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Some pieces mean so much to you that you don’t know where to start writing. But The Alchemist Remains taught me that you just have to start. Start, and let the process unfold. Trust that you’re being guided—towards something better, something new, something more.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’m just writing. Letting the stream of consciousness carry me. Maybe Virginia Woolf is watching over me somewhere. I hope to make her proud, because she gave me an incredible gift—the ability to let go in writing.

I think it was during my first or second year of studying English literature that she appeared to me.
Of course, no, it was my professor and her curriculum that obliged me to read Woolf, but the sentiment remains the same. (Though, admittedly, that version sounds less poetic.)

I’ve always enjoyed writing. As a child, I poured my thoughts into diaries. As an adolescent, I spent after-school study periods writing poetry. Many diaries, because I’d quickly abandon one before starting another. My poetry, I would gift to my father. He’d read them, congratulate me, and then they’d disappear into the ether.

He enjoyed them, of course, but we never returned to the subject. There were more important things to take care of in life, after all. Now, as an adult, I understand the weight of responsibilities. I can’t blame him.

But that doesn’t mean that child in me wasn’t deeply hurt by my parents’ nonchalant attitude toward my creations. I realized early on that art—at least in their eyes, and in society’s—was inconsequential.
Understandably so. It serves an invisible purpose. (And it doesn’t make you a living easily.)
So they pushed me toward something secure.

But what was secure for my potential earnings became the most dangerous thing I could do to my heart—ignoring its calling.

Back to Virginia.

By the time I met her, years of uninspired restlessness had passed. I was, and still am, a sensitive child. Ignoring a part of me meant my brain, in turn, began shutting down—partially. I could still consume.
I consumed my courses. I consumed the Internet. I consumed myself.

But creation is the opposite of consumption. To create means to be open—to just do. It isn’t perfect. It’s raw, uncertain, incomplete. And that’s exactly what Virginia allowed me to embrace again. To let my imperfect thoughts and my imperfect words roam free on the page.

If she could allow herself to do so, why couldn’t I?

I suppose ignoring your heart’s desires is also the quickest path to unattainable perfectionism. The heart knows mistakes are necessary to grow, yet the mind tries to calculate a way around them.
The heart accepts passion and life for what they are. The mind tries to improve them.
We are born with both—two wonderfully paradoxical tools to navigate life.

But to ignore either one is to lose balance. A heart grows numb. A mind grows bitter. And like a compass spinning wildly between north and south, the body splits.
And you… get lost.

Today, I am more balanced than I have ever been. And yet, I still choose to honor that split. Because I learned so much from it.
Better yet—the journey it led me on, however lost I may have felt, gave me everything.

And I am prepared to get lost again, if it means learning more.

Because now, I hear that truth beating, steady and sure:
“It’s good to make mistakes.”