You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.

Why am I attracted to all these lying quotes all of a sudden? Here’s another one. This one by Phillip Lopate: ‘(Children know it better than adults) that in telling a lie, fidelity is everything.’

The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.

The trick is to realize that one is not important, except insofar as one’s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.

I imagined a psychic pain growing inside him (myself) that demanded some physical outlet. Suicide must have been his attempt to give Pain a body, a representation, to put it outside himself. A need to convert inner torment into some outward tangible wound that all could see. It was almost as though suicide were a last-ditch effort at exorcism, in which the person sacrificed his life in order that the devil inside might die.

Have fun writing, because it enhances both the writer's and reader's experience.

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.