Sometimes you get the random urge to do something you can’t exactly reason out—something you usually end up doing anyway “just because.” It shouldn’t take long, I told myself the exact same thing. 

However, unlike the usual feeling of satisfaction that comes with having an itch scratched, I was sitting by my window gazing out towards the Safeway parking lot that lay just beyond my window at 1:35 a.m., trying to find the words to a response I was trying to formulate. I felt one of these urges catching a glance of my newly bound book (or collection of “a few” essays) titled *Memories of Finn and Further Down Quarter One*. Like a few other books, it simply sat on my desk propped up, “displayed.”

Getting nowhere with my response as I listened to the gentle buzz of the mini fridge largely overcast by the sound of my suitemate showering and my dorm mate sleeping just a table’s length away from me, I worked away by lamplight. Despite having written half a page (which I am thankful for as it’s better than none), it was upon giving in and picking up the book that I ran my fingertips across the pages, flipping through them one by one (66 pages total) ever so gently, ever so carefully. I felt as if I were cradling a baby or holding, touching, engaging with some artifact, something with a loaded history, a family lineage perhaps. I thought back to all that went into making such a thing, from collecting and organizing photographs to plotting down ideas for cover art to designing the cover, from all the editing, all the loneliness, and all the laughs. I remembered how it felt to write (create) such a thing. Perhaps I felt too many things. Or maybe, truly, too few.

Looking back, none of it feels real to me and I almost can’t believe I wrote such a thing. As much as it pains me to have to read over my own work, many of the words and the process of writing and constructing it are ever present in my memory. Yet many are also so faded and in need of a refresh, and it is in engaging in the act of reading over one’s own work for the billionth time that a sense of joy warms me.

Despite all the pain and all the struggle I can’t help but not forget as that, too, has become a part of me that I try to learn from and wear, embrace with pride. I thank not only myself (or this past version of me who had written this) but all those who made it possible. Without their help, support, and motivation, I’d be nothing.

But sometimes it’s not about the others. Sometimes, it’s in re-engaging with oneself, one’s past, that you learn something, that you take something away. Maybe you even find the motivation I found in this moment of silent reflection and gentle delight—the motivation to keep going.