It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.

The writing life doesn't move in a straight line. I've had successes and rejections all along the way, at every stage of my career, and I will continue to do so. Acceptances and rejections don't define me. They're both part of what it means to be a writer. My job is to simply keep doing the work.

Write like a motherfucker.

We are savages insides. We all want to be the chosen, the beloved, the esteemed. There isn't a person reading this who hasn't at one point or another had that why not me? voice pop into the interior mix when something good has happened to someone else.

The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.

I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

So on one hand, because the wilderness was familiar to me, it really helped me be brave. But it still was scary sometimes. I had to say to myself: "Chances are, you're not going to be mauled by a bear."