour round trip from our town in upstate New York.

I worked harder and harder, compressing five or six hours of practice into each school day, waking at five and finding more hours wherever I could. It was grueling, but it clarified everything—ambition has a way of doing that. I knew who I was and what I wanted to become. I dropped out of high school during what would have been my senior year to devote myself fully to music. Conservatory was the plan. Becoming a classical musician was the future.

And then, just as quickly, that future began to narrow.

At seventeen, during my final year of Juilliard pre-college, there was an opening in the bass section at the New York Philharmonic—an event that occurs perhaps once a decade. Watching the process unfold—the thousands of musicians, the immense pressure to be perfect—was sobering. I realized I was among the strongest student bassists, but not the strongest. I was great, but not sublime; talented, but not transcendently gifted. The odds of achieving my dream began to resemble something closer to a lottery—one I was training for as if it were a certainty.

A few weeks later, my beloved teacher died, and the path narrowed further. Homer Mensch—who lived up to his surname in every sense—had been my fiercest advocate, a steadying presence, almost a grandfather. In the midst of that grief, I found myself briefly buoyed by the prospect of studying with the only female bass teacher on staff. Instead, I discovered she was not only harder on me than on my male peers, but often needlessly cruel. The joy the instrument once brought me began to feel like pressure—constant, low-grade, unrelenting. When I mentioned to my new teacher that, on a whim, I had visited Princeton with a friend and was questioning whether conservatory was the right path, she said without hesitation: That’s a much better fit for you. You’re pretty enough to marry a rich man by graduation. You should just do that.

I did not quit then, but something in me fractured—though I chose to ignore it. I couldn’t see another way forward. I had invested too much personally, never mind what my parents had sacrificed. The next week, I applied to Princeton because it had one of the strongest collegiate orchestras in the country; it offered the possibility of continuing to play seriously while also tending to the part of me that wanted an education beyond the practice room.

I spent all four years playing in the orchestra. But something had shifted. By my final year, the discipline had thinned out, along with what was left of my joy. When I moved to Paris after graduation for my first job as a paralegal, it was the first time in my life I did not bring my bass with me. Even then, when all signs pointed to the end, I told myself this was temporary. A temporary break.

Over the next fifteen years, whenever people asked why I quit playing, I said it was because I got sick—that the bass is such a physical instrument and I no longer had the strength. True, but incomplete. I had quit long before that, in ways too gradual to name. I carried shame around the quitting—not only of the bass, but of what it seemed to reveal about me: someone excessive, absolutist, all in or all out. Someone who did not know how to live in the in-between.

I had to confront all of this—feelings I had buried and camouflaged so expertly, sealed inside a closed chapter of an earlier life—when, in the spring of 2025, Jon suggested I play bass onstage with him during my book tour.

Absolutely not, I said.

Playing bass onstage again, in front of thousands of people, sounded less like bravery than public humiliation—like being an excellent teenage gymnast and then, decades later, attempting a double-back dismount off the high bar.

I wasn’t having it. I told Jon I had too much on my plate, no time for lessons or practice—and where was my bass anyway? But he persisted, gently reminding me that one of The Book of Alchemy’s central premises is to cultivate a creative practice without the end goal being perfection.

A week before tour, I finally relented—but by then there was no time to practice. I see now that this constraint was essential. Each night, when I pulled the bass from behind the curtain and onto the stage, there was an audible gasp of surprise from the audience—and a corresponding one in me. My nervous system did parkour. Sometimes I surprised myself by playing in tune. Often I didn’t. But every time, I felt unexpectedly exhilarated—not because I was good, but because being good was no longer the point.

How liberating it was to return without needing excellence as a shield. To touch the instrument in defiance of fear. By the final tour stops, I was improvising. I was having fun. I was free.

Which is why the words of today’s guest contributor, the creative director Isabelle Raphael, stayed with me. She writes about quitting with unsparing tenderness—about love and disappointment, about the versions of ourselves others are invested in, and about how these decisions become a kind of compass. Her essay neither redeems quitting nor condemns it. It invites us to reflect on something more interesting: what we carry forward after we stop.

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A Few Things to Know—

Our next Journaling Club is Sunday, March 1, 2026 from 1-2pm ET. It’s a virtual hour of writing and conversation—a place to create quietly, together.

If you took part in the 30-Day Journaling Project, think of this as a way to drop back into that inspiration and accountability. And if you didn’t, it’s a wonderful introduction to the depth, care, and creativity of this community. Paid subscribers will receive the Zoom link the day before.

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Last week, a community member named Ashley shared a reflection on her experience with the 30-Day Journaling Project that I haven’t stopped thinking about. She wrote about how unexpectedly nourishing it felt—and how the variety of prompts opened up new ways of being with herself.

“I wrote a haiku,” she said. “I sketched while listening to music. I made a list. I drew a closed-eye self-portrait. I printed carefully with my non-dominant hand. I laughed. I cried.”

If that kind of guided exploration feels like something you could use right now, all 30 prompts are gathered in one place, ready whenever you are—whether you want to return, revisit, or begin again.

30 Prompts for Living the Questions

Prompt 371. Nineteen Moves Ahead by Isabelle Raphael

When I was twelve, every Saturday my dad drove me to chess lessons with a Russian woman named Irena. With Irena, I studied Soviet games from the 1980s. The beauty of Anatoly Karpov’s play: slow, grinding, joyless victories where your opponent didn’t realize they were dead until move 38. She trained my tween mind to think nineteen moves ahead.

My dad drove me to competitions around Sydney and stood behind me, arms crossed, quietly proud. At a sports game, he would have been yelling from the sidelines, “Throw the ball to Isabelle! Someone please throw the ball to Isabelle!” But with chess, he watched in silence, smiling.

And I won. Actual trophies—not my usual “third place in a race with three people” situation. It was the first thing I was actually good at.

I liked being good, but what I liked more was how proud my dad was of me. He believed in me with a certainty I didn’t yet have. I was his little Bobby Fischer, and in his eyes, I was going to go far.

Once we traveled from Australia to New York in the middle of winter. We bonded over antique chessboards on the Lower East Side, then went to Washington Square Park, where he plonked me down opposite a group of old men and their boards. Cigarette smoke. Thermoses. Wooden timers. A look of incredulity on their faces. They’d been playing there every day for forty years. I was a socially awkward twelve-year-old Australian girl in a thin jacket, unprepared for the cold or their skill.

But when I saw my dad’s face—his pride in his little Bobby Fischer facing off against these grizzled New Yorkers—I punched the clock and played my little heart out. For him.

As I moved from tween to teen, the social cost of chess started to show. Spending Saturdays studying Garry Kasparov’s queen sacrifices became a liability. I wanted to be cool, and chess was not cool.

I rehearsed how to tell my dad I wanted to quit, imagining his disappointment—or worse, that crumpled look of sadness. Chess was something that had bonded us, and I was walking away from it. But the pull of social status was stronger. I didn’t want the stench of chess on me as I entered my fourteenth year.

I was certainly given a look—stern, fiercely disappointed—when I told him. What I hadn’t rehearsed was how to live with my dad thinking I was a quitter. He may have said it once, or maybe I just internalized the disappointment. Either way, I didn’t want it to become a defining trait: that I quit the only thing I was actually good at.

A few years later, I learned I’d miscalculated. I was seventeen, at a party, awkwardly orbiting a group of boys who barely registered my existence, when I spotted two of them playing chess. I hadn’t played in four years. My game was rusty. Nineteen moves ahead had shrunk to four. But since my social standing was already nonexistent, I saw an opening.

I asked if I could play.

As the game went on, a few guys gathered around the board. I heard one of them murmur, “Pretty cool that she’s so good.” I won.

I ran home to tell my dad. He smiled—just for a second—then shook his head. “You shouldn’t have quit.”

I never really played again. And yes, quitting chess was a mistake. I walked away from something I was good at, something that may have brought me joy and friends and a sharper mind. But quitting was also part of growing up. Of learning that sometimes you will disappoint people. Sometimes you will defy the version of yourself someone else is invested in. And in time I came to understand the weight of that choice, and that has been a compass, one that reminds me not to let other people’s ideas of what’s cool decide my path, and applies a quiet pressure to keep going, believe in myself, even when no one is standing behind me, arms crossed, watching, smiling proudly.

This is your prompt:

Write about something you quit. For better and worse.

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Today’s Contributor—

is an Australian creative director living in Austin, Texas, where she works with brands and startups. She spends a lot of time floating in bodies of water and two-stepping. Sometimes she tells stories about walking around New York with no shoes, and sometimes she writes about the things that make changed her life that week.

A special thank you—

The Alchemy Tour was so full of love it still knocks the wind out of me when I think back on it. Thank you to all of you who showed up, listened generously, and cheered on my very imperfect bass playing.

I also want to offer a special note of gratitude to Duettist, a new nonprofit project launched with Unlikely Collaborators to support and inspire creative partnerships. Jon and I would not have been able to create the tour without them. A deep bow to Duettist—and to Doug McGray in particular—for saying yes to our wild idea and being there for us every step of the way. You can learn more about their work, and about some of the other collaborations they’re helping bring into the world, at duettist.com.

I had no business standing on a street corner in Bushwick at 7 a.m. during a polar vortex, waiting for a dog named Bob.

I was keeping my eyes peeled for a large white transport truck called Lucky Tails Express—a cross-country rescue van arriving from Texas with forty shelter dogs packed inside. We weren’t adopting Bob—just fostering, something I do when time and life allow. It was eight degrees. Snowbanks rose to my waist. I was wearing pajamas, my house sweater, a scarf, and farm boots. In my excitement, I had forgotten something fairly crucial: a coat.

I had strong-armed my friend Holly into coming with me because she is an animal whisperer. She also lives on a farm in upstate New York and understands winter—and had dressed accordingly: insulated boots, three sweaters, a coat, hat, gloves. She looked at me as I stood there, grinning wildly and shivering slightly, and said with genuine disbelief, “How are you beaming right now?”

“Rescuing animals is how I access my inner child,” I told her, which felt both true and like something I should unpack with a therapist.

With each passing minute, more people arrived. They pulled up in salt-encrusted Subarus, stepped out of taxis, materialized from side streets—fellow fosters all—each holding a leash or a dog sweater and, sensibly, dressed for actual winter. The gathering took on the air of a motley flash mob assembling for a coordinated dance number.

When the truck finally pulled up, the air filled with barking. The rescue organizer—thick New York accent, no-nonsense—called out, “Not to be curt, but once you get your dog and check out, get the fuck out. It’s cold and we’ve got forty dogs in here.”

Bob was a senior. A big boy. “Nobody wants the big boys,” the rescue had told me, which immediately made me want him. When he stepped off the transport truck, my first thought was how shockingly emaciated he was. He’d been found as a stray. Looking closer, I saw the scars stippling his legs and the broken, missing teeth—the hieroglyphs of a hard life. And yet: sweet, soulful brown eyes in a grizzled black-and-tan face.

I have a soft spot for seniors in need of a warm, safe place to land. And at that moment, I had something rare: space. Emotional, mental, figurative, literal.

Or so I thought.

Within a few hours of bringing him home, what I’d assumed was just a cold declared itself as the flu. Exhausted and bleary-eyed, I loaded myself, my three dogs, and Bob into the car and drove to the farm—only to discover the heat wasn’t working and every pipe in the house had frozen. No running water. No shower. No bath for Bob, who desperately needed one. Friends were supposed to arrive. Family too, for a Grammy watch party. One pipe thawed, then froze again overnight. I packed the dogs back into the car and decamped to the city.

Nothing went according to plan.

And then, yesterday, Bob began to settle. He softened. When he first arrived, he was understandably disoriented, whimpering every time I left the room. As I write this, he’s curled up beside me, wrapped in the softest blanket I could find. He’s been asleep for hours, snoring deeply—like someone who’s been holding it together for years and has finally realized he doesn’t have to. As he waits to find a forever home, Jon has given him a name upgrade: Billy Bob Bo Bob Blanky Dank Batiste. Robert, for short.

There are moments when you can’t fix what’s wrong. You can’t control your body, the weather, the pipes, the thwarted plans. But you can offer a warm, soft place to land—to a person, to an animal, to yourself. That, at least, is within reach.

Which brings me to this week’s guest contributor and prompt. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen writes with piercing clarity about power and control—about the stories we tell ourselves regarding our bodies, our strength, our agency, and what happens when those illusions crack. Her essay met me exactly where I was: sick, humbled, reminded that control is often provisional at best. Her words invite us to look honestly at the moments when the wheel slips from our hands—and to ask what we do next.

P.S. If you’re interested in adopting a rescue dog, please check out True North Rescue Mission’s available pups. And keep an eye out for Bob, though he may or may not be available for adoption by the time you read this.

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One more thing—

I’ve gotten several messages asking whether the 30-Day Journaling Project is still accessible. Some of you are just arriving. Some paused midway and are ready to pick it back up. And some finished and feel the pull to begin again. As community member Katie shared, she’s thinking of starting the days over—to see where she’s been, to notice where she’s headed now.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can find the full 30-Day Journaling Project archived here—along with musical pairings and video conversations with Jennifer Garner, Jon Batiste, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Michael Bierut for creative inspiration. It’s there whenever you want to return, revisit, or begin again.

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Prompt 370. Power & Control by Anna Quindlen

Samantha deftly threads the needle and then brings me a can of ginger ale. Above me are the two bags, one full of saline solution, the other the dark burgundy of iron. It turns out I have become anemic. “Listless and weak,” it says in the Webster’s on the stand atop my desk. This is contrary to how I think about myself in every possible way.

This is about my hemoglobin, my ferritin, my breathlessness, my fatigue. It can all be fixed with these infusions, drip, drip, drip. Somehow I have made it about much more than that, about power and control. After all, what’s not?

Hundreds of years ago, long before the invention of the x-ray machine, ordinary people lived with the tacit acknowledgement that the business of their bodies was a mystery, that life and death often jostled one another for position side by side, that illness was inevitable. It was all a matter of the fates and the gods.

But that is not where we live now. We have all absorbed the idea that we can manage our bodies by diet and exercise, oversee them with mammograms and colonoscopies, blood tests, and pressure cuffs. I have been, throughout my life, what I suppose you could call a compliant patient, although this is contrary to my character, too.

So there exist more iterations of my insides on film than there are versions of the Avengers movies. I know, because I’ve seen most of them. I’m the annoying person who convinced the radiologist to let me look at the mammogram on the computer, who has the wonderful GI guy who lets me stay awake to watch the colonoscopy, to the horror of my friends. “Remind me again what medical school you attended,” one of them once said.

Power and control. And then my body turned on me, in this small way. I had to halt my walking pace on the hills to breathe, pause in the middle of hoisting kettle bells. The healthiest patient I have, my GP said, and still my iron had gone south. There were only three times in the past when my body took the wheel, unequivocally, powerfully, inarguably. But at least at the end of each of those I got a baby out of the bargain.

I know anemia is small potatoes. I know because some of the people around me are not getting iron infusions, but chemo, which makes me feel like a fraud as Samantha offers me pretzels as I drip drip drip. And maybe, it occurs to me, this minor setback, easily dealt with, is the preparation for other, more serious losses to come, other times when I am essentially powerless against what aging, and mortality, bring. But for now, I want to look at blood test results that show the hemoglobin climbing, to realize on my morning walk that I have not had to stop, not once. I am back in control.

We all love our illusions, don’t we?

This is your prompt:

Write about a moment where you realized you weren’t all-powerful—that control was an illusion. Did you cling to it, or did you let it go? What happened then?

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Today’s Contributor—

Anna Quindlen’s eleventh novel, More Than Enough, is being published this month. You can find information about her book tour here. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times column “Public and Private.” Her memoir of aging, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and her book A Short Guide to A Happy Life has sold more than a million copies. Her hemoglobin appears to be rising.

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For the first time in as long as I can remember, my calendar is empty.

The last few years have been a nonstop sprint—our documentary American Symphony, my first art exhibit, The Book of Alchemy, the book tour, the Alchemy Journal, the New Year’s Journaling Project—so much motion that momentum began making decisions for me. This sudden quiet feels strange. Outside the daily rhythms of normal work and life, there’s nothing scheduled. No big work trips. No deadlines. No mountains to climb. (Except for leukemia and chemo, which rudely declined my cancellation request.)

Looking ahead, I feel a mix of excitement and unease. It’s been years since I’ve had so little I was required to do. Left to myself, I’m adept at filling empty space with busyness—but I’m determined to treat this pause as an invitation: to rest, to step out of the weeds and survey the terrain of my life, to consider what I truly want next, and to move with intention.

In moments like this, I find myself wishing for an office with walls made entirely of whiteboards. In lieu of a remodel, I did the next best thing: I went office-supply shopping and came home with a stack of giant Post-it notes. They’re now on my walls, waiting patiently to be filled with 2026 dreams and ideas—some ambitiously big, some modest, and some inevitably Lentil-sized.

As January closes and February opens—at a moment in a world thick with rage, heartbreak, and uncertainty—I want to share a prompt that has been a companion of mine for nearly six years. It’s one I’ve returned to in hospital rooms, while on the road, in moments of clarity and in seasons when the future felt terrifyingly opaque. It’s no exaggeration to say that it changed my life.

The prompt is called “A Day in the Life of My Dreams,” and it comes from my friend Hollye Jacobs.

I first began writing to it in the early days of the pandemic, when I felt adrift—professionally, personally, existentially. I knew I was ready for a new chapter, but I had no map, no clear next step, no reassuring sense of momentum. My mind did what it does best: it panicked, it scolded, it catastrophized. It told me I was behind. That I was failing. That worth required the certainty of a plan, milestones, visibility, proof.

This prompt interrupted that spiral. Instead of asking What should I do? or What comes next? it pushed me toward something gentler and more to the point: What do you want? What becomes visible when you let imagination do the looking for a while?

Each morning, I described—without irony, without editing—a single ordinary day in a future I wanted to inhabit. Who I woke up next to. Where I lived. How I spent my time. How my body felt as the day unfolded.

Something shifted. The future, which had felt sealed shut, began to crack open. Possibility crept back in. And slowly—almost suspiciously—pieces of those imagined days began to materialize, not through any miraculous act of manifestation, but because I could articulate what I wanted and make small, incremental shifts toward it when opportunities appeared.

I trace many of the best things in my life back to this prompt: my marriage; our decision to move to a farm; finding ways to live in community, close to friends and family; writing this newsletter; building this space with you.

That’s why I wanted to re-share this prompt today. If you’re feeling stalled, scared, or unsure how to imagine yourself moving forward, consider this an offering. Creation begins with imagination. And sometimes the bravest thing we can do is describe a future that still feels fragile—and keep writing toward it.

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For the month of January, we gathered here to write our way through. Some of you journaled every day. Some journaled when you could. Some stood near the doorway, curious and observing.

And despite the inevitable interruptions, something real took place. I want to pause and say this plainly: your words have been a genuine astonishment to me.

From Jana: “The 30-day journaling has been a lifeline in a way I could never have predicted.”

From Giuliana: “This intimate, peopled ecosystem of emotional landscapes is a web I want to be part of.”

From Terri: “I need these prompts more than ever; they have sustained me in the wee hours as worries begin to consume me.”

I’ve been deeply moved by what emerged from our Rilke-inspired experiment in living the questions now, trusting that—someday—we might live our way into the answers.

If you missed it—we gathered all the prompts from our 30-Day Project into one simple post. You can find them here.

Begin today!

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Prompt 369. A Day in the Life of My Dreams by Hollye Jacobs

A few years ago, I was professionally betwixt and between.

I was ready for a new chapter but found myself rudderless, not knowing which way to turn or how to proceed. I felt wobbly and uncomfortable in the unknowing. Throughout my life, I had always felt a magnetic pull to particular lines of work, from my time at Ralph Lauren to hospice nursing and grief counseling to writing a book about my cancer journey. Finding meaning in work had always come quite naturally, but suddenly the natural pull was gone.

In its absence, my reflex was to dive into bottomless despair. This involved self-­criticism on a good day and feelings of worthlessness on a normal day. I had fully subscribed to this culture’s edict that in order to be worthy, I had to produce, earn money, accumulate accolades, and jump through all the hoops. Living in this state created a vicious cycle that was wholly exhausting. I realized I had to put a plug in this energy suck.

I did this through an exercise that I call “A Day in the Life of My Dreams.” Every morning, I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down with my journal to write. I turned off my thinking brain and opened the door for my dreams to emerge.

From the time I started writing “A Day in the Life of My Dreams,” my perspective brightened and my energy lightened. The stuckness that I felt evaporated. To my utter surprise and delight, I found that I began to have the exact experiences that just so happened to be in my dream life. As George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”

This is your prompt:

Imagine yourself at some point in the future—­maybe a year from now, maybe five, maybe ten—­living the life of your dreams. This is a normal day, not a holiday or a special day; rather, it is a typical and perfect everyday. What do you see? What do you feel? What do you hear? What do you taste? Who is there with you in your dream day? Describe the day in present tense, from the moment you wake up to the moment that you go to sleep. Creation begins with imagination.

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Today’s Contributor—

Hollye Jacobs, RN, MS, MSW, is a resilience coach, nurse, speaker, and author. As a coach, Hollye supports and empowers people as they navigate life’s inevitable challenges and transitions with strength, confidence, and compassion, and she shares practical strategies to help people find clarity, purpose, and a path forward. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010, she writes about her experience in her New York Times bestselling book, The Silver Lining: A Supportive and Insightful Guide to Breast Cancer. Find her on Instagram @hollyejacobs.

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In this interstitial moment before the new year, I turn toward reflection. I usually revisit the past year by noting the epic moments, the small joys, and the harder passages—a record of what stayed with me. But there’s a narrowing to this kind of accounting. Cataloguing our highs and lows pulls memory toward extremes, collapsing the year into binaries: good and bad, desirable and undesirable—what we push away and what we cling to.

So this year—inspired by today’s guest essay and prompt (more on that later)—I’m trying something different. I’m reviewing the year through the lens of what felt sacred: what felt strangely aligned, what sustained me. Nothing held that feeling more clearly than my return to the fatherland—to Tunisia—my first time back since getting sick.

My parents live part-time in Tunis. Their apartment is tucked into a walled courtyard, set slightly apart from the street—especially my mom’s rooftop studio. It’s the only room up there, modest and a little miraculous. Whitewashed walls. Hand-painted tiled floors, worn thin by centuries of footsteps. Light that arrives early and doesn’t seem in a hurry to leave.

From the windows, the Gulf of Tunis appears as a long spill of aquamarine. When the call to prayer begins, it doesn’t so much sound as spread, pouring in from every direction, wrapping the room in vibration. The sky feels close enough to touch.

I spent long days walking the medina with my mom—through the small shops of the souk, past her community murals, 1001 Briques and 1001 Mains—but each evening I climbed back up to the roof to paint. Hours at a time, losing track. Watching watercolor bloom, spread, thin, then surprise.

Later, my mom told me she’d been so busy with the daily logistics of living that she hadn’t been using the studio much. Watching me up there stirred a small, unexpected envy. And then it became obvious to her: it was her studio, after all. She could use it whenever she wanted!

“I’m going to harness the good energy you set in motion,” she told me. Since then, she’s returned to a daily painting practice.

Another holy site: the family house where I spent my summers growing up—the house my dad and his brothers built with their own hands outside their hometown of Gabès, on a rural stretch of land where the Sahara meets the sea. I noticed the changes almost immediately. A giant turtle shell now leans against a wall, hauled home from the beach, alongside other offerings added over the years—shells, sea glass, a worn fisherman’s net.

The red window where my cousins and I used to sit is now blue, and from sun and sea winds, the paint has faded and cracked. The result is a lovely patina (a word I love almost as much as the thing itself). I hope no one ever paints over it. And when they do, inevitably, I hope this modest record helps me remember it exactly as it is now.

One of the biggest changes to the house is the land around it. My uncle Mounir has been farming it, planting fields of peppers and mint among the olive trees they put in when I was young. It was harvest time. He shook olives from the trees to turn into the olive oil he sells in small batches; he picked peppers, laid them out to dry for harissa.

Watching him, I kept thinking of my own garden—much smaller, just a tiny fenced plot—that nonetheless delivered its bounty all summer, and of the outsized pride I felt the first time I filled a basket with cherry tomatoes, briefly wondering if this is how parents feel at graduation.

We took a day trip to a factory town where they make ceramics, bricks, and tiles. On the long drive home, we stopped at a roadside gas station, and that’s when I noticed a building a few doors down. It looked abandoned, but through the window I could see it was full of antiques. The door was open, so I let myself in and persuaded my companions to follow—an act that instantly turned them into accomplices, they were quick to point out.

Inside, it was even more crammed than it looked; we had to shimmy through the aisles. The sun was setting, so I used the flashlight on my phone, pulling objects from shelves and stacking my favorites—first carefully, then with the unrestrained enthusiasm of someone who had lost track of the plot.

When the pile began to feel ambitious, I went looking for the proprietor. “Whose place is that?” I asked next door. We were led to a man—silently chainsmoking, possibly very inebriated—who brought us back, turned on the lights, and gestured us upstairs, as if we’d passed a test we hadn’t known we were taking.

The rooms multiplied as we climbed. Mirrors and paintings crowded the walls; shelves overflowed with ancient clay pots. Baskets and chandeliers hung overhead. Behind a partial wall was his bedroom, and on it hung the only modern photograph in the place: a school portrait of him at eleven—tender, unsettling, somehow both very close and very far away.

The experience left me feeling gently rearranged. Which is why, the next morning, feeding a bottle to a baby camel named Mahmoud felt entirely coherent—a continuation of the same dream logic. Just look at his lashes.

Returning made the losses unmistakable. Since I was last here, my grandmother Cherifa and my uncle Jilani have both died.

At the family house in Gabès, I came across my father’s elementary school diploma, which for years had hung on the wall of Jilani’s bedroom. Jilani himself never graduated from elementary school, which made the gesture feel especially tender—an act of pride, of devotion, of faith in someone else’s becoming.

Then there was my own small recovery. As I moved through the bookshelves, I found the books I’d read there as a teenager, waiting for me, as if they’d simply been holding my place.

Before leaving, a relative handed me a photograph of my grandfather, who died before I was born. It was the first photograph I’d ever seen of him—there simply aren’t many. I couldn’t get over how familiar he looked, until someone said, gently, that I was his carbon copy. We also visited the troglodyte village where he and my grandmother lived during World War II—homes built underground to escape the desert heat and, when necessary, to avoid detection.

It was disorienting, yes—but also anchoring. I had a brand-new journal with me, and finding myself back where I once spent hours as a teenager with pen and paper—dreaming, making lists, trying things out—felt less like returning than resuming. Like picking up a sentence mid-thought.

That feeling followed me home. It’s what drew me to today’s guest essay, “The Sacred Hallway” by —perhaps best known as Dwight Schrute on The Office, but also a writer, podcaster, and seeker. In the essay, excerpted from his book Soul Boom Workbook, he writes about an ordinary place that becomes sacred after life moves through it.

As this year draws to a close, may you take a moment to notice what is already shaping you—in the rooms you pass through, the habits you return to, the unfinished sentences awaiting.

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Prompt 364. The Sacred Hallway by Rainn Wilson

Excerpted from Soul Boom Workbook

The most sacred place I can possibly think of is a drab hallway, lit by flickering fluorescent lights and lined by folding chairs, in the back of a crappy hospital in Van Nuys, California.

Why? Because that is where my wife and son almost died during childbirth.

After the 2 a.m. hemorrhaging and the ambulance and even more bleeding and no available rooms and the nurse being unable to find my son’s heartbeat and my wife being placed on a bed in the hallway and the staff being unable to reach our doctor on his pager and the five units of blood lost and the cord wrapped around our baby’s little neck and the panic and prayers, Dr. Foroohar burst into the delivery room at 4 a.m., bellowing for a C-section, and successfully cut young Walter McKenzie Wilson out of his traumatized mother’s womb.

Holiday Reinhorn, my wife, overcame pain and terror with a power that was greater than that of any Marvel superhero.

When she was, thankfully, pronounced stable, and three-minute-old Walter was brought to my trembling arms in that same hallway, and I gazed into his bright blue eyes, I felt God, the universe, meaning, hope, life, and energy in a way I never have before or since.

You see, sacred doesn’t need to mean a church or shrine or holy relic or monument. Sacred can mean linoleum and aluminum chairs and chipped paint and the smell of Lysol at four in the morning.

Sacred can be an action and not just a place. It can mean the sacrifice (notice the Latin root word “sacer,” meaning “holy,” in both) that women like Holiday make to carry the children of Planet Earth and bring them—painfully, dramatically, and with a miraculous explosion of love and guts—into the world.

Holy is what we make it. How we experience it. And it can heal our society, too! The concept of preserving and honoring something sacred is a force that can unite folks on all sides of any political, ideological, or religious spectrum.

For some, nature is sacred. For some, it might be an altar. To part of the population, the awe and miracle of the cosmos evoke a holy magic. For others, it might be a battlefield where many brave men lost their lives. For some, it’s the right of self-expression; for others, it’s the right to worship that is most revered.

In Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, I wrote at great length about my pilgrimage to Haifa, and Akka, Israel, and visiting the holiest sites in the Baha’i world. I sought to evoke the profound feelings that blossomed in my heart, and the profound meaning that the prayerful trip brought up in me. And I explored how and why it’s so difficult to tap into what is consecrated in our mundane daily lives.

But the thing is, you don’t need to visit holy shrines to create a pilgrimage. When I took 12-year-old Walter to visit my childhood homes and schools and trees and playgrounds in Olympia, and Shoreline, Washington, that, too, was a kind of divinely inspired journey.

The swing set at Westside Elementary School where I lost my last tooth. The parking lot at Shorecrest High School where I asked my first girlfriend out on a date. (Walter: “Ew, Dad.”) These were sacred sites for me, in their way. Sharing them with my son had a kind of mysterious power.

It’s challenging to find what is sacred in the modern world. I live north of suburban Los Angeles, and there are an awful lot of dumpsters and freeway on-ramps and donut shops and endless power lines decorating the horizon here. Can any of those things really be holy?

Determining your sacred spaces, your divine connections, may be the touchpoint where your spiritual journey launches. For me, a visit to that particular Van Nuys hospital hallway may now be impossible, but Holiday and I hold its terrifying holiness in our hearts, and we will until the day we die. Maybe that’s what it’s all about.

Your prompt for the week:

Some people associate sacredness with stillness or quiet. Others with natural beauty and some with a place of worship. Below is the dictionary definition of “sacred.”

sacred: adjective [ ‘sā•cred ] dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity; devoted exclusively to one practice; worthy of religious veneration

Close your eyes and imagine what sacred looks like to you. What was the first image that popped in your mind? Was it a landscape? A beautiful object? A temple? An experience with loved ones? Now write about or draw that “something sacred.”

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Today’s Contributor—

Rainn Wilson is an Emmy-nominated actor, comedian, and New York Times bestselling author, best known for his portrayal of Dwight Schrute on The Office. Beyond his acting career, Rainn has been a passionate advocate for faith, spirituality, and creating a better world. He co-founded SoulPancake, a digital platform dedicated to life’s big questions, and authored Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution and co-authored its recently released follow up: Soul Boom Workbook: Spiritual Tools for Modern Living. Along with his popular Soul Boom podcast, you can follow his work on The Soul Boom Dispatch. His commitment to humanitarian causes includes climate activism and educational equity, exemplified by his work with Climate Basecamp, an initiative promoting climate action, and Lidé Haiti, a nonprofit providing Haitian girls in underserved communities with art-centered education in safe, nurturing spaces to support learning, health, and well-being.

For more paid subscriber benefits, see—

• Life is Like That, a video replay of our virtual creative hour with Michael Bierut, the renowned designer and originator of the 100-Day Project, where we talked about freedom in constraint, taking it one day at a time, and the actual value of a daily creative practice (hint: it’s not in the repetition—but something else)

• Marriage Vows & the Myth of the Good Catch, an installment of my advice column Dear Susu, where my husband Jon helps me answer this question from a reader: “Is it selfish to ask someone to marry you if you’re ‘broken’?”

• On Creative Lapses, a reflection from our 100-Day Project, where I write about the trap of all-or-nothing thinking and share my ritual for recommitting to a daily practice

Today is the winter solstice—the shortest day of the year, at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. The sun won’t rise until hours after I send this missive, and when it does, its rays will slide in sideways, glancing off the books on my shelves, pooling in the corner by the door, then dissolving into dusk within hours. Outside, the natural world is slowing, settling. Inside, I find myself wanting to do the same.

My mind goes from sun to moon now. I see the year in its final phase of waning, like the thinnest crescent still hanging on in the sky. In just ten days, we’ll begin our 30-Day New Year’s Journaling Project. I’ve already heard from so many of you: this is exactly what I need.

I feel the same way. I don’t think I’ve ever needed this project more than I do right now.

December has been, frankly, a lot: shingles for the second time, chemo side effects that flattened me, the news delivering heartbreak after heartbreak, the rush of last-minute gifts and end-of-year loose ends, and the seasonal pressure to be relentlessly merry. It’s left me craving less noise—and something that can bear weight.

I’ve been dreaming about what my new year might look like, turning questions over and over in my mind in a way that calms me in the midst of all the busyness, like a smooth stone rolling around in my palm. What creative rituals am I longing for? How can I make this year’s journaling project—our sixth—feel different, alive, newly charged? Again and again, my mind returns to the epigraph of The Book of Alchemy—a line by the poet Rilke:

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

To live the questions is to loosen the grip—not on control exactly, but on the belief that I ever held it. The universe does not bend to intention; it flares, veers, interrupts itself. Uncertainty is the ground we stand on. What remains within our reach is attention: the discipline of noticing, the choice to respond with imagination and care.

I was talking about this with Michael Bierut—the designer, educator, and originator of the 100-Day Project—during our creative hour last week. I asked him the same questions I was asking myself about our New Year’s Journaling Project, bouncing ideas off him, reveling in his insight. That conversation reminded me why I don’t do this practice alone, in my house, with only my dogs as witnesses.

Embarking on a new project is better in community, in conversation. Even in a busy season—when everyone I know seems to be moving one hundred miles a minute—I took a little time this week to text a handful of friends to ask if they’d join me in my journaling project (plus all of you, of course). It felt grounding to plant this small, glimmering marker in the near future: a place where I’ll arrive, after the holiday madness, to find myself again.

Anyone is welcome to join the 30-Day New Year’s Journaling Project by committing to a small creative act each day in January. Paid subscribers will receive daily prompts for inspiration, gentle accountability, ongoing group conversations, and a handful of special events sprinkled throughout the month. I’d love to have you—and anyone you think might need this, too—with us.

Join Me for the 30-Day Project

In the meantime, I’m sitting with today’s guest essay, “Why Make Art Now?” by Sarah Sentilles. When Sarah first sent it to me, I was struck by its clarity and quiet force. Rereading it this week, it feels newly charged.

Sarah’s words helped me gather myself. I hope they steady you, too—and help us remember what she calls “the certain knowledge that it’s possible to make something new.”

Not all at once.

Just enough to begin.

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Our Creative Hour with Michael Bierut

In the spirit of our New Year’s Journaling Project, I wanted to share this short clip from last Sunday’s Creative Hour with Michael Bierut—the legendary designer and originator of the 100-Day Project (a title he modestly resists, but one I stand by).

It was a genuine pinch-me moment: nearly a thousand of us gathered from all over the world—Maine to Hawaii, Norway to Spain to Brazil—to talk about how to cultivate a daily creative practice, the power of framing, and why creative work is less a high-wire act than a kind of dance (no net required). We talked about journaling—about staying with the day you’re in, and about the quiet relief of taking things one day at a time.

Paid subscribers can watch the full conversation here.

Prompt 363. Why Make Art Now? by Sarah Sentilles

When I say out loud that making art is one of the most urgent things we can do right now, even artists say, “You can’t be serious.” But I am serious. Art gives me hope, and this hope is not naïve. It’s not romantic or small or abstract. It’s concrete: glue and paint, scissors and tape, words and drawings, book pages and ink and gouache and oil and canvas and sentence after sentence after sentence. It’s the certain knowledge that it’s possible to make something new.

Artists were made for moments like these. This is what we have been practicing for. This is why we’ve been exercising our imaginations. So we can come up with alternatives. So we can dream up a better world. So we can remember who we are.

My training as a theologian and an activist and a feminist has taught me it’s possible to imagine a world other than the version peddled to us by people in power. And my training as an artist has taught me it’s possible to make that world. For I can see it; it’s just and it’s beautiful and it’s life-giving for the most vulnerable and precarious among us, for those who have been shut out and shut up and not believed, for the un-grieved and the untended, for the trees and the beasts and the winged ones and the rivers and the mountains, for the missing and the terrified and the suffering.

My mentor in graduate school, the late theologian Gordon Kaufman, a Mennonite minister and a Conscientious Objector, used to remind me that the version of God found in the creation story in Genesis is a poet and a potter. “That doesn’t tell us much about God,” he told me, “but it tells us what those writers thought about artists: They knew their work was world-making.”

Reading the news, yelling at the television, crying while listening to the radio, I’ve felt helpless. Filled with despair. Overwhelmed by rage. Distracted by every emergency that demands attention. I react, react, react, sending energy in a million different directions. But now is the time to recommit to what matters most to us. To put whatever it is that we call sacred at the center of our lives, of our days. To commit to the kind of world in which we want to live—and to decide who and how we want to be in that world. To take all that scattered energy and send it in a single direction. To take back our focus. Art can help us practice this.

Many of the artists I know worry that what they are doing is indulgent, pointless, a waste of time. And I know other people think this about artists, too. But making art is useful because it engineers hope. Not the “thoughts and prayers” kind of hope that lets people off the hook. Not the kind of hope that allows people to sit back and stake their faith on a bigger-than-us, other-than-us force that will magically rescue us from this mess we’ve made or release us into an afterworld where none of this matters. Art generates the kind of hope that helps us remember that we are that bigger-than-us force. We’ve made the world we find ourselves in—the one that’s on fire, the one with refugees drowning, the one with species after species after species going extinct, the one with people being bombed and bombed and bombed again. To admit this fact in all its devastation, to hold ourselves accountable for this violent creation, means to remember our agency. To remember that we can unmake this version of the world. We can reinvent. We can repair. If the cause is human, then so too is the remedy.

The impulse to make art is ancient and sacred. Those hands on the cave walls? They were reaching out to you. Reminding you that you are not alone. We are all in this together. Your art matters. It’s needed, essential.

We are all artists here, painters and cooks, sculptors and farmers, parents and writers, scientists and poets, teachers and musicians, and the muscles of our visionary minds are growing stronger and stronger. With every word, every piece of clay, every brushstroke, every stitch, we create a reimagined world, and we choose to live there, now.

Your prompt for the week:

Make a plan to create something: A painting, a poem, a pie, a garden bed, or a community mural. A practical object or something full of whimsy. A solo creation or a group project. List the materials you’d need and the steps involved—and see if you take one of those steps by the end of the day.

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Today’s Contributor—

Sarah Sentilles is a writer, teacher, and author of many books, including Draw Your Weapons, which won the PEN-America Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her most recent book, Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Idaho Book of the Year. A graduate of Yale and Harvard, she’s had residencies at Hedgebrook and Yaddo and is the co-founder of the Alliance of Idaho, which protects the human and legal rights of immigrants. She teaches workshops to support writers’ and artists’ creativity, like “Magic & Muscle for the End Times: How to Protect Your Writing When the World Is On Fire,” and publishes the newsletter, NibLit.

A few small, giftable things for the holidays—

Thoughtfully assembled bundles of beautiful desk-side companions meant to be used, marked up, carried around, lived with. Nothing flashy. Nothing fussy. Just good company for the page.

The marbled pouches have sold out (thank you 💙), but we still have a small number of bundles available. We’ll be happily packaging these up for the new year ahead, including our upcoming 30-Day New Year’s Journaling Project.

Visit the Alchemy Shop

We’re approaching my favorite season: the new year.

In those first days of January, my husband Jon and I clear our schedules and carve out a few days just for ourselves—to get quiet, to take stock of our previous turn about the sun, to consider what lies ahead, both known and deliciously unknown. For him, that means fasting and prayer. For me, it looks like returning to daily journaling with fresh intention. For both of us, it’s a period of apparent stillness—though, like the creature sealed inside its chrysalis, so much is rearranging itself beneath the surface.

I’m endlessly fascinated by what accrues when we commit to something tiny, daily, and ours. A practice doesn’t need grandeur to be transformative. It just needs to be repeated. One small gesture a day—almost embarrassingly small—can begin to shift the inner furniture. Sometimes it only moves a lamp. Sometimes it knocks down a wall.

When I was younger, I was convinced creative life came in cinematic bursts—lightning-strike epiphanies, long ecstatic stretches of inspiration, the perfect conditions aligning like planets. I’d write feverishly for a few days, fall off, and assume my inconsistency revealed something fatally flawed in me. The graveyard of half-filled notebooks on my shelves still mutters that old myth.

But everything changed during my first summer in the hospital, when I committed—out of equal parts desperation and hope—to a 100-day project with my family and friends. One creative act a day. Nothing fancy. A sentence, a doodle, a list. Something small enough that I couldn’t fail at it, yet sturdy enough to hold me.

That modest daily act became a lifeline. Not because the content was always profound—most entries were delightfully mundane—but because the consistency quietly began to work on me. Turning to the page each day created a sliver of distance, a bit of clarity, a tiny window cracked open in an otherwise airless room. Though nothing around me changed—the lumpy mattress, the IV pole, the prognosis—I was changed. More porous. More awake. More able to hold both the terror and the wonder of being alive in one open palm, one open page.

That’s what a daily ritual can do: not sweep you off your feet, but nudge you—one improbable millimeter at a time—toward the person you’re becoming.

Which is why it feels especially meaningful that today’s guest contributor is Michael Bierut, originator of the 100-day project. “The Art of Dailiness,” his quietly astonishing essay and prompt which appears in The Book of Alchemy, explores his own daily creative practice, the beginnings of the 100-day project, and the abundant, surprising fruit that small acts can bear over time.

I’m so thrilled that Michael will also be joining me for our virtual creative hour for paid subscribers this afternoon—today, December 14, from 1–2 p.m. ET. We’ll be talking about the art of dailiness, the discipline of small acts, and the mysterious ways something humble can become, over time, something luminous.

What’s your relationship to the new year—are you two on speaking terms, studiously avoiding each other, or quietly plotting something together?

PS. In case you missed the email about today’s creative hour with Michael Bierut, or you’re just upgrading to a paid subscription, you can find the link and everything they need to join us here.

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Prompt 362. The Art of Dailiness by Michael Bierut

In the wake of 9/11, I began making a drawing every day inspired by a photo in The New York Times. Like a lot of people, and as a New Yorker particularly, I felt deeply disoriented. It was a chaotic time, and I wanted to engage with current events, but on my own terms, in a meditative way. I didn’t realize that consciously in the moment. I just thought that drawing was nice, and that it’d be nice to have an excuse to draw every day, and also that doing it daily would take the pressure off. Maybe you screw it up one day, then the next you draw something pleasing—­that seemed appealing to me.

I began my daily drawings on January 1, 2002. My rule was simple. I would get that day’s paper and choose a picture—­something I thought was funny or interesting or provocative, or something I wanted to look at longer than anything else in the paper that day—­and use that as my source material. It might be a politician making a speech or a photograph from a conflict zone. Something that inspired me regularly was a feature the Times began running that February called Portraits of Grief, where every day they published life sketches of people who died on 9/11, along with a photograph of each—­usually a snapshot shared by the family. Some days I found myself in the mood to luxuriate in the drawing, and I would spend three hours on it. Other days I would say, “I won’t take another breath until I’ve finished.” I gave myself permission for both of those responses to be equally valid. Also equally valid was whether I actually captured a likeness or not. The practice had less to do with the output and more with getting myself in a proper frame of mind for the rest of my day.

It was a ritual I continued throughout the entire calendar year. This was before the omnipresence of social media, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to share these images with ­anyone—it was just something I was doing privately. However, at the time I was teaching graduate students in the graphic design program at Yale, and the director of the program somehow learned of this project and suggested I assign something like it to my students. The idea of the class undertaking something together—­but picking their own subject matter, instead of doing the same thing—­appealed to me immediately. The question then was, of what duration? I looked at the calendar and saw I was scheduled to teach two classes that year, one in the fall semester and one in the spring semester, and they happened to be exactly one hundred days apart. It was a coincidence, but it felt meaningful, the way a year had felt meaningful with my own project. It was almost as if that round number was telling me exactly what to do. So I wrote up a brief, and at the top, I typed “The 100-­Day Project”—­capitalizing every word to make it feel as if it was official. Then I wrote a simple prompt, very unstructured and open-ended: Starting tomorrow, do one creative act that you can repeat for 100 days.

For the next five years, I assigned that brief on the first day of class. As the students meditated on what their project might be, I would go around and talk to them and give feedback on the practicality of their ideas. For example, a student might say they wanted to take a picture at the same street corner near campus every day, which would prompt me to ask them, “Are you going away for the holidays?” They’d answer, “Yeah, to Phoenix, to see my parents.” So I’d tell them to figure out something portable—­something that would also work in Phoenix. In time, I came to see that there was a sweet spot between specificity and open-­endedness. There needed to be some constraints, but it was also important that they could make a choice, however small. But even when people hemmed themselves in, even when they came to me on day twenty-­two and said they never wanted to do their particular creative act again, I’d say, “Make your resistance the thing. See how that works.”

Mainly I tried to encourage my students to do things they wanted, and I was amazed again and again by what they came up with. One student took a well-­known poster from the 1950s and made a visual variation of it every day. There was one young woman whose preacher grandfather always gave the same very long sermon about heaven and hell, and she spent fifteen minutes every morning memorizing it, and at the end of the hundred days, she delivered that sermon from memory in front of the class. Another put on the song “Here Come the Warm Jets” by Brian Eno and began designing; when the song ended, the piece was done. One of the most memorable projects was by a student named Ely Kim, who filmed himself dancing to a different song in a different place every day. At the end, he edited all hundred clips into a seven-­minute video called “Boombox,” which jumped between him dancing in the stairwell of the art building, in his apartment, and back home in Las Vegas, where he was from, and dozens of other locations, too. It went viral and led to invitations to perform all over the world.

With something like the 100-­day project, there’s no right way to do it, and there’s no wrong way to do it. The reason this project works is the reason anything like this works: You can do it on your own terms, in your own way. It has nothing to do with any expertise that I or anyone else would profess to have about it. It’s that old saying: The only way out is through. You somehow have to work your way through the whole thing, and even if you hate 95 percent of the things you did, if you’ve made it to one hundred days, congratulations—­that’s amazing in and of itself.

Of course, not everyone makes it to the end, and that’s okay, too. I had students who dropped off quickly, some at two weeks, others after a month. Once people got about halfway, they had so much personal investment, and they had internalized the process enough, that there was a good chance they’d make it to the end. But even the ones who dropped out at two weeks would say, “I got so much out of it—­even just doing it for fourteen days.”

I’m always amused when I get credit for coming up with the 100-­day project, because part of what makes it interesting is that there’s nothing original about it. It’s what we all do every day. We do routine things, and we do things that require acts of imagination that we’re never going to do again, whether it’s naming a goldfish or responding to a stranger tripping over a curb. Toggling between such routine experiences and unique ones are what, in the aggregate, constitute life.

Your prompt for the week:

Write about a time when you began doing something daily, be it a creative endeavor, a new course of study, or a form of exercise. What prompted you to start it? What obstacles got in your way? When you felt resistance or missed a day, what called you back? Now reflect on what you gained from it and how you might apply that knowledge to a new daily creative practice.

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Today’s Contributor—

Michael Bierut is a partner of the international design consultancy Pentagram, a founder of the website Design Observer, and a teacher at the Yale School of Art and the Yale School of Management. His clients have included The New York Times and Saks Fifth Avenue, and as a volunteer to Hillary Clinton’s communications team, he designed the H logo for her 2016 presidential campaign. He has published a monograph on his work, How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things, Explain Things, Make Things Look Better, Make People Laugh, Make People Cry and (Every Once in a While) Change the World as well as a collection of essays, Now You See It. Elected to the Alliance Graphique Internationale and the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, he was awarded the profession’s highest honor, the AIGA Medal, in 2006.

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Earlier this week, I joined a book club hosted by —the educator known as “America’s Government Teacher,” which feels like the highest civilian honor short of having your face printed on currency. Sharon chose my memoir Between Two Kingdoms as one of her selections this year—an unexpected delight, considering the book turns five soon and should, by publishing-world standards, be settling into its quiet middle age.

The conversation was beautiful, but the true highlight arrived in the final minutes. Someone asked what my dogs would call me if they could speak. I didn’t hesitate: “My humble servant.” Because honestly, I do live to serve them, and it brings me unreasonable amounts of joy. I lifted Lentil into view—my attempt to present Exhibit A to the court—and this immediately derailed the conversation. Sharon, ever the professional, nudged us back on track only to confess that she, too, has three dogs, and she is fairly certain they call her… Sharon. Said with the clipped tone of a roommate who pays the larger share of the rent.

Any dog talk these days tends to trigger my favorite new party trick: the crowning achievement of my unofficial résumé—matching rescue dogs with humans in need. The book club was no exception. I began listing, with no apparent self-control, all the friends and acquaintances from L.A. to Texas to New York whom I’ve matched with their perfect pups.

This “side hustle,” as I generously call it, serves two purposes. First, it keeps me from adopting a fourth dog—something every member of my household (except me) agrees we are not emotionally or spatially prepared for. Second, it lets me funnel all my PetFinder scrolling into improving other people’s lives. A win-win, depending on whom you ask. There is such joy in connecting extraordinary animals with the humans who need them—watching that delight ripple outward. I’ve essentially become a dog doula, ushering these creatures into the next phase of their lives.

My own dogs are steady companions—anchoring me, buoying me, occasionally judging me. As I wrote in my essay The Gospel According to Dogs, published earlier this week, they’re my greatest teachers. They remind me how to live fully in the present. Their short lifespans—so unfair it borders on cosmic clerical error—teach me about impermanence and the urgency of cherishing the right-now. And though it’s heartbreaking to lose a beloved pet, they also teach me about my ever-expanding capacity for love.

I often think of Jane Goodall, who, when asked her favorite animal, didn’t say chimpanzees but this: “My favorite animal altogether is a dog because dogs have taught me so much and dogs are so faithful, and dogs give unconditional love, and I don’t like to think of a world without dogs.”

Of course, some of you may be cat people—and cats are their own particular riddle. Or maybe your beloved companion is a lop-eared bunny nibbling greens, a flock of parakeets staging daily opera rehearsals, or a tortoise demonstrating, with monk-like patience, exactly how slow and steady wins the race. Whatever the species, the animals in our radius change us. As one reader wrote in response to The Gospel According to Dogs:

A small creature restores shape in ways humans rarely manage: simply by being there with no demands and no narrative to uphold. Sometimes survival isn’t insight—it’s companionship that doesn’t ask you to perform.

So today, in praise of the creatures we love, I’m sharing “Dog Affirmations” by illustrator Andrea Cáceres, an excerpt from her new book—a funny, tender glimpse of the world as experienced by our canine sages. May it remind you of all the glorious ways our non-human companions help us, and all the things they’re quietly teaching us about being human.

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✨ Virtual Creative Hour (aka Journaling Club!)

Mark your calendars for Sunday, December 14, from 1–2 PM ET. I’ll be hosting, and I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be joined by a very special guest—Michael Bierut, designer, Yale professor, and originator of the 100-Day Project. I’m so excited for this, and I would love to have you there. We’ll send you the link and all the information you need to join the day before!

✨ A 30-Day New Year’s Journaling Challenge

A way for us to begin the year in conversation with our intuition rather than in battle with white-knuckled resolutions that were never built to hold our whole selves. Paid subscribers will receive:
• a daily prompt for reflection and inspiration
• gentle accountability
• and invitations to special gatherings sprinkled throughout January

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Prompt 361. Dog Affirmations by Andrea Cáceres

Whenever I feel overwhelmed, frustrated, sad, or scared, I ask myself, what does my dog Tobi think of the situation?

Is he annoyed I dropped his kibble on the floor, or excited he’ll get to pick up the pieces? Is he sad our plans got canceled, or is he happy we’ll get to cuddle at home all night?

This shift in perspective helps me come back to myself and see life for what matters.

Your prompt for the week:

Write about what the animals in your life have taught you. About life’s small joys, about following your instincts, about the rewards of being present, about unconditional love—in short, about living. What happens when you look at the world through their eyes?

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Today’s Contributor—

Andrea Cáceres is an illustrator and the creator of the viral Instagram series Dog Affirmations, and the new book Dog Affirmations: An Illustrated Journey Through Your Dog’s Thoughts. She is also the author of children’s picture books Hello, Tobi! and My Dog Just Speaks Spanish. She lives with her dog, Tobi, in New York City.

Rather than my typical Sunday missive, I’m here today with a note of gratitude—to say how thankful I am for this kind, generous, much beloved community. But first, will you permit a small detour?

Over the summer, a community member named Lauren wrote to me about fear—how it had always loomed large in her life, how as a child she rehearsed catastrophes (losing everything she owned, being orphaned), believing such imaginings might inoculate her against life’s inevitable blows. Only decades later did the real catastrophes arrive, and at quite a clip. First a hurricane, then wildfires, then illness—her own and that of people she loved—and she found herself undone.

“I realized nothing prepared me for it,” she wrote. “I didn’t know how to find my words anymore.” (I nodded. I’ve been there too—more than once.)

Around that time, she spotted The Book of Alchemy at her local bookstore and began reading it as soon as she got home. When Dani Shapiro asked in the book’s very first prompt, What would you write if you weren’t afraid? Lauren already knew her answer—only she was too exhausted to get up and retrieve her journal.

What came next was a librarian’s nightmare (and a dream for me): she began writing inside the book itself. In the margins, the white space, above essays, between lines. It felt, she said, “delightfully transgressive.” She kept going for 100 days. Her words unspooled. Color bloomed into meaning. She made the book entirely her own—“the most beautiful mess,” she called it.

“If I could, I’d hand it to you,” Lauren said. “I’d pass it reverently, the way I used to place my infants in other people’s arms, and I would beam at this incredible creature in your hands. I’d ask you to see how I’ve done the hard work of becoming sure of a few things—and here are all the places where it was happening.”

The hard work of becoming sure of a few things.

That may sound modest. In truth, it is seismic—a quiet tectonic shift of inner knowing. It’s no small thing to find slightly firmer footing through daily devotion to the page. To alchemize pain into form, form into meaning.

Journaling has always been that for me, too—here in community, and alone in the privacy of a notebook. An experiment in transmuting life’s interruptions into creative grist. A reminder that if I keep showing up to the page long enough, language eventually finds me again—and I find my way back to the world.

So today I want to say thank you.

Thank you for reading.
Thank you for witnessing each other with such care.
Thank you for turning the comments section into small, human benedictions: I’ve been there. I see you. I’ll be thinking of you.

Your stories spark more stories. They’ve shaped this community into something living. You’ve made some of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen—Lauren’s beautiful mess, yes, but also Linda’s knitted emotional-support chickens, Paul’s hospital doodles, Rhonda’s pinch pots of gratitude, Maryann’s ocean of blue notebooks. If there’s anything this community has taught me, it’s that showing up—tenderly, imperfectly, honestly—changes us.

With a new year peeking around the corner, I’ve been wondering what it might look like to start 2026 with a daily return to the page—one small creative act of attention and intention at a time.

I’m dreaming up a 30-day New Year’s Journaling Challenge—a way for us to enter the year in conversation with our intuition, rather than in battle with white-knuckled resolutions that were never built to hold our whole selves. Paid subscribers will receive daily prompts to spark inspiration and reflection, gentle accountability, and invitations to special gatherings sprinkled throughout January. I hope you’ll join me.

And in the spirit of beginnings, I’ll leave you with a prompt—borrowed from Dani Shapiro and angled to what’s ahead:

What would you write if you weren’t afraid—
and what might happen if you wrote it anyway?

Hold your answer close. More soon.

As a small thank you—

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I’m writing to you today from a vantage I haven’t occupied in a while: awe, appreciation, and praise for our daily bread.

A couple of months back, I shared how complicated my relationship to food has become since returning to treatment a year and some change ago. Between chemo side effects and the nausea that sets in as soon as I take a bite, eating can feel like an endurance trek—uphill, in bad shoes. Sometimes it’s an absence of appetite; other times, the mere thought of food—no matter how innocuous—brings on a preemptive wave of nausea so powerful I’m convinced I may never eat again.

For a long time now, food has been duty-bound. A “should,” a “have to.” I’ve cycled through the anti-cancer diets and the anti-inflammatory diets, right up to the inevitable moment when one more forkful of kale feels like a personal affront. My medical team keeps reminding me, “Keeping your weight up, no matter your appetite, is key!” so I dutifully fill my daily quota with protein shakes, pouches of baby food, and supplements—none of which appear on anyone’s list of epicurean thrills.

More often than not, feeding myself has been something I dread.

But last week, that began to change.

Jon and I traveled to Hawaii to celebrate his birthday with friends. After weeks of being on the road separately for work, simply landing in the same time zone felt restorative. One of the unexpected highlights of the trip was how much care and intention our friends poured into every meal—which became the organizing principle of our days together.

Each morning we’d peel off to do our own thing (for me: poolside painting for a new project), then meet for a lingering lunch. Afternoons were similarly unstructured (for me: reading by the ocean, a little napping). And in the evenings, we’d gather again for dinner.

Our friends researched restaurants and made reservations weeks in advance. The meals were extraordinary. One evening: fried rice cakes topped with ahi and the most delectable poke cones. Another: red curry with lobster and a constellation of jewel-toned chutneys. There was freshly made, liberally buttered tagliatelle fragrant with truffles, and thinly sliced steak you seared yourself on a very hot tower of lava rocks. Seared scallops on a bed of parmesan risotto with sweet spring peas and poached white asparagus. Wasabi mashed potatoes. Golden rolls straight from the oven. And dessert—a warm chocolate chip cookie and an affogato with a scoop of impossibly creamy vanilla ice cream that I’m still thinking about.

But more than the food itself was the way everyone cherished it. Their delight was contagious. I’d arrive without an appetite, but the joy of being together—and the sheer enthusiasm with which everyone anticipated each dish, reading the menu like a page-turning novel—roused a hunger in me I didn’t know I still had. I even tried things I never normally would.

Case in point: shrimp.

I haven’t had a bite of shrimp since age twelve, after an unfortunate (and very public) episode in Tunisia involving an upstairs balcony and projectile vomiting. Attempt number two yielded similar results. We concluded I was allergic, and I avoided shrimp forever after.

Then came my first bone marrow transplant at 22, and then a second at 33. One of its stranger side effects is that I now share not just my brother’s DNA and blood type, but also his allergies. Goodbye peanut allergy—I’ve eaten a PB&J at least once a week since. Hello itchy eyes and stuffy nose whenever I pet a cat or change zip codes or the seasons turn. So it’s entirely possible my shrimp allergy faded years ago—whether through age or scientific sorcery.

Still, I wasn’t eager to reprise the balcony incident, hence the quarter of a century haitus.

But one day at lunch, the special was rock shrimp, and I felt curious. I mentioned the possibility of trying it, only to hear Jon whisper, “Maybe not today.”

But curiosity won out. I ordered it. I then told the shrimp story as the dish arrived, prompting a collective sharp inhale. I reassured everyone as best I could, then went for it.

Reader: the shrimp was excellent. I loved every bite. Granted, it was fried—and you could fry a shoe, hand me a dipping sauce, and I’d probably eat it—but still. Something had shifted.

Not in the symptoms themselves; chemo and transplant side effects don’t vanish overnight. But I felt, for the first time in a long time, a sense of adventure around food. A refusal to let my body’s Pavlovian responses dictate the borders of my life and palate. I want to stay open—to discovery, to delight, to the symphonic arc of a meal, which can be pleasurable for so many reasons: the company, the conversation, the setting, the narrative thrill of exploring a menu, and yes, the food.

The last few weeks, I’ve sat down to write this newsletter thinking, This one will be short and sweet. And yet—here we are. But as we enter holiday feasting season, I hope you’ll forgive a love letter to food, and that you’ll enjoy penning your own, inspired by today’s guest contributor, Annie Campbell.

Annie first shared her essay, “I Have Been Eating Figs,” with me years ago, and I was honored to include it in The Book of Alchemy. Vivid, lyrical, and haunting, it’s a testament to how food can teleport us through time—to another elsewhere entirely. I can’t wait to hear about your food, your where, and your when.

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Some Items of Note—

• In case you missed it, The Book of Alchemy has been nominated for the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards! If you want to weigh in, you can cast your vote here.

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Prompt 360. I Have Been Eating Figs by Annie Campbell

I have been eating figs. Every day. The season has been extended by Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, and I try to buy enough for a couple of days at a time. They are delicious.

My husband has been mystified by this and I try to explain how good, how sweet, how satisfying they are. He bites into a fig and shrugs.

Why are they so delicious only to me? Yesterday my friend Goldie wrote about plums and grief—­ and as she read, my tears, unshed, lit up behind my eyes. Suddenly I knew why the figs were so sweet.

There was a house in Jericho at the foot of the Mount of Temptation. It had been an ancient sugar mill. On the main level was a terrace shaded with bougainvillea and vined grapes. The veranda stood above terraced orange groves and date palms and had a view of the Jordan River and the Moab hills beyond. It was small, and in the open courtyard, stone steps wound up to the roof level, where there was an old spring-­fed pool. “Weekend house” seems too grand a name for such a primitive spot, but that is what it was for us.

The water in the pool was cool and black. Once, we went to the house in the middle of the week and shepherds were bathing their sheep in the pool. This partly explained the dark, murky water. It didn’t stop us. Into the water we dove, rising to tread water while reaching for the figs from the trees that grew around the pool. There were six of us in that water. Only two of us are left to tell the story.

I read my parents’ letters about the war and the fighting and the refugee camps below our house. Yes, I remember all of that. But that is not what I remember when I eat figs. I remember my family, all of us, treading water in a murky pool and reaching up to the branches heavy with fruit.

I remember the celebratory call-­and-response: “Tean,” one of us would call out—­ the Arabic word for fig. The rest of us would respond with “Alhamdulillah.” Thanks be to God.

Your prompt for the week:

What food evokes a transporting moment of time and place? Taste the moment and write down everything you can remember.

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Today’s Contributor—

Annie Campbell learned storytelling at the dinner table—­the only time life stood still in a diplomat’s family—­then she spent forty years teaching children to be passionate about their lives as writers and readers. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her husband, Ben. She wrote “I Have Been Eating Figs” after listening to a conversation I hosted for the Isolation Journals where I talked about being a third-­culture kid. More of her work can be found at Our Class Writes.

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I pored over the design of this journal—I poured myself into its pages—and I couldn’t be happier with the result. A few reviews from our beloved community:

What a pleasing handful of sturdy, welcoming, finger-itchin’, 224-page loveliness! —Catharine

I love that your creative energy is in the journal’s design. The poem teaches me ways to befriend the pages and myself, with no room for perfectionism or self-judgments, just me. —Christine

The journal is a beautiful companion to The Book of Alchemy. —Debbie

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Ever since my return from Tunisia the other week, I’ve been a little homesick—hearing echoes, feeling this fatherland I love press itself into the margins of my days. At a bodega in Brooklyn the other day, buying a breakfast sandwich, I nearly asked “Qaddesh?”—Tunisian for “How much?”—before catching myself like someone waking from a dream mid-sentence, still speaking its language.

It reminded me of my brother, who spent the last two years teaching in Tunis. The day after he returned, we stopped for coffee near our house. The barista handed him his cup and he reflexively said, “Aychek, merci.” A melange of Arabic and French—Frarabic—a dialect that exists nowhere officially and everywhere emotionally.

“Dude, what are you doing?” I said. “We’re in rural Pennsylvania.” But the truth is, after only two weeks there, my own tongue was already slipping back into that old terrain—faithful to the last place it felt fully free.

As I wrote recently, I love that easy back-and-forth of Arabic and French and English—that braided linguistic chaos that always feels like home. It’s stitched into my family. When we raise a glass, we’re as likely to say the English “cheers” or the French “santé” as the Arabic “saha.” When my dad speaks to his brothers, his professorial French slips into a Tunisian accent—r’s rolling thickly, darija threaded through like a secret handshake. And when my brother and I are together, we default to Franglish, switching between French and English without a thought, reaching for whichever word—whichever world—fits the sentence, the sentiment best.

My mom, meanwhile—Swiss, operating with only a smattering of Arabic—uses “inshallah” often and somewhat ironically, because in a work context the word drives her a little batty. Ask a collaborator in Tunisia about a deadline and they’ll often answer, “Inshallah” (God willing).

She hears: maybe.

She wants: yes or no.

And so it’s become a family joke. She asks me to clear the table.

“Inshallah,” I say.

She groans.

In the United States, unless you’re an immigrant, speaking multiple languages is treated as a cultural flex—evidence of worldliness, or at least the suggestion of a semester abroad. But elsewhere—especially in North Africa—it’s simply a means of getting through the day or the cost of doing business in an economy shaped by tourism. French lingers as colonial residue; English drifts in on the currents of pop music and television. (Two of my younger cousins learned to speak fluent “American” from watching Friends, which I find both hilarious and faintly poignant.)

As a child who moved around a lot—preschool in Switzerland and then Tunisia, kindergarten through second grade in upstate New York, third grade back in Tunisia, sixth grade in Switzerland, and so on—I was preoccupied with belonging, with the question of how people determine you’re “one of them.” Whenever my mother, with her thick French accent, mispronounced a word in English, I corrected her ferociously, with that zeal of the eldest child who believes assimilation is a group family project she’s personally responsible for.

Language was my portal. I kept long lists of idioms in my journal because slang, colloquialisms, even profanity were the true litmus tests of membership. In the margins you’d find things like “talk to the hand!” or “chillin’ like a villain” or “eat my shorts???”—the mid-nineties incantations that functioned as a kind of playground passcode. Later, at twelve in Switzerland, my list read: ça joue (that’s fine), natel (cellphone), tchô (see ya), kiffer (to dig). My Tunisian cousins taught me curse words—sometimes on request, sometimes as a setup. Once, at a family dinner, I asked my aunt Zohra in Arabic to “please pass the penises,” fully convinced I’d said “peppers.”

Over time, all this linguistic collecting turned me into an expert code-switcher—the kind of person who can slip into whatever register the room requires. It’s a useful skill, though not without its complications. When you grow up toggling between countries, accents, and expectations, your ear becomes finely trained; your tongue sometimes a little too eager to comply.

Take my marriage, for instance. Jon is someone who doesn’t curse. He says things like “shucks” or “got doggit” or “gee willikers” when he’s upset—as if Walt Disney himself were narrating his frustrations. If he’s singing lyrics with a cuss word, he’ll bleep himself, which always makes me laugh (see: his Tiny Desk performance with Juvenile, around minute 15:45). And so around him, without ever consciously deciding to, I stopped cursing. My sentences come out scrubbed, wholesome, as if they’ve been through some sort of Southern charm-school rinse cycle.

But put me on the phone with a friend who swears like a sailor, and suddenly my vocabulary blossoms into its saltier forms. It’s not performance; it’s instinct. A long-practiced habit of attunement. A way of signaling: I’m with you. I get it. I belong.

Of course, the danger in all this linguistic shapeshifting is that you can lose track of your original voice—the one that isn’t trying to match or soothe or blend. The one unbothered by the rules of whatever country, classroom, or kitchen table you happen to be sitting at. Your purest, untranslated self.

I’ve learned a thousand and one ways to belong. I’m still learning the art of belonging to myself—work, I suspect, that’s lifelong for all of us.

I’m learning that language is never just language; it’s the map we carry of ourselves and each other, and the words we pick up—or leave unsaid—tell a story. They’re tiny acts of affiliation, of self-protection, of longing or rebellion. And nothing reveals our linguistic loyalties quite like profanity: an unexpected swear exposes the fault lines faster than any polite sentence ever could.

Which brings me to today’s essay by Carmen Radley—an ode to the art, politics, and pleasure of swearing. (Highly recommend the audio version if you enjoy hearing a Southerner deliver a well-timed cuss.)

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Some Items of Note—

• I’m so excited to announce that The Book of Alchemy has been nominated for the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards! If you enjoyed the book and want to show it a little love, you can cast your vote here.

• This week we celebrated the arrival of The Alchemy Journal! It’s a companion to The Book of Alchemy, but it also stands on its own. A journal that’s both beautiful and deeply useful, it’s designed to hold anything and everything—from doodles and to-dos to your wildest, most harebrained dreams.

Get yours here!

• Mark your calendar! We’ve scheduled our next virtual Journaling Club for Sunday, November 23, from 1–2 PM ET. Holly and Carmen will host this time—they’ll share a spark of inspiration to get you started, then we’ll journal together and explore what surfaces. To join, upgrade to a paid subscription (if you haven’t already), and we’ll send you the Zoom link the day before.

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Prompt 359. Cussing by Carmen Radley

My mother will be slightly horrified when she learns that I’ve written a short essay called “Cussing” and have involved her from the jump. Cussin’ is how we said it where I grew up in Southeast Texas, rather than the more refined cursing. You cussed out an old cuss. If you cussed, you were like Gus, which is a reference to a little rhyme my mom and her friends chanted on the playground: “Don’t cuss. Call Gus. Gus’ll cuss for us.” Though now that I think of it, another of her favorite playground rhymes directly contradicted that one. It unspooled in the most languid Texas twang: “Merci beaucoup, you shit ass you.”1

My mom does cuss, and my dad cusses too, though not around my siblings and me when we were young—only the occasional “damn.” Curse words were uncommon enough in our home that for a while I was confused about how “shit” was pronounced, after I heard my grandmother, whose first language was Ukrainian and whose English always came out a little off kilter, say to my grandfather, “Well, shet, Larry.” Mainly I learned curse words from older kids at school. I was under a childish misapprehension that there was a rite of passage for cussing that involved an unmarked but well-known line on the playground that separated third graders from fourth graders, and once I graduated to the other side of that line, damn and shit were mine, and I could use them as I liked.

I wonder, do you feel unsettled by these curse words? (“Uncomfortable with all this cussin’?” I want to say.) When my mother reads this essay, she might. She’s the consummate Southern hostess who’ll drown you in sweet tea if you let her, and she’d rather that I at least try to be ladylike. My sisters and I regularly disappoint her on that front (though she is very proud of us on others). At Thanksgiving about twenty years ago, my younger sister decided to normalize the f-word by asking our mom, in the most casual tone, “Can you please pass the fucking mashed potatoes?” My mom was equally affronted and amused, but the amusement went a long way, for she loves to laugh, and her laughter often comes when we hit the right note between proper and profane. Another Thanksgiving (holidays with family invite a good cuss, don’t they?), when I was living out of the country, that same sister made a card for me. On it, she drew a turkey and a little speech bubble that said, “As a turkey, I feel the need to say: Fuck Thanksgiving.” She had my whole family sign it. My mother’s signature included a caveat: “I do not approve this message.” I’m certain she was at least a little amused.

My mother cusses around us more now, but she still feels an impulse to watch her language. Watching your language is a funny expression. Implied is a kind of vigilance, like minding your manners, your Ps and Qs. One is careful not to transgress. In my youth, in an attempt to shame me into good behavior, a family friend told me that only ignorant people curse, because they have small vocabularies—they don’t know any better words. As a very moralistic and studious child, I took that to heart, but as a less moralistic and still very studious adult, I disagree. I love to cuss. I love the sonic experience—so explosive, so many fricatives and plosives—and the emotional release. I love having all the words at my disposal, not just the polite ones.

I also like how cussing can quickly make an acquaintance into a friend. I imagine the moment where I slip, where I cuss like Gus, then feel I have transgressed. I clutch my pearls a little performatively and say, “Excuse my French.” And you smile and say, in your best imitation of my mother, “Merci beaucoup, you shit ass you.”

Your prompt for the week:

Write about cussing. About whether or not you cuss, and when and why. About whether that has changed over time.

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Today’s Contributor—

(pictured with her family last Thanksgiving) is a writer and the managing editor of the Isolation Journals. A graduate of the University of Texas and the Bennington Writing Seminars, she lives in Austin—with her new rescue pup, Penny. (Suleika is responsible both for the dog and for its addition to Carmen’s bio.)

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I went to chemo solo for the first time in a very long while this week. My go-to companions weren’t in town—my parents are in Tunisia and Jon has been on tour. Friends joined me for a few of the days, but one morning, I couldn’t find coverage. So I packed a book, my laptop, and a brave face, and went alone.

By now I know the drill: the reclining chair, the IV pole with its slow drip, the too-cheerful ceiling lights. I chatted with my favorite nurses, answered a terrifying backlog of emails, and tried to pretend I was at some grim version of a co-working space.

The last time I went to chemo alone was more than a decade ago. I was in my mid-twenties, still reeling from my first bone marrow transplant, when I learned I was at a high risk of relapse and would need to do an additional two years of maintenance chemo. I’d prepared for two paths: live or die. I hadn’t considered the third—the fluorescent-lit corridor between the two, that purgatory of being “technically cured,” yet nowhere near well.

Cancer had already taken such a toll—my body wrecked, my relationship limping, my sense of the future replaced by a calendar of more medical appointments. Could I ask my parents to drive eight hours each month to sit beside me for five days of chemo? Could I ask my then-boyfriend, who’d already given so much, to keep giving? Did I even want to?

The truth is, I was desperate for independence. I wanted to take charge of my life again. Learning to mete out my meds, to take the bus to the hospital, to brave chemo alone felt like an important first step. It seemed like the kind of thing a real adult would do.

But hard as I tried to be stalwart, the isolation was its own kind of sickness. I wondered how much longer I could keep enduring treatment, then considered not doing it at all.

And then, a plot twist—salvation by young-adult fiction. I’d sworn off cancer narratives, but somehow this one found me anyway—maybe an algorithm, maybe fate. I was twenty-three, pretending to read Baldwin and Didion, but instead I was secretly ugly-crying into The Fault in Our Stars, and grateful for every word, every tear.

There’s a sacred jolt of recognition when a writer gives language to what you hadn’t yet found words for. Reading John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars wasn’t escapism—it was a way back to feeling connected to a larger story, and to myself: that strange relief of realizing you’re not special in your suffering, and therefore not alone in it. Hazel, the teenage narrator living with stage IV cancer, hates the idea of a support group, as I did too—the pity, the forced platitudes, the way illness can flatten a person into a lesson. She’s depressed, darkly funny, and utterly allergic to sentimentality. And yet the group changes her. She meets other teens who get it, who make morbid jokes, who flirt and fight and live. Despite the specter of death, they insist on living.

It was the first time I’d seen my experience mirrored in story form, and that book cracked something open in me. I’d long mistaken vulnerability for weakness, thought armor was a sign of valor. But suddenly I no longer wanted tough skin; I wanted tender skin—even if it meant bruising easily (already an occupational hazard of leukemia). I wanted to feel everything: the terrible and the beautiful, the absurd and the holy.

Inspired by The Fault in Our Stars, I began seeking out friendships with other young adult cancer patients. They became my chosen kin—the ones who came with me to chemo when I was too defeated to go alone.

In the pediatric oncology unit, I met Max Ritvo, all wit and phosphorescence, who wrote poems that dared the universe to blink first. Through blogging and a blind friend date at a coffee shop, I met Melissa Carroll, who grappled with mortality in watercolor. During a recurrence of Ewing sarcoma, she painted herself into myth: a crow perched on one shoulder as she sheared off her hair; a marionette hanging by a thread; a fevered girl with a thermometer dangling from her mouth like a cigarette in an Egon Schiele sketch.

Had it not been for Max—my biggest writing champion and go-to first reader—I might never have started writing my memoir, Between Two Kingdoms. Had it not been for Melissa, I doubt I ever would’ve picked up a paintbrush. Unlike solid-tumor cancers, leukemia is invisible. I can’t touch it, can’t see what mysteries are unfolding in my marrow. In ink and watercolor, I give shape to what eludes me. I trace the contours of the unseen. Interrogate it. Converse with it.

Over time I began to understand imagination as a kind of superpower. It is agency. It is alchemy. It is the bridge between isolation and communion—sometimes inch by inch, sometimes in one wild leap.

So this week, as I sit once again in that chemo chair—older now, allegedly wiser, increasingly addicted to rescue dogs, and no longer alone, even when technically alone—I think gratefully of John Green. His words once kept me company through the loneliest chapter of my life. And now, years later, he’s joining me for a dream-come-true celebration of The Alchemy Journal, which comes out in less than seventy-two hours.

I’ll leave you with John’s essay and prompt from The Book of Alchemy, “Dutch Tulips & a Dodo Bird,” a meditation on using imagination to see the unseen.

May it carry you past the edges of what’s known—

and show you what was there all along.

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The Alchemy Journal is almost here!

I’ve been looking forward to this for so long! The Alchemy Journal comes out in less than 72 hours, and to celebrate, on November 12, 2025, from 7–8pm ET, I’m hosting The Alchemy Games: An Evening of Unconventional Journaling with John and Hank Green, the iconic brothers who built a whole universe of curiosity and compassion.

To join us, simply pre-order The Alchemy Journal from your favorite bookstore and make sure you register by November 10.

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Prompt 358. Dutch Tulips & a Dodo Bird by John Green

I’ve never actually seen much of what I’ve seen. I’ve never seen row upon row of flowering Dutch tulips—but I’ve seen them on Instagram. I’ve never seen the surface of Mars—­but I’ve seen it through high-­definition photographs. I’ve never seen the long-­extinct dodo bird—but I’ve seen it through illustrations. I’ve been fascinated by what we’ll never see since the artist David Brooks told me the story of William Beebe, an eccentric scientist of the early twentieth century who hired artists—including Ruth Rose, who went on to write the screenplay for the 1933 movie King Kong—to illustrate the wonders of the natural world. Beebe often descended into the deep ocean in a small submarine that was connected to a boat on the ocean’s surface. From thousands of feet below the sea, Beebe described the fantastic creatures he saw to the artists via a wired telephone. The artists then drew the creatures—­animals that they would never see—­based on Beebe’s descriptions. The resulting illustrations include strange and lovely squids and viperfish.

A friend of mine who died a few years ago once told me that if you look at a tree,­ really look at it, you do not get tired of looking at it. There is plenty of tree to take in, from the mountainous bark to the fingering leaves to the branches that themselves branch out into yet more branches, and more. And then, my friend noted, there is the tree you can’t see—the vast root system below, branches branching out wider than the tree’s canopy, a kind of invisible symmetry. You know the root system is there, but you cannot see it. My friend told me: Think of these roots, and think of the tree, overwhelming in its complexity and wonder and persistence. And then consider: There are more trees. There are billions more. Despite our best efforts, there are more trees than people by a very wide margin, and we are utterly and entirely dependent upon them. We live in their shade, breathing their oxygen, and yet while they live, we can never see the vast root structures that hold them aloft.

For almost all of human history, we also could not see the inside of a living body. I often think about this eighteenth-­century German doctor, described in Barbara Duden’s brilliant book The Woman Beneath the Skin. This doctor, Johann Storch, had no way of seeing inside his patients. He could not use X-­rays or MRI or CT scans or colonoscopies, of course, but he also couldn’t listen to the body through a stethoscope (they weren’t invented until 1816) or even glimpse the workings of the throat using a laryngoscope (they weren’t invented until the 1850s). And so the inner body was an absolute mystery to him—­something he could see illustrated in medical journals but could never see himself in a living patient. But then again, it occurs to me that I’ve also never seen most of the interior of my own human body. I can tell you approximately what my heart looks like, but I haven’t seen it—­and frankly hope I never will.

Your prompt for the week:

Think of something you’ve never seen but nonetheless know something about. Maybe you’ve read descriptions, or seen pictures, or imagined what it must be like. Write about what you’ve never seen until you feel like you can, at least in some way, see it.

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Today’s Contributor—

John Green is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, and The Anthropocene Reviewed, and his most recent book, Everything Is Tuberculosis. He was the 2006 recipient of the Michael L. Printz Award, was a 2009 Edgar Award winner, and has twice been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Along with his brother, Hank, John is involved in a number of video projects, including vlogbrothers, their YouTube channel where they promote intellectualism and try to better the world, including raising millions of dollars to fight poverty in the developing world and planting thousands of trees; and Crash Course, where they teach science and the humanities to more than ten million subscribers.

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I spent a day in an orchard earlier this week, napping beneath an olive tree and a pomegranate tree as a breeze fussed the leaves. The sky was a gentle, almost bashful blue with a few bright, threadbare clouds. It was the kind of place that seemed to have forgotten the noise of the world—and for a moment, I did too. The word bower came to mind, definitively: a pleasant, shady place under the trees.

I was in Gabès, the maritime oasis in southern Tunisia where my father grew up, where I spent many summers as a child, and where much of my family still lives. Along with fifty others, I’d been invited by the French-Tunisian artist eL Seed, whose family is also from Gabès, to celebrate the olive harvest and share a meal. In the orchard, a woman was making tabouna—Tunisian flatbread baked against the walls of a cylindrical oven. We dipped it into ricotta made from eL Seed’s family cow, drizzled with olive oil and honey. Then came l’agneau à la gargoulette—lamb, olives, fava beans, tomatoes, peppers, and turnips slow-cooked underground in sealed terracotta urns. When the stew is ready, the pots are unearthed and cracked open with a mallet, everyone claps, and the feast begins.

I’d been longing for just such a gathering. I hadn’t been to Tunisia in six long years. First the pandemic, then the return of leukemia kept me away. My second bone marrow transplant wiped out all my immunities, and I had to wait until I was fully revaccinated and strong enough to return. My parents and brother spent much of the last two years here, and it was hard to be away from them. I missed the landscape. My cousins. The easy back-and-forth of Arabic and French, that braided linguistic chaos that always feels like home. I even missed the way the heat conspires to slow you down, insisting you sit, sip mint tea with toasted pine nuts, stay awhile.

Getting here was no small feat—thirteen hours of flights in a face mask—and the steep hills of Sidi Bou Saïd, where my parents live, test me daily. And then there are Tunisia’s strict laws against marijuana, even medical marijuana, which I rely on to quiet chemo nausea and coax appetite. The penalty is a year in prison. Not exactly the kind of souvenir I had in mind, though it would make one hell of a story.

So that’s how I found myself in this bower of olive and pomegranate trees. After the ricotta and tabouna, I felt the familiar waves of nausea: the clamminess, the shakiness. I needed to lie down, so I wandered just far enough to still hear the laughter and clinking glasses but be out of sight. Above me, the branches were heavy with olives, and directly overhead, a single pomegranate glowed.

Despite the discomfort, I was blissfully content. My body was struggling, but everything else—light, air, fruit—was whole. I felt as subsumed by beauty as I could ever wish to be. Lying there, I thought of my first long hospitalization, at twenty-two—the shock of finding myself confined to that room, unable even to open a window. As the days blurred into weeks and the biopsy results kept coming back wrong, I felt suffocated by the snarl of tubes and beeping IV monitors and the harsh fluorescent light. I was starved for rain, for wind, for anything alive. Hope was hard to locate.

I used to be all-or-nothing about my health: if I didn’t feel well, I went straight home to bed, shut the door, disappeared. But after a while I realized I didn’t want to live inside that confinement, inside the parentheses of illness. So I started venturing out anyway, learning how to make a makeshift nest wherever I was. More times than I can count on this trip, I’ve pulled up somewhere and stayed in the car for twenty minutes, just breathing until the world steadied again. And then, almost always, something revealed itself: a stray cat sunbathing in a perfect coil, a party of finches in a jasmine bush, a radiant kilim in a shop window saturated in sunlight.

It’s become its own kind of creative practice—how to find beauty inside constraint, and maybe, sometimes, because of it.

I’m reminded of something my late friend Lisa Bonchek Adams used to say—a line I’ve shared here before and will probably share again until the end of time, as it’s become a kind of daily prayer for me: “Find a bit of beauty in the world today. Share it. If you can’t find it, create it. Some days this may be hard to do.”

Some days, it is. But not that day in Gabès, lying beneath the olive and pomegranate trees, watching the leaves and the sky and the swollen fruit above me. Beauty found me exactly where I’d had to stop—and stayed long enough to make itself known.

Now I’d like to introduce you to today’s guest contributor—or reintroduce her, as she’s written for us before: Jessica Slice. The author of Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World, Jessica writes powerfully about the experience of disability. Her essay “Comfort & Care” is no exception. It gives us permission to indulge in something soft, soothing, and beautiful, and to create a perfect nest for yourself.

I hope this week you find your own version of that orchard—a corner of quiet, a moment of reprieve, a small mercy of beauty. We make these places for one another simply by noticing them, and by sharing what we see.

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Some Items of Note—

• To celebrate the arrival of The Alchemy Journal, on November 12, 2025 from 7–8pm ET, I’m hosting The Alchemy Games: An Evening of Unconventional Journaling with John and Hank Green, the iconic brothers who built a whole universe of curiosity and compassion. To join us, simply pre-order The Alchemy Journal from your favorite bookstore and enter your confirmation or receipt number when you register.

Register for The Alchemy Games

• Nashville friends, I’m coming for a visit! On November 20, 2025, at 6:30pm CT, at the Montgomery Bell Academy, I’ll be taking the stage with the extraordinary Ann Patchett—another dream dinner guest!—to talk about all things alchemy. Seating is limited so get your tickets now!

Join me in Nashville!

Prompt 357. Comfort & Care by Jessica Slice

I needed a power wheelchair for seven years before I got one. When I stopped being able to walk or stand for more than a minute in 2011, I shrunk my life to match my body’s needs. At some point, as the shame about my new body sloughed off, I realized that with a wheelchair, I could do more. Maybe my body wasn’t inadequate; maybe it was simply not accommodated.

I needed an accessible house for fourteen years before I got one. For years, I was trapped for most of the day in whichever room I set up camp. Most often, it was the primary bedroom, where my adjustable bed works for my body’s legion of demands. I have settled for facsimiles of meaningful moments, facetiming my daughter when she returns from school rather than meeting her at the door, hearing the echoes of my family’s laughter and the cries that only my husband was there to comfort. There have been tiny losses of dignity. I went a decade unable to access my own washer and dryer, unable to wash my special sweaters in the way I prefer. There are the scarier losses, too, like when we realized that the elevators in our high-rise apartment building shut down during emergencies and had to come up with an evacuation plan that involved me being carried out in a human-sized duffel bag. (We crossed our fingers that someone—my husband, a neighbor—would be available when the time came.)

My wheelchair lived in the garage or the front entry for years, stuck there because of stairways and narrow halls. I never considered that I could have a home I could fully access. Decades of ableism (which is, in part, the belief that a good life is for those whose bodies work) convinced me that I could fully use my house only if I could fully use my body. But even after we started trying to live somewhere with features that would work for me, I encountered a host of obstacles: cost, historical requirements, and stodgy neighbors.

Fourteen years after becoming disabled, in July of this year, a seeming miracle occurred: I moved into my first wheelchair-accessible home. We purchased a property in Toronto that is wide enough for the accommodations I need. We added a wheelchair lift in the front and another in the back. In the center of the house, an elevator with just enough room for me and my chair provides access to all three floors. I am now doing laundry. I am joining my family for breakfast. I was there last week when my toddler dropped a book on his toe and cried. I was there last night when my eight-year-old danced to Chappell Roan, wielding her “scepter” like Fred Astaire did a cane.

Sometimes, when I see these hulking metal structures in places where we might, say, put a dining room table, I’m embarrassed about what a fuss I’ve made. Is having me downstairs really worth the costly eyesores? But, other times, I see each one as evidence. That my comfort matters. That my presence is valuable. That a disabled or sick body does not deserve relegation or punishment. They are also a message to my two kids: in this family, there is no need, no pain, no weakness that renders you ineligible for inclusion. We will alter the whole house to ensure you belong.

Your prompt for the week:

What is a room in your house where the needs of your body conflict with the design of the space? How can you adjust your physical world to offer acceptance to your messy corporeal reality? Sure, adding an elevator is expensive, but what about a thrifted sofa instead of dining chairs? Or a duvet near the sofa for chilly nights? Or a soft rug by the kitchen sink for when your feet ache? How can we arrange our homes to serve as a reminder that we deserve comfort and care?

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Today’s Contributor—

Jessica Slice is a disabled author, speaker, and essayist. She is the author of Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World, which explores the experiences of parenting with a disability. She is also the co-author of Dateable: Swiping Right, Hooking Up, and Settling Down, This is How We Play, This is How We Talk, and the forthcoming We Belong (with the late Judy Heumann). The author of the newsletter Whatever What Is, Jessica lives in her accessible house in Toronto with her husband, two kids, and two dogs.

For more paid subscriber benefits, see—

• Beholding the Body, an installment of my advice column Dear Susu, where a reader asked, “How do I make peace with the changes in my appearance?” and I meditate on about the impulse to cut your losses, simple pleasures, & Frida Kahlo

• On Asking for What We Need, a video replay of the Studio Visit with the brilliant Lena Dunham, where we talked about navigating limitations, letting go of shame, and the spiritual dividends of pain

• Love in the Time of Cancer, an installment of Dear Susu where my maman Anne Francey helped me answer a question from another caretaker—How do we keep going?—and reflected on the essential role of beauty in getting through

  

Pre-order the Alchemy Journal & join us for a special event!

✨ The Alchemy Journal arrives in just over a week—on November 11! And as a special thank you to anyone who pre-orders, on November 12, I’m hosting John and Hank Green for a virtual event called The Alchemy Games: An Evening of Unconventional Journaling. Reserve your copy and your spot today!

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