What would you write if you were really honest with yourself?
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Once I was asked to write an essay about being lonely. I immediately knew just what I would write about: the summer I was 20, when I backpacked around Europe by myself. I’d always meant to write about this particular adventure! I embarked on the writing project with the unearned confidence of a college kid sweating into the money belt Rick Steves told her to buy.
But as I wrote, things went awry. The essay kept wandering, forgetting to be about loneliness. Annoying! I pored over my travel journal and found one or two instances when I felt a little lonely, but mostly tales of the people I met on the road. I tried, draft after draft, to wrench the thing into shape.
Eventually, I realized that I couldn’t write an essay about being lonely on that trip because I hadn’t been lonely. I had in fact felt ecstatically connected, and had almost never actually been alone. It wasn’t the essay that was wrong, it was me. (I ended up publishing the essay that emerged in a travel magazine, and starting fresh for the loneliness essay.)
The problem was that I had been (inadvertently) dishonest about the truth of the experience.
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