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.
