Here's an actual line from my journal last month: I have no idea what I'm doing, and I'm having the best time. Both true. At the exact same time. I've been building something new, and the journal is where it lives before it lives anywhere else. (Which is the process I've lived by for 20+ years now.) Long before the camera, before the plan, before I'd said a word out loud to anyone, it was just me and a page and a very messy list of maybe this? That's the part nobody posts, Reader. The reel...

I was seventeen when I woke up in an emergency room with no memory of how I got there. There had been a wreck. Almost everything I know about that night, I know because someone told me afterward. Or I pieced parts of it together after years of reflection, but my brain never handed the full footage back. What came after the wreck is the part I've mostly kept to myself. There were consequences. There was guilt, and shame, and a tangled-up feeling that some of it wasn't fair — all of it sitting...

Take fourteen. I'm sitting at my desk in my office, readjusting my shutters and tripod (for the sixth time), trying to say one normal sentence into the camera without my voice doing the scratchy thing. It did the scratchy thing, Reader. Take fifteen. Here's what I'm not telling the Amazon delivery guy peeking to see who's home: I'm building something brand new — and it's making me feel like it's the first day of school. Sweaty palms. The whole bit. You'd think after years of making things,...

It's 2008. I'm in college, a little lonely, and The Secret is sitting on every nightstand in America. So one night I do the thing the book says to do. I open my journal, and I write down — in detail — exactly what I want in a partner. Not just "funny and kind." Specific. How he'd treat people when no one was watching. How I'd want to feel standing next to him in a room. What I'd want us to build together. A few weeks later, I met Seth. Now — I'm not going to sell you a spell. I don't think...

Blah, blah, blah. That's what my teacher told me to write. Over and over, on a blank page, until something real showed up. I was sixteen. I thought she'd lost it. Her name was Miss Hicks, and this was her actual assignment for our creative-writing class. "Don't know what to write? Then write blah, blah, blah until you can't stand it anymore." So I sat there. Pen on paper. Blah, blah, blah, blah, feeling like the biggest idiot in the room. And then my hand kind of took over. It wrote this is...