“The Restless Soul in the Bathroom Mirror.”

I’m a sucker for stories of career reinvention through introspection and journaling, and the dollop of Barbara Sher doesn’t hurt, either.

I don’t write in my journal as much as I used to, but pieces like this one make me want to take it up regularly again. I use cheap spiral notebooks for personal journaling — a tip I got from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, which I read one summer during college and which really taught me how to write creatively. The cheaper your writing medium, the less pressure you feel to fill it with Great Thoughts, which frees you to write whatever comes into your mind and encounter the thoughts and feelings you didn’t know you had.