My speech therapist gave me a strange assignment after brain injury: keep a written log of my day. I didn’t know it would become the thing that rewired how I process my emotions. There’s a saying and principle in the worlds of neurology and psychology: Neurons that fire together, wire together. Writing makes things in our brain fire together. It can change your brain, and change your life. It’s not an overstatement.
“When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stone-cutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
— Jacob Riis, Danish-American social reformer












