17 Years later, I found myself following The Artist's Way

Unfinished letter #26 (It's the inner work, stupid).

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Soon after we first married, a friend and mentor of M’s gifted me a copy of The Artist’s Way. It sat on my bookshelf, neglected for over a decade before I tossed it into a donation pile.

These were the years of artistic starvation.

I was a newlywed and then a young mom, adjusting to life in a new city and then move after move on top of the sleep deprivation that came with a Tasmanian devil of a boy who never, ever stayed in bed. In those early days of social media, I spent my precious free moments numbing my brain with an endless scroll, writing corny Facebook status updates and falling down the rabbit hole of Twitter threads.

Books? I didn’t have two braincells to rub together for anything longer than a reddit thread. When I did read, it was exclusively fiction, consuming novels hungrily, feasting after months of reading famine.

Case in point: in the last months before D was born, M and I took a four-day vacation to the eastern townships in Quebec. A babymoon of sorts. We were supposed to stroll through the lavender farms and nap by the pool, but all I wanted to do was binge-read Harry Potter. That’s right: I had finally picked up the series after having avoided it for over 12 years. And I could not put it down.

Babymoon indeed.

The universe is stubborn in its signals. It pokes and pokes and pokes until you can no longer ignore the thing you’ve been staring past. As I have come back to my writing in the last two years, The Artist’s Way has repeatedly appeared before me. An apparition, impossible to ignore. My initial instinct was to close my eyes, plug my ears and shake my head from side to side.

Julia Cameron, the author of this annoyingly accurate book, will tell you that my reaction is perfectly natural, a defense mechanism that results from being blocked from my own creativity, and that having this reaction is all the more proof of my need to get unblocked, to get out of my own way.

She is right (of course), and I cannot overstate how much I hate this fact.

I am 4 weeks into the book, which is also a course, and the best way to describe things is that I feel personally attacked, but in a good way. It’s humbling to discover that every deeply personal resentment and urge to resist is utterly banal. That I read something and think, No! Absolutely not! How dare you? only to discover half a page later that she will tell me, the reader, you are probably now thinking, “No! Absolutely not! How dare you?”

All of this reminds me of that famous quote (because it’s so true!)

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

-James Baldwin

A-Ha Moments with The Artist’s Way:

As soon as I started the morning pages, the most critical tool in the author’s arsenal and the one she insists you fulfil daily, I felt an overwhelming anger. I was so angry as I wrote for that first week or so. So angry that I wrote a poem about it.

A couple of weeks later, when I arrived at chapter 3 of the book, I read the page below and nearly fell out of my chair.

Get out of my head, Julia! You’re freaking me out!!

Cameron describes moments of synchronicity, where things start to just… click. And I’ve had that happen too. Perhaps the biggest click has been in finding teachings that I’ve learned through the Islamic tradition reappear in this book where I least expected them.