Practice Makes Possible
Why writing is a superpower
When I was fifteen, the world was slipping through my fingers. I could feel it, life suddenly went from flowing like water to being strictly numbered. Precious, each one expiring like a ripe berry I had no appetite to savor. My strategy for elongating and preserving my fleeting time was through meticulous (some might call it obsessive) journaling. Detailed plotting of every minute of every day. Pages of to-do lists. Carefully color-coded charts of my mood, exercise, and cycle.
At last, I had my hands back around the wheel of time.
These journals multiplied from a volume into a library. Scattered across the margins, stuffed into the notes sections, poetry. Desperate, explosive confessions of love and rage. Receipts and condom wrappers. Lipstick smears and tear stains. Reading these journals is not unlike watching an animal tear at its own flesh. I leave them alone in a box, tightly packed with ink-weighted pages. I can smell it now, from 2,000 miles away. From ages fifteen to nineteen, I wrote almost every day. Unmedicated adolescence will do that to an artist…
Bloodletting, we’ve established to be socially unacceptable. Medieval and disgusting. Journaling, however, is quite erudite and respectable. In my life, they have served near identical purposes. Whatever sickness of the mind lives in my head must be dumped out regularly or it festers. It rots.
I stopped writing when I was twenty.
Why?
Oh why does anyone give up their line to life-line sanity? Emotionally tormented relationship. COVID. Birth control and all its demonic hormonal nightmares. Substance abuse. Sexy stuff...
When I was twenty-two, I crawled back to myself by journaling digitally. It was easier, somehow, than facing an empty notebook. I was already spending hours upon hours on my laptop. May as well fill some empty pixels with meaning the same way I populated every facet of my world. And, naturally, I wanted to be remembered. If only by myself to come. Let me stretch out the dead versions of myself for the later, living me to autopsy with the clinical detachment of distance from the disease of feeling.
I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve spent wading through the heartbreaks of being twenty-three. Of realizing it was time to leave behind everyone I knew. Again. The pain of unrequited love, the rash-like discomfort of unrequiting love.
Hidden in each of these entries, from paper to pixels, was a practice being worked so subtly it never registered as being practice. The words came easier. The re-reading eyes got sharper and the editing more ruthless. The internal monologue got less insufferable. At twenty-five (my birthday is next month! Ahhhhh!!!!), I am a writer by trade. Professionally and independently. And I am finally f**king good at it. Turns out, the woman who emerges from 500,000 words of her own life, teased apart like tangled hairs and then braided neatly into language, is one uniquely equipped for gathering the world beyond its scripts and surfaces. It feels like a superpower, but it is a skill. One I can teach you to develop.
I have created 62 journal prompts that will tug something hard and soft out of you— all of life’s thorns with soft flesh still stuck to them. I will give you the literary rituals of blood letting. If you use them, these prompts will leave you with a trail of evidence of your truth, your change, and your character. The skill of writing is a latent function of writing a lot, but these prompts are designed to challenge you, to force your mind into new ideas, old schools of philosophy, and unimagined versions of your future.
Here’s the link: https://www.skyfishingforskyfish.com/services-store/p/skys-sixty-journal-prompts
May they bring you to exactly where and who you hope to be.
All my love,
Sky
It's true, you are a very skilled writer. I wonder though, at the ripe age of twenty-five, why you use the word "finally" to describe the acquisition of your talent? You have many years ahead of you and your ability and talents have only barely started to blossom.
this is so weird i was already going to ask if you could tutor me T-T i also stopped writing in my 20s afflicted with love and substance abuse. i find you deeply inspiring. I thought i was the version of you who made all the wrong choices. apparently my only mistake was letting my voice remain a cosmic vapour. Over a decade since ive been mostly bound to the land of thought, in hindsight, a mystery to myself, as the human memory is folly.