After I began writing on the web, I read some work by Dorothy Allison that inspired me in many ways. Her statement of how she lives her life  resonated for me. I've adopted an edited version of it as a reflection or approximation of a personal statement of purpose for me. (I hope she doesn't mind.)
 

"I wear my skin as thin as I have to, armor myself only as much as seems absolutely necessary. I try to live naked in the world, unashamed even under attack, unafraid even though I know how much there is to fear ....Trying always to know what I am doing and why, choosing to be known as who I am ... is as tricky as it ever was. I tell myself that life is the long struggle to understand and love fully. That to keep faith with those who have literally saved my life and made it possible for me to imagine more than survival, I have to try constantly to understand more, love more fully, go more naked in order to make others as safe as I myself want to be. I want to live past my own death ... in what I have made possible for others - my sisters, my son, my lover, my community - the people I believe in absolutely, men and women whom death does not stop, who honor the truth of each other's stories." -- Dorothy Allison