#15: 12 weeks with Julia

I finished The Artist's Way.

I filled up another notebook today. I wrote by hand to the bottom of the last page, closed the back cover, marked its end date on the front and slid it into chronological order in my notebook drawer: 6/6/23-7/16/23. Filling up notebooks provides one of the most satisfying dopamine hits to ever do it, but today it was extra special. Today was day 7 of week 12 of The Artist’s Way.

The Artist’s Way is a 12-week Creative Recovery workbook written in 1994 that has sold over 4 million copies and solidified Julia Cameron’s place in the self-help x creativity industry. It asks that participants utilize three primary tools for 12-weeks: morning pages (3 pages of handwritten stream-of-consciousness writing/journaling, done in the morning shortly after waking up), weekly artist’s dates (creative, inspirational playdates with yourself), and weekly reading and journal prompts at the end of each chapter. The chapters have names like “Recovering a Sense of Power” and “Recovering a Sense of Abundance,” and book makes significant promises about the “gentle but powerful” changes that will occur as one engages with the tools and process of The Artist’s Way en route to becoming creatively unblocked.

“When we become unblocked, we will experience a withdrawal from our old life and what has kept us stuck – habits, workaholism, relationships, addictions. We find that we are able to articulate our own boundaries and desires and become less malleable to the whims of others,” Cameron writes. 

These are big claims. We will develop Boundaries. Flow. Synchronicity with the universe, which conspires with you to achieve your dreams, if only you would just trust it. Connection with your inner child. Profound transformation. 

Exactly what I am looking for when I pick up a self-help book; exactly what I will never find. 

The first observation I have about completing The Artist’s Way is that I really enjoyed the experience. I found it joyful and energizing. I also… wanted more. What if it could change everything, catapult my career ten years into the future, uncover some crucial truth that empowered and re-oriented my entire life moving forward?

“Gentle but powerful changes,” I told my husband this morning as I convinced him to take me to brunch, my first of many bargaining behaviors to avoid writing this newsletter. “Emphasis on the gentle, honestly. I’m underwhelmed.”

The first few weeks, I felt like I’d cracked open, pouring my thoughts and feelings onto the page every morning, daydreaming about my upcoming artist dates. Cameron insists that the inner artist that lives in all of us is a child, and must be treated like a child, welcomed in with softness, treats, and play, made whole through reparative journal entries in which you write letters to the people in your past who made you feel bad about making art.

I loved being a child. I learned choreography and beaded bracelets and collected magazines to cut up for collages like I was eleven to thirteen years old again. In the mornings, I rolled over in bed and grabbed at my 8.5x11 spiral notebook and gushed about my dreams and my to do lists for the day and how proud I was to be building this new habit.

It felt like everything about my orientation towards work and joy were shifting in a positive direction. And then, another voice showed up, impatient and expectant: “Something amazing must be coming.” 

But by week 10, I had begun to grow a little weary. Previously undiscovered levels of productivity had not arrived. I was not up until 3am writing the most brilliant essays of my life. No book deal had fallen from the sky into my lap. While I was supposed to be reigniting my passion for productive, career-aligned goals such as writing, I had instead... fallen back in love with dance class? Bought myself flowers?

Until I was 17 years old, I held too tightly to the wildly unrealistic dream that I could still maybe become a professional ballerina. Letting that dream go was like spending years getting breadcrumbed by an unavailable partner. I failed diet after diet and accumulated injuries in my joints, always balancing school and a booked social calendar, in total denial that the reality of living as a professional dancer was neither feasible nor the life I wanted. So it was a gift, at 33, to find myself head-over-heels in love with learning choreography again. To remember to turn music on and dance around my kitchen and feel joyful and alive in my body. To honor the little girl who wrote, in a “time capsule” letter to my future self that I opened at my 10-year high school reunion: “My name is Grace DeVoll, and I LOVE ballet!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Now that I don’t have to worry about having what it takes, my inner child and I are free to enjoy our beginner’s hip hop class.

Writing… not so much.

Two weeks ago, I was moaning at my therapist: “I’m on week 10 and I’m not even writing anything! Like, ZERO newsletters. Well, one newsletter. Barely anything!” 

“Haven’t you been writing morning pages every single day?” She asked me gently. 

“Yes, but I mean PROFESSIONALLY.” 

…

“I will take care of the quantity,” Julia Cameron suggests you tell your higher power. You are supposed to write it out, like a contract with God: I will take care of the quantity. You take care of the quality.

Twelve weeks in, the quantity remains a problem.  

I’ve written about an intention to prioritize process over outcome before. Part of this newsletter’s purpose is to learn more about what and how I want to write by showing up to the computer and figuring it out. But I cannot divest from the results of my own writing, cannot walk my adult parts out of the room so my inner child can please finish her little essay, which will take however long it takes, just let her be in flow, okay? Unblocked as I may feel when I am learning a choreography routine to Where They From by Missy Elliot ft. Pharrell, I have yet to free my relationship with writing from the pressure cooker of expectation, profit, and capitalism that it was formed inside of.

Also, producing finished art requires more than creative unblocking. It requires consistency and time management and perseverance. 

Completing The Artist’s Way didn’t stop me from procrastinating tonight until a few hours before my self-imposed deadline (which is also past my bedtime). It didn’t stop me from watching a documentary about UFOs for 90 minutes (lol), or finally handling a month’s worth of mail and paperwork, or making an elaborate risotto before finally sitting down to turn whatever I scribbled in my notes app last week into… something. I was just a little nicer to myself upon entering the pressure cooker tonight. If I am only here to attend to the quantity, it feels easier to just… go to bed, having written something that might only be fine, but will at least be true: after 12 weeks of The Artist’s Way, I remain myself. Except now I do my morning pages. 

Emphasis on the gentle. 

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Thanks for reading. <3