I find I amaze myself, or better said: I know myself pretty well.

I was cleaning out folders on this computer yesterday; ridding myself of duplicate things and oddball entries of unknown origin. When I saw a file titled “THIS WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE”..yes in all caps. That’s all.

Opening it I found this, an excerpt from an essay written by Alexander Chee about Annie Dillard and the Writing Life.

“The literary essay, as she saw it, was a moral exercise that involved direct engagement with the unknown, whether it was a foreign civilization or your mind, and what mattered in this was you.

You are the only one of you, she said of it. Your unique perspective, at this time, in our age, whether it’s on Tunis or the trees outside your window, is what matters. Don’t worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything’s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. You writing it makes it possible.”

Indeed, I realized that I saved this for myself to find when it would matter most.

I have been struggling with the fact that I didn’t want to write something, anything, that would put me in a pool of others writing similar things. That pretty much negates every subject on the planet. If I couldn’t be ‘original’ I didn’t want to do it. Silly me, because *I* do it, that’s what makes it original.

How did I know it would change my life? Why didn’t it the moment I saved it? I suppose I know myself better than I thought I did.