I feel like I’ve been becoming a better writer lately. I’ve really been practicing at it daily, although rarely in blog form. I use social media as writing prompts and expand on it in a journal.

I realize that to be a good writer you have to be a good reader and get some practice as a philosopher and an editor and learn to understand the rules and then break them in the way that your heart is broken and build them up in the places your hopes and dreams are. You have to have the ability to speak about the most sensitive of things with empathy, while having a thick enough skin to protect yourself and stay whole when people vehemently disagree and then get mean.

You have to be able to use cliches and familiar references only enough to introduce new connections that didn’t exist before. Then once you’ve got that pulled together you have to find new ways of incorporating stuff you have learned into what you already knew and talked about, and revising it daily.

It’s like trying to navigate by constellations where new stars are constantly being added in a kaleidoscope pattern. It’s amazing and frustrating and sometimes even horrifying. But the one reason I know I love writing is that I never ever run out of new stuff to talk about. And if the written word is me cataloging the changing sky, then the changing sky is the limit. So there is no limit.

I write to know what I think. I’ve done it since I was about 12. Without it I’d just have some weird wordless gut feelings plaguing me. A sense I needed to get somewhere but wasn’t there and didn’t know how. And instead I am like Harold and the Purple Crayon, both on a mysterious journey and writing a familiar journey. And I am grateful for that. Life hasn’t ever been boring for me, and I bet it won’t ever be.