The Artist's Way: Week 6
Previous entries: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5
This week was mostly stupid so I mostly didn't do it :)
The reading
This was the "abundance" chapter. Shockingly, Julia has some really bad opinions about money.
I don't know what else to say. It was bad. She talked at length about buying a horse for the first time in awhile, something the masses can definitely relate to!
The morning pages
I'm back to journaling only when I feel like there's something I need to get out onto the page, so I've only done it once or twice this week. It's working a lot better for me.
And guess what! I started drafts of two new blog posts this week, not including this one. I think my bit of writing burnout is gone. I've realized that journaling is great sometimes, but I get a lot more out of doing writing that's meant to be shared with people. It's basically the same reason I tend to not write music just for myself: I create as a way to connect with people, to share a little piece of myself with the world.
I'm really glad I recognized that the morning pages were actively harmful for me and scaled back. I feel like younger me would have either tried to push through it or seen it as a failure and given up on the program completely. Growing as a person! We love to see it!
The artist's date
This was actually fun. I challenged myself to bake something that I've never made before, without buying any new ingredients. I ended up making chocolate chip blondies, and they turned out really tasty! I have a few go-to things that I usually bake because I tend to be pretty hard on myself whenever something I'm cooking or baking doesn't turn out well, so it was really good for me to try something new. Also, my husband got to reap the benefits of his wife randomly deciding to bake blondies, so I'd say it was a successful artist's date in multiple ways.
The exercises
I have a confession to make. Baking something as my artist's date was actually cheating, because that was one of the exercises for the week. Whatever! It's called being efficient!
There was a fill-in-the-blanks exercise where I had to complete various statements about money, such as "people with money are..." and "if I weren't so cheap I'd..." Big news! Turns out I'm still anti-capitalist.
I didn't do anything else. Walking around collecting leaves and rocks actually does sound kind of nice, but it was so, so cold this week. So I may try this one next week, when it's supposed to get up to the 40s??? Okay Chicago!
The rest of the exercises were like, throw out old clothes! Change something in your home environment! Ponder whether the way you think about money has changed! (It hasn't. I still have the income of a freelance indie composer.) Just like, a lot of repeating exercises that she already assigned in prior weeks and/or things that I can't relate to.
Conclusion
I'm genuinely really glad to hear that this book has helped so many people, but I mostly just think it's bad! I'm sorry!
But I will stubbornly keep doing the program, because for some reason I think that's a very funny thing for me to do.
Umm. I just realized there wasn't really anywhere in this post that felt like a good place to add an image, but I always like to include at least one so there's some sort of preview image. So to conclude, here's a horse I found on pexels.
See ya next week!