The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life

by Suleika Jaouad

What pulled me out of that despair was a 100-day project, an endeavor that originated with the designer and Yale professor Michael Bierut in which you perform one creative act daily for one hundred days—a sketch, a poem, a photograph, whatever medium calls to you. The point of the project is to use discipline as a vehicle for creative inspiration. As Bierut says, “It’s easy to be energized when you’re in the grip of a big idea. But what do you do when you don’t have anything to work with? Just stay in bed?”

It taught me that if you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.

But I knew that a fear-driven life was one where I never made plans, where I stopped myself from dreaming ambitiously. It meant living safe and small, always hedging against the worst-case scenario. Instead, I wanted to live boldly. I wanted to hold the best-case scenario at the forefront and have that guide my decisions and actions.

My modus operandi became this: to trust and find ways to delight in the mystery of how things unfold, even if it’s not what you had planned, even if it’s far from ideal, and to believe that facing the thing you fear brings you exactly what you need. In my journal I wrote: It is possible to alter the course of my becoming.

The concept is this: Upon waking, before brushing your teeth or drinking coffee—before your inner critic is roused—you write three longhand, stream-of-consciousness pages.

wrote about the person I wanted to become and the distance between me and her.

In search of a new way in, I sought out the voices of other writers who had famously kept journals, like Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, and Isabelle Eberhardt, before cracking open my own journal each morning. To prompt myself—to push myself beyond myself—I would read a page or even just a paragraph, often selected at random.

I have long believed that journaling allows you to alchemize isolation into creative solitude.

On April 1, 2020, I started a newsletter and sent out the first dispatch inviting readers to begin journaling each day for one hundred days and, if they felt so moved, to share their entries. I called it the Isolation Journals.

Think of The Book of Alchemy as your own 100-day project: Read an essay and prompt each day, then sit down to journal.

Journaling as a process is utterly alchemizing, with practical applications in every area of one’s life and work.

The physical, tactile nature of journaling by hand is important to me.

To begin, begin, Wordsworth said.

To get to here goes nothing, first a writer must feel she has nothing to lose. And truthfully, what is there to lose? To begin, begin. What’s the worst thing that will happen? You’ll get it wrong? Write pages that make you cringe the next day? Ball them up and toss them out? To begin, begin again.

With something like the 100-day project, there’s no right way to do it, and there’s no wrong way to do it. The reason this project works is the reason anything like this works: You can do it on your own terms, in your own way. It has nothing to do with any expertise that I or anyone else would profess to have about it. It’s that old saying: The only way out is through. You somehow have to work your way through the whole thing, and even if you hate 95 percent of the things you did, if you’ve made it to one hundred days, congratulations—that’s amazing in and of itself.

I had no idea I was such a convincing actress, and no idea that “fine” was not a little white lie, but a brick wall I’d placed between me and the people who loved me.

I sit down, take a few deep breaths, and set a timer for two or three or five minutes. Then I pick up a pen or a pencil and place that pen in the fingers of my nondominant hand.

Why the big pile of paper, or the fresh notebook? To write freely and legibly, I need to write big and to use a lot of paper. I’ll start with a line that might lead me somewhere I might not want to go: “I don’t want to write about…” Or somewhere I do want to go: “I want to remember.” Or I start with the physical day: “Just now I see that the night sky has turned a washed shade of pale blue.” Whatever is at hand.

As the writer Dani Shapiro once said to me, “To go back to my journals is a way to reach a hand out to that young woman, to dance with her a little bit. As opposed to remembering myself at that age, I actually encounter myself at that age.”

Excavating memory is how we identify and hold on to a principle of being. It’s how we trace the throughline from our past, how we notice patterns that inform our present, that ripple out to our future.

I tell my students that everything in their writing should bring with it some greater meaning: every word some greater depth, every character some greater representation, every object some greater symbolism. As writers, it’s our job to make sure our words do some heavy lifting.

And that ultimately is what I found on the other side of my fear: the knowledge that I can handle it, whatever “it” is. There’s strength and a sense of possibility in that belief.

I find video games cathartic in times of stress because they provide a concrete list of achievable tasks (bring the wizard a coconut) in exchange for a tangible reward (a largemouth bass), unlike real life, which provides a nebulous haze of crushing responsibilities (write a book, do your taxes) in exchange for terror and pain (get criticized in the newspaper, send the government twenty thousand dollars).

I’ve heard it said that depression is an overfixation on the past and anxiety is an overfixation on the future.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke says: “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them…Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

What I want to invoke is the radical power of seeing, understanding, and showing up for another human.

As Alain de Botton writes in A Therapeutic Journey, “The word is so fatefully associated with romance and sentimentality that we overlook its critical role in helping us to keep faith with life at times of overwhelming psychological confusion and sorrow.”

Over the next several years, I became a student of love. I actively sought out people who loved beautifully and deeply, whether it was self-love, familial love, romantic love, or platonic love. And in studying people who loved well, I saw that they all had vibrant, tight-knit, supportive communities.

Most of us don’t find it strange to hate ourselves. For many of us, it’s the default setting of our consciousness. We are wracked by shame, tormented by all the ways in which we have failed, and far more likely to bully ourselves than we would ever bully another human being. We are merciless toward ourselves. And we never, never let ourselves off the hook.

Emily Dickinson wrote, “I dwell in Possibility.”

Write about a day in your dream life—not a holiday or a special occasion, but a typical day.”

“Destruction is essential to construction,” as Glennon Doyle writes in Untamed. “If we want to build the new, we must be willing to let the old burn.”

But to me, rebuilding unfolds alongside becoming. It is crucial, if we want to keep evolving and flourishing, to get rid of the things that are no longer serving us and make space for something new to grow.

One simple antidote to this constant grasping and batting away is what the Buddhists call “the open palm.” It means not holding too tightly to the things we want, and not pushing too hard against the things we don’t want, but accepting whatever comes.

“Whether we make a profession out of it or not, we all need an activity that is beyond the mundane and that takes us out of our established and limiting roles in society (mother, employee, neighbor, brother, boss, etc.). We all need something that helps us to forget ourselves for a little while—to momentarily forget our age, our gender, our socioeconomic background, our duties, our failures, and all that we have lost and screwed up.”

I remember the first time I heard the word brazen, in English class. I was twelve, timid, and struck by the meaning of the word and its power. Bold and without shame.

I have always loved the word alchemy. I love how it sounds on the tongue, with its melding of Arabic, Greek, and French influences pointing toward how in human hands (and mouths) everything shifts and changes. Even more so, I am inspired by the idea that it’s possible to transmute something base, something considered worthless, into something precious, like gold.

I reach for the page like I reach for prayer: to plead, to confess, to commune, to remember that all is not chaos, all is not lost.

The journal is oceanic. It is capacious. It is memory, reverie, distillation. It teaches me to pay attention, to see the world anew, to rearrange the pieces, to play.

The journal is tabula rasa and terra incognita. It is a mirror for the self—past, present, and future—and a portal onto the not yet known. It is refuge: a hiding place, a searching place, a finding place. It’s where I go to know myself, to uncover the unlived lives within

Here I create myself. Here I write my way through.