This is week three. The third of a series of reflections on Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.
Catch up with week 2 reflections here.
I am still convinced I am doing my morning pages wrong. I do write them first thing in the morning and I’m starting to believe they are helpful, but I’m certain I’m still doing them wrong. That my handwriting is too sloppy and careless. I couldn’t go back and read them if I tried. Sometimes as I’m writing strange thoughts creep in, ‘Is that even how you spell that word? Does it count as a word if you just scribble something similar? Nah, its okay I was thinking of a word when I wrote it, even if it is illegible.’
I’m not being mindful when I write them, or meditative. It’s just sprawl. Wordy sprawl, like urban sprawl, only less architecture and no graffiti. (How far can I take this simile?) GPS doesn’t work here and there are too many dead ends, random u-turns and no stop-lights. Sometimes you drive in circles without even realizing you’re driving in circles. On a happier note, the views from above are fantastic. I highly recommended you take a tour, with your tour guide Julia Cameron.
Welcome to my rambling journey into the Artist’s Way.
What is the Artist’s Way?
I ask myself this all the time. Every week I try to define it differently for you. Firstly, it is a book written by Julia Cameron for starving artists. Not starving in the cliched, literal sense, but artists who’ve lost touch with their inner artists, who are blocked and struggling to make their art. It can be writing, dancing, drawing, painting, film or any creative craft. The Artist’s Way is going to help you begin anew; to feed your artist soul with helpful tasks, artist-brain activities and morning pages to help you recover.
What else is it? A journey into your past, it creates mindfulness of your present and gives you a glimpse of your future. Week one reflected on the past and week two encouraged you to be constantly aware of the present. This week felt like we were stretching toward our future.
Our tasks asked us to consider people we admire and friends who nurture us. Cameron is guiding us, week by week, toward a hopeful future. If we keep going along this path we can become a stronger, more creative person. That’s what I want. That’s the future I seek.
Week three deals with emotions
There is something freeing when you spend every morning gutting your inner feelings and thoughts onto paper. I use loose leaf paper and a pencil. This is because I ran out of pens the second week and have yet to buy more.
Three weeks are not long enough to call it a habit, not yet. (I think it’s more like a month and a half to call something a habit.) But my body clock has definitely worked out that we wake up earlier and as a consequence we must go to bed earlier too.
Bummer for that, but this week was about indulging, babying your inner artist and being gentle to yourself. And since my period started this week, I was exhausted by the evening and wanted nothing more than to curl up with a hot pack. So that’s what I did.
And yes, I did feel guilty about it.
Of Anger, Shame and growth of the Artist
Luckily, this week Cameron also spoke of these emotions. How shame will wear us down and cling to us. And how anger is a map and compass. “Anger shows us what our boundaries are” and “points the way.” A metaphor I was ready to embrace.
I don’t often get really angry. But recently it happened while playing my new favorite game, Elden Ring. I was furious because I kept dying to a mini boss. It was an underground crypt where an evil stone guardian has polluted the root and it must be destroyed. The stone dog killed me over and over, unfairly at times, or sometimes after a brief struggle where I tried desperately to kill it first. Mostly I died.
And died.
And died again.
Rage filled me and I pounded on the floor, ready to smash my controller, not caring in that moment if I broke it. The anger flared like alcohol on a bonfire, the smoke choking me, blinding me to anything else. My anger wasn’t at the game, it was directed at me. Why wasn’t I good enough? Well, I wasn’t practicing. I wasn’t observing the monster’s movements. Elden Rings is a difficult game. It requires precision and dedication to master the timing of attacks and learn the movement of your enemies, especially when you’re playing this type of Dark Souls genre for the first time. So first, I took a walk to calm down. This let my brain to catch up with what I was trying to accomplish. I am not a pro. I’m just a casual yet determined gamer. I came back from my walk and I beat the monster. (Maybe twenty or thirty deaths later.)
After anger, shame was the next emotion I dealt with this week. But if we start talking about my feelings on shame and guilt, I could spend all week typing them out, with pages and pages, novels of text, but I won’t do that here. Suffice to say, I have some long standing guilty feelings and I’m working on them. It’s not something you conquer in one week, but it’s good to be aware of. I know I am my hardest critic, so going forward I need to be kinder to myself.
Yes, I know this in my head, but I’m still learning to do it in practice. Like playing my game, I have to fail again and again, practice and learn the moves before I can get better. This is how I will grow as an artist.
Cameron gives some practical advice for dealing with criticism from others. I think it also applies to criticism you give yourself.
So when I draw a new picture and dislike it afterwards, I can try to acknowledge it isn’t the best work, but a “necessary stepping stone” and then I can do something nurturing, and maybe also write myself a letter.
Like this one.
Dear Ava, Thank you for your honest thoughts on the illustration entitled O Rose Thrower. The body proportions are not accurate on purpose. I was trying for a JoJo pose, all bendy, with impossible limbs at weird angles. You’re right, I didn’t use references for the clothes and I should do that on my next piece. Thank you for taking the time to critic my work, yours sincerely, Ava.
Okay, I feel much better about it now, (I even managed to post the illustration here), and I’m ready to try drawing another. Tune in next week for more thoughts and confessions on the Artist’s Way.
Actual check in, week three:
Morning pages written: yes, I wrote them, sloppy and impossible. I skipped one morning to write my story.
Artist Date: I dyed eggs. Now I have tie-dyed paper towels. (What do I do with them?)
Moments of serendipity: Perhaps. I wanted to be more social and got invited to my cousin’s for Easter dinner, which I was not expecting.
Other breakthroughs or significant insights: I feel like I’m not doing anything productive, but I am making progress in my writing and drawing. Each week I make this blog post with my cute character illustrations and its adding up. I’ve written more blogs posts in the last three weeks than the last three months and a total of 18 drawings of my artist self.