In the forest canopied with the leafy niche of daily events, a benevolent listener reverberates in the canonical poetry of the ages humming irrepressible visceral contradictions. A squall of tears of bereavement pierces the elegiac sea of a silent night. The red-rimmed eye of sunrise greets us with a torrent of rage spilling over from frontlines of an examined life’s vital quarrels. The flute of life ushers in a welcoming breeze of reassuring resonance.

Personal essay writing that incites the mind and instigates personal growth involves examination and re-examination, a process of noticing and reflecting upon what a person perceives. Essayistic writing is an osmotic process wherein a person intuitively absorbs information and ideas, allows inchoate thoughts to gestate in the unconscious mind, and then consciously places the emergent strands of language and logic into an orderly and expressive format.

The whole of eternity is present now. We apprehend eternity through our senses and mental imagination. We can never recapture lost time. Memory allows us to taste the scintillating experience of living by recollecting our past in a series of sequential personal events and an orderly arrangement of a linked series of cultural happenings. Writing our personal story calls for us to remember the sensation of what it entails to live tactilely before losing lucidity of the mind.

Narrative essay writing affords sufficient opportunity for the writer to collect data, organize information, rationally process a matrix of collected material, reduce the essence of experience to assigned territories, and by doing so logically quantify their personal existence. Essay writing is an apt form to catalogue discordant incidences and as such writing prose oftentimes calls for the essayist to draw hard and fast classifications and conclusions.

Akin to any other human being’s creations composed from inspirational toil, the textual rendering of a person depicted in personal essay writing asserts an existence independent of the author. A personal writing voice speaks to me from a secluded mental closet. Writing makes private mental musings a public act.

Writing is an exhausting and demoralizing task that destroys human conceits. Writing an elongated series of personal essay opens a person’s mind to explore paradoxes and discover previously unrealized personal truths. Writing is as arduous as any trek into the wilderness. Every sentence takes a writer deeper into the jungle of the mind, a world of frightening inconsistencies created by our waking life’s desire that the world of chaos conform to our convenience.

We write, edit, and rewrite the story of our own life employing descriptive words, metaphors, and symbols. Our lives are full of symbols including those supplied by nature and religion, which touch upon the mystical and spiritual aspects of life. Symbols inspire enduring hope by formulating idealist expectations.

Life is untidy. My writing is messy. Life yo-yos up and down. My writing undulates. I do not fly straight. Akin to a broken arrow, I yaw in the wind. I write the way that I lived, without submission to silly rules and without undue modesty.

An essayist, unlike a fiction writer, needs to establish their objective reliability, equitable sincerity, intellectual integrity and maintain their authoritative trustworthiness because they are an acknowledged reporter of true events and relating or applying the ideas and principles of their sources.