The Book That Changed How I See the World? I Had to Write It Myself.

Daily writing prompt

What’s a piece of media (book, movie, song) that changed how you see the world?

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People ask this question expecting an answer like The Alchemist or a Beyoncé album. Something polished, someone else made. Something you can hold up and say: this thing, from out there, cracked me open.

My answer is different. The piece of media that changed how I see the world is a book called Clay and I’m the one who wrote it.

And I know how that sounds. But stay with me. The Book That Changed How I See the World? I Had to Write It Myself.

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Furthermore, I didn’t set out to change anything

I set out to process something I couldn’t name yet. The feeling of having been someone’s project. Of having made myself soft and workable for years: easy to shape, easy to hold, easy to put down. I had tried to write about it directly and the words kept coming out wrong. Too angry, Too small, and Too much like a diary entry and not enough like the truth.

Then I started reading about pottery.

I don’t remember exactly why. I think I was looking for something to keep my hands busy while my brain healed. But somewhere in a late-night spiral through ceramics forums and YouTube tutorials, I read about leather-hard clay — the stage between soft and dry when a piece is firm enough to hold its shape, but not yet set. The potter scores the surface at this stage. Scratches it deliberately, makes it rough again, so two pieces can bond.

I put my phone down and sat in the dark for a long time.

That’s what grief does and love does. That’s what the wrong person does, and then the right one, and then you , alone, learning to do it to yourself.

The metaphor broke me open in the best way

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. The entire arc of becoming, not just heartbreak, but the whole project of turning into yourself. Mapped perfectly onto the stages of pottery.

Dry clay: before you knew what you were. Before anyone touched you. Raw and full of potential and completely unaware of it.

The wheel: the dizzying, disorienting spin of being shaped. By love, by the wrong hands, by your own desperation to hold a form that pleased someone else.

Leather-hard: the slow, quiet stage of pulling back. Firm enough to stand, but still vulnerable enough to crack if handled wrong.

Bone dry: the withdrawal. The stillness. The stage everyone mistakes for healing when really it’s just waiting.

Bisque firing: the test. The heat you didn’t choose but had to survive anyway.

Glaze: the finish. The seal. The version of yourself that is finally, permanently, beautifully yours.

I structured the whole book around these six stages. And writing through them…poem by poem, stage by stage. I started to see my own story differently. Not as a series of things that happened to me. But as a firing process. As something that was always going to end in permanence, if I could survive the heat.

What it changed

Before I wrote Clay, I saw breakage as failure. I saw the crack lines in myself. The places where I’d been dropped or mishandled or put back together badly as damage. Evidence of wrong choices. Proof I had let the wrong hands touch what wasn’t finished yet.

After writing it, I see them the way the Japanese see kintsugi. The art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The cracks are not where you failed. They are where you were tested. And the gold that fills them is not something poured in from outside. It was always in you. It just needed the break to have somewhere to go.

I also stopped seeing myself as clay.

That was the real shift. The whole time I was writing, I thought the book was about learning to survive being shaped. But the last section, the Glaze poems, the ones that came out of me like they’d been waiting for years. Turned out to be about something else entirely. About the moment you realize you were always the potter. That the hands doing the most important work were yours all along.

Why I’m telling you this

Because I think a lot of us are walking around in the leather-hard stage, mistaking our own firmness for healing. Holding our shape without knowing it’s ours to keep. Waiting for someone to score the surface again, to make us workable, because soft and workable is the only version of ourselves we learned to trust.

Clay is for those people. It’s the book I needed when I was still letting the wrong hands shape me. It’s the thing I wrote so I could finally stop.

If it changes how you see yourself the way writing it changed how I see myself. That’s everything.

Clay is available now on Amazon. If you’ve ever been too workable for too long, it’s for you.

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