I’m currently doing a class on The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron’s classic text about a path to creativity. I’m on week eight of twelve. True to Cameron’s practice, I have been doing Morning Pages pretty faithfully. I attend the once a week Zoom with my classmates, other midlife women. I have tried to do the Artist’s Dates, but I’m terrible at them (I have only managed a handful). I sometimes do the tasks at the end of the chapters. I even got a brand new red notebook just for the tasks, but to be honest, I gave up somewhere around Chapter 4. I took the class in the hopes that I would get my creativity back. That reading a book would be enough to make me creative again. That I suddenly would want to work on my manuscript from my MFA and turn into a proper book instead of spinning my wheels. That I would find that spark for writing again that I have been missing ever since I graduated in June. That I would be able to motivate myself to do something, anything, really to make art again.
That’s not entirely what’s happened.
It’s week eight, and I haven’t been writing. Around week five, I did all of a sudden have energy to look at my MFA final project. I printed it all out. I sat down to read it to see what work needed to be done. I got about one third of the way through, and life happened. My family needed me. I put manuscript on the white coffee table in my office, and the cats tromp on it as they navigate their way to the green, velvet loveseat behind it. I haven’t picked the manuscript up since. I feel vaguely guilty each time I catch a glimpse of it. Like I should want to work on it. But I don’t. Not really.
Instead, I get up each morning earlier than my family, and I pour everything I am feeling out into my Morning Pages. All my fear and doubt. All my joy and frustration. All my concern that my life is passing me by and I am simply watching from the sidelines. All my anxiety about my parenting and my kids. All of my anger. All of my happiness. All my hope for what could possibly come next. All jumbled together is my handwritten sprawl all over the pages. Impossible to tease apart. Impossible not to be bound together. Because there’s this one quote that Cameron included from Chekhov that I can’t let go of: “If you want to work on your art, work on your life” (80). And my Morning Pages are me working on my life, little by little, page by page to figure out what’s still standing in the way of my creativity. Is it my life right now? Probably. Am I okay with that? Not really, but I recognize the reality of it and know that it is temporary. Life can life hard. And of course, that would affect my art and whether I feel like even making it or not.
But it doesn’t help that I have been putting pressure on myself about writing either. All I can see are numbers. Six years since my last book came out. Four years since my last column. Two years since my last blog post. One year since my most recent book project contract was cancelled. Four months since I graduated. The numbers haunt me. They shout out, What are you doing? What should you have done? Even though I spent two years in an MFA program, time still feels lost. I could have been producing. What have I done to myself? (This question in my head completely ignores the reality of the pandemic and the death of my stepdad and a whole host of other things.) I have gotten caught up in the product rather than the process, Cameron would say. I have told myself I can’t just experiment and play with my manuscript because it has to be my next book. And then, surprising no one, I don’t want to work on it. I can’t write blog posts because I should be writing essays for publication, so I don’t write anything. Everything I write has to be meaningful or publishable or useful, so my writing has dwindled to nothing. I was so concerned about the numbers and the possible product that I stopped writing. I forgot that it was fun and enjoyable. I forgot that I used to love it.
The Artist’s Way has made me realize that yes, I do need to make some changes in my life. Not necessarily big dramatic ones, but small incremental ones that allow me to be creative and to nourish my creativity. But also, it has made me realize that I need to get out of my own way and recover that sense of joy and wonder that writing used to bring me. If that means I table book projects for awhile and start writing a poem a day instead, so be it. I have to find a way to be a writer that works for who I am now, not who I used to be. That’s the challenge, and I think I am ready for it.