The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life

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

But giving fear free rein makes it hard to live a life. You're afraid of rebuilding, because it will collapse—but then you're just existing in wreckage.

To launch herself into something new—whether a novel, a memoir, a story, an essay—she must first gather up an unreasonable, unearned confidence bordering on lunacy.

Sometimes you’re so afraid, you don’t know where the fear is coming from anymore, and that makes it seem unparsable and totally intractable. But in writing your fears down, you give them a container, and you can begin to evaluate them—to see which ones are valid and which ones have no grounding in fact.

attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

You don’t have to be particularly brave. You just have to be a tiny

Write about your most looming fear of failure—where it shows up and when. Now call to mind the people

To remember somebody means to put them back together and to hold them within ourselves. As everybody knows—or will come to know—people who you can’t live without die

if you’re in conversation with the self

What would you write if you weren’t afraid? Set a timer for ten minutes. Don’t worry. No one’s going to read a word. You can shred it. You can burn it. You can keep it. It’s entirely up to you. Ready

It taught me that if you’re in conversation with the self

Above my desk, I keep a Post-it of a quote attributed to Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” The Book of Alchemy is designed to expand that space, to give us ideas and inspiration for how to choose our response. It provides tools to engage with discomfort, to peel back the layers, to uncover your truest, most laid-bare self—and in doing so, to distill kernels of insight, to dream daringly, to learn to hold the brutal and the beautiful facts of life in the same palm.

would probably have been yes. The 100-day project had come at the suggestion of a college friend who proposed we all do this together—to help us stay connected during that difficult time. My parents were desperate to find something to anchor

it. The line that comes to mind is one attributed to Anaïs Nin: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

I’ve found that it’s not avoiding such memories

I discovered in the depths of every plunge were feelings. Even in everyday responsibilities such as work and family, I realized that the upstream of every “to-do” was actually a “to-feel”: useful, financially secure, loving, loved.

And the truth is, sometimes fear makes it hard to see the ways in which you are okay, or to see when things are safe and good.

I realized that the more I ran away from my fear, the bigger and more looming it became. Yet if I confronted the fear, it lost its power. As the fear evaporated, other feelings materialized in its place—feelings like wonder and curiosity.

though journaling is sometimes dismissed as a childish pastime you do in a pretty diary with a tiny lock, its physical and mental benefits have been extolled in study after study—everything from reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety to improving working memory and strengthening the immune system.

Journaling as a process is utterly alchemizing, with practical applications in every area of one’s life and work. The journal is like a chrysalis: the container of your goopiest, most unformed self. It’s a rare space, in this age of hypercurated personas, where you can share your most unedited thoughts, where you can sort through the raw material of your life.

Day by day, page by page, you uncover the answers that are already inside of you, and you begin to transform.

That summer, I dipped my toe into the gorgeous stream of Annie Dillard’s nonfiction. Her loving attention to the natural world showed me that I was not alone in the woods of Vermont—on my daily walks, the fallen logs, the fungi, the ferns became friends.

In search of a new way in, I sought out the voices of other writers who had famously kept journals, like Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, and Isabelle Eberhardt, before cracking open my own journal each morning.