The Only Way is Forward
When I gave up my job describing interiors for a magazine, my Mother told me not to ‘burn my bridges,’ and I started to wonder if that is sound advice. Once burnt, there is no way back. You have crossed the Rubicon, the Styx, the Thames, for that matter. The landscape is new, terrifying. The only way is forward. 
A friend of mine who paints abstracts lost all of her work in a fire. For months she walked around in a funk. Then she rented a new studio. She started again and her paintings were fresher, freer, more layered, more interesting. I have files of unfinished short stories, notebooks of ideas, character descriptions. I keep going back to them as if in the past we might find the future.
But I have a feeling, a deeper instinct, that only when I find the courage to burn all these scribbled notes will the universe reach down and lift me like a fiery phoenix from the ashes. You get trapped into repeating yourself, you plagiarize yourself, you become all those things you condemn in others. Sometimes, I pass a shop window and see my mother in the reflection.
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