The Artist's Way: Week 2
This is the second of my series of weekly reviews of The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. You can read the first one here.
I have some complaints.
The reading
This week, Julia talks a lot about people who will get in the way of your creative journey. Naysayers who discourage your creativity and emotional vampires who selfishly suck up all your time and energy. Reading this made me feel superior because I was like, yeah Julia, I already identified those people in my life and cut them out long ago! You're preaching to the choir! So that was nice. I love anything that lets me feel smug.
But then she said something that made me so mad. I'm paraphrasing, but essentially she said that if you're keeping an emotionally abusive person in your life, it's your own fault. You're doing it because you're blocked and are afraid to embrace creativity, so you keep the person in your life so that you'll stay blocked. This is, of course, total bullshit, and I hope that she has learned more and changed her views on abusive relationships since then.
There was some other stuff in the chapter that was like, fine I guess, but mostly I was just cranky reading the rest of it, you know, because of the victim blaming.
The morning pages
I did these most days. I straight up forgot yesterday because it was a bad ADHD day. I did the full 3 pages most days, but not all of them. I don't know. This week was bad for obvious reasons. I've been trying to let myself do as much or as little as I feel up to.
The artist's date
This was nice. I started crocheting a shirt and listened to the first hawk tuah girl episode of Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), which is a very good podcast that you should listen to. This is something I may have done in a normal week anyway, but whatever, I'm counting it. The US government has essentially been an oligarchy run by billionaires for awhile, but now they're fully masks off about it, and that feels bad. I'm just trying to get through each day. I don't have energy to go to the dollar store to buy stickers or walk around the neighborhood looking for birds, Julia!
Sorry, Julia. This isn't your fault. This book was written in the early 90s. I think people were happier then. Oh no, am I just fully spiraling in the middle of a blog post? ANYWAY
The exercises
I've got beef with these. There were 3 separate exercises that were some version of "write a list of things and then do one of the things." One was to continue the imaginary lives exercise from last week and list 5 more, and do something having to do with one of your new entries. One was to write 10 things you would like to do, specifically things you haven't done before or changes you'd like to make, and do one of them. One was to write 20 things you enjoy doing (this was weirdly difficult, by the way), and write down the last time you did each one, and then do one you haven't done in awhile.
That last one was kind of interesting in that it made me realize I basically don't deprive myself of anything! The only ones I hadn't done in awhile were things that require a lot of coordinating of people (TTRPGs) or cost money (clothes shopping). I guess I'm generally pretty indulgent with myself, which I don't think is a bad thing!
Anyway. I skipped imaginary lives and counted starting crocheting a shirt as my artist's date, one of my 10 things I'd like to do, and my thing that I enjoy doing but haven't done in a bit. I'm sorry! I don't have unlimited time and energy for "doing" "things."
I did like the life pie exercise, where you figure out how fulfilled you feel in different areas of your life. It kind of confirmed what I already thought (things could stand to improve re: exercising, friends, and work), but the exercise involved drawing a circle and connecting some dots. And I liked being able to see the areas of my life visually.
Conclusion
I think I might hate Julia Cameron?? Okay, that's an exaggeration. She's probably a nice lady. But I did find myself frequently annoyed at her this week.
I'm going to keep going though. Because like I said, some friends whose opinions I really value said the book really helped them. Maybe it'll get better. And if it doesn't, I still have the group I'm doing it with, and I think going through 12 weeks of a bad self-help book together would be really funny. I'm not saying we've been making fun of the book a lot this week, but I'm also not not saying that.
Either way, I want to stick with it.