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?”

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.

I 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.

But reading someone else’s words before I write always stirs something new in me. It’s such a natural way in to keeping a journal. Sometimes I respond to an insight, an image, a turn of phrase. Sometimes it’s the fact that the person’s experience feels so familiar. Other times, the writer’s perspective is so unlike my own that I’m completely bewildered by it, and I write into that bewilderment. Someone else’s words awaken a different train of thought, a new energy. A synapse fires that, moments earlier, was dead asleep.

Above my desk, I keep a Post-it of a quote attributed to Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

As Anaïs Nin wrote, “When we go deeply into the personal, we go beyond the personal. We achieve something that is collective.”

The times when I’ve journaled mostly consistently are when I’ve committed to a daily practice of some specified duration with friends or family—like my mom, who is far more disciplined than I am. She journals first thing each morning no matter what, both in words and a quick watercolor, while she drinks her tea.

Write every day. Aim for three pages, but any amount will do. A paragraph. A sentence. A word. Let your thoughts unspool, going in any direction they want, and once you’re done, you never have to look at them again.

I don’t believe going through something hard makes us wiser or stronger or braver by default. But the transitional moments in our lives offer the possibility for a new beginning.