Each year, I choose a question to guide the focus of my personal work. This year’s question is simple, but far-reaching: Can essay writing be a personal practice?
What I Mean by Personal Practice
A personal practice is something you return to regularly and intentionally in order to cultivate growth, self-awareness, resilience, or alignment with your values. It isn’t about productivity or achievement. It’s about something deeper: setting aside time to tend to yourself, to cultivate meaning, and to create intentional space for self-knowledge and transformation.
Like meditation or ritual, writing can offer a rhythm of reflection and integration. The personal essay is uniquely suited to this role because of its relationship to the question.
The Personal Essay and the Question
In an academic essay, the writer typically begins with a thesis—a claim to be argued, defended, and supported through evidence. The structure is oriented toward resolution: a problem is posed, analyzed, and ultimately clarified or concluded.
A personal essay operates differently. It doesn’t begin with a thesis but with a question.
That question might arise from an experience that hasn’t yet settled into meaning, an image that refuses to loosen its grip, a contradiction that asks to be lived with longer, or a tension between belief and experience. Rather than knowing in advance what the essay will argue, the writer enters the work alongside the question itself.
The material generated by the question is not treated as a problem to be solved but instead becomes something to be examined attentively—turned over slowly, viewed from different angles, tested against language. The question is allowed to exist in its full complexity, holding multiple possibilities and contradictions without being forced into resolution.
This transforms the blank page into a space for attempting, testing, and staying with uncertainty. Unlike the academic essay’s drive toward clarity and conclusion, the personal essay creates room for paradox to dwell freely, allowing meaning to emerge rather than be imposed.
Writing as a Way of Being
When essay writing is approached not merely as a form of communication but as a way of being with your own experience, it becomes a personal practice in the truest sense.
- It cultivates presence. By returning to a question you are examining again and again, circling it patiently you begin to pay attention to things you may have otherwise ignored including what you feel, what you see, what moves beneath the surface of things. Your understanding of both yourself and the world deepens.
- It becomes a space where experience is metabolized. What has happened to you, what you are learning, what you are drawn toward—these can be given language, form, and coherence and through this meaning can emerge.
- It cultivates stronger alignment with who you are. By examining what moves your curiosity and why you also get the chance to discover what you really think – noticing what rings true and what doesn’t and refining language until it matches inner knowing.
- It gives you the space to dwell in paradox. Beijing able to hold multiple truths and to remaining open to what you might discover along the way mirrors the process of growth and transformation.
Why This Matters to Me Now
Last year, the question guiding my inner work was: What do you really know is true?
After many years of studying Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, a set of principles began to take shape—still very much abstract and foundational, but resonant – formed through my own questions, thinking, and lived experience rather than inherited from any single tradition. The work that year was to articulate those principles as best as I could and see whether they could form a coherent philosophical framework that I could use as a foundation for my creative work.
This year’s question is an extension of that inquiry.
I have always loved writing, but in recent years I’ve lost my way.
Part of that was due to dealing with trauma in unexpected ways and then the stress of moving to a new country and having to adapt to new surroundings. My screen time went up as a way to cope with changes – not knowing just how detrimental that was as a coping mechanism – and I found my self with very little headspace for anything else.
Somewhere along the way I learned to doubt myself and with that my relationship with myself, the world and my writing changed. This year, I am committed to repairing that relationship.
x Martina
