You all will be shocked to learn that I'm giving up on The Artist's Way
Well. I'm sure some of you saw this coming.
I know literally last week I had talked about how I was determined to see this thing through to the end because I thought it was funny. This entire time I've been incredibly committed to the bit. But I'm going to be real, I'm tired. I love doing a weekly snarky blog post, but my god, at what cost?!
I tried Week 7. It honestly wasn't as bad as some of the past weeks. She said some stuff in the reading that I felt like actually applied to me. But I don't know. As I get older I become more and more aware that my time on this earth is precious, and I don't really want to spend any more of it doing these random activities that I know deep down won't help me.
Like, I COULD find some magazines and make a collage of things I like, and display the collage in a sacred space in my home, and also write a list of my 5 favorite movies and see if they have any themes in common with the collage. But I could also just not do that. I could, I don't know, write some music or read a (better) book or talk to my friends instead. And those all just sound so much better to me.
Some key takeaways
- As expected, a lot of advice given by the very wealthy author of this book simply does not apply to us normal people.
- That being said, week 3 was weirdly good? Not the exercises, but the reading itself. I legitimately think I will be going back to her guide on how to handle receiving harsh feedback in the future.
- Anything this book can do, therapy can do better.
- I did learn that I like baking blondies, though.
Finally, the most important thing that this book taught me is that I've actually been doing pretty well this entire time, even if I haven't always felt like it. I decided to try the program because I felt a little blocked, like my music was getting stale. But I was still writing music. I've never been scared or ashamed to be a composer. I have lots of hobbies, and I don't have any qualms about making time to do them.
So maybe it's just that I'm not the target audience. I know a lot of people who it helped a lot, and I'm genuinely so glad for them! But for me, I think it was mostly a big old waste of time.
There's also probably something to be said about how our hyper-individualist culture is obsessed with self-help books, and how I personally think that's bad. But I'm tired from 6 weeks of writing lists of different combinations of things I like. So maybe another time.
The good news is that I will now have the bandwidth to do some non-TAW blog posts again! I've got a few good things that I'm working on. Stay tuned! Until then, please enjoy this piece of music that really encapsulates how I feel now having decided to DNF this mostly terrible book (especially starting around 2:45).
You can read through my entire The Artist's Way Journey here.