Making the work you're meant to - starting from nix

You write beautifully because the way you pay attention to the world is beautiful. There’s a porousness to perception that seeps into everything you make. The most banal things are not banal at all — but filled up to the brim with aliveness. Rebecca Solnit claims that all writing begins with a ‘cosmology of the self.’ The structure of your internal universe that flows into everything you create. Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind. Her observation has stuck with me for a long time: Underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to. In other words, writing as identity. And identity formation is hard! It requires a great deal of invisible labor and discipline. In fact, the common thread among friends I admire for their precise and

You write beautifully because the way you pay attention to the world is beautiful. There’s a porousness to perception that seeps into everything you make. The most banal things are not banal at all — but filled up to the brim with aliveness. Rebecca Solnit claims that all writing begins with a ‘cosmology of the self.’ The structure of your internal universe that flows into everything you create. Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices an