What I Learned From Week One of The Artist’s Way

At the end of 2022, I decided to set an intention for the new year by choosing a word that I wanted to embody in 2023.

I went with the word “create” because I wanted to stop consuming so much and start creating art of my own.

I decided that I would buy a copy of The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron to kick-start that journey. I dove into the first 30 pages of the text, wrote Morning Pages for three days, set the book aside, and forgot about it.

Luckily, that wasn’t the end of my journey. A friend from my improv group posted an invitation to join her in working through The Artist’s Way and I jumped on the opportunity.

See, I’m what Gretchen Rubin would classify as an Obliger — I’m great at meeting the needs and expectations of others but absolutely horrible at holding myself accountable. I knew that going through the course with others was the only thing that would make me stick with it.

We got started last week, and I’ll be sharing my big takeaways from each week here on Vocal.

1. My phone is a huge creative block.

I love learning new things, so I spend a lot of time researching and reading about things instead of actually doing the thing. Instead of sitting down to brainstorm, outline, and write, I’ll sit for hours scrolling on my phone reading articles, and watching videos about writing.

In order to be successful, I needed to be intentional about separating myself from my phone. Instead of keeping it next to my bed at night, I moved it across the room so that I would have to get up to turn my alarm off and get my morning routine started.

When I was keeping my phone next to my bed, it was way too easy to hit snooze five times or grab my phone and start scrolling, wasting time when I was most motivated to write.

Bonus: putting my phone across the room when I get into bed also means that I actually spend my reading time before bed reading instead of scrolling.

I also have a time-release phone vault that I have not been brave enough to try out yet. Maybe in Week 2!

2. I am actually a morning person.

When I tried to start The Artist’s Way back in January, I kept my morning pages journal next to my bed so I could just wake up and write. Unfortunately, this meant that I wasn’t actually getting out of bed to write, so my brain still thought it was sleepy time. It would take me almost an hour to write three pages, mostly because I kept falling asleep mid-sentence.

This time around, I knew that I needed to set myself up for success by keeping my journal in a spot where I would actually have to get out of bed and walk to another room to write. This tiny change made it so much easier to actually get up and follow my morning routine.

For my entire life, I thought that I just wasn’t a morning person, but it turns out that I was just making it way too easy to hit snooze.

3. I’m really bad at being alone.

Okay, so this isn’t quite true. I love being alone. I’m an introvert, through and through, so I need to spend time alone to recharge my energy.

That being said, I’m terrible at being alone in public. The Artist Date is one of the basic tools of The Artist’s Way that involves setting aside a weekly block of time to connect with your inner artist. The only rule is that whatever you do needs to be a solo activity — no bringing along a friend or partner to accompany you.

I could have made this part easy on myself by choosing to work on one of the many craft projects I have at home, but in the spirit of personal growth, I decided to venture out into the world all by myself.

I decided to start off small by heading to a thrift store solo. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but the idea of just experiencing the world without a purpose felt overwhelming. I wandered around the local thrift mall, looking at discarded and refurbished items from the past and just took in my surroundings. It was deeply uncomfortable, but I definitely achieved my goal of pushing myself outside of my comfort zone.

4. My therapist was right about journaling.

And by “my therapist”, I mean literally every therapist I’ve had for the last fifteen years. Every single one of them suggested that writing would help me alleviate some of my anxiety and my tendency to numb out my feelings instead of fully experiencing them.

Like the Artist Date, Morning Pages are a basic tool of The Artist’s Way. The idea behind Morning Pages is to fill three pages with writing or drawing first thing every morning. There aren’t any prompts and there aren’t any rules, other than getting it done.

At first, I felt like I needed to come up with something extra creative to fill my pages, but I ended up just writing about anything that I couldn’t get off my mind. If I was stressed out about something, I wrote it down. If I was mad about something, I wrote it down. If I was anxious about something, I wrote that down too.

As I wrote about all of my worries and annoyances, my mind started to feel more clear and I was finally able to channel all of the brain power I had been wasting on negative thoughts into creative writing outside of my morning pages. If one week of Morning Pages can free my mind this much, I can’t wait to see how much change will take place after completing the full twelve weeks.

5. Time passes regardless of how you spend it.

It has been over a decade since I wrote any fiction or poetry and about six years since I wrote any non-fiction. At 34, I was starting to feel like I was never going to be able to turn my ideas into actions. I felt like it was just too late and I was too out of practice to pick things back up again until I read this:

“Remember that in order to recover as an artist, you must be willing to be a bad artist. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one. When I make this point in teaching, I am met by instant, defensive hostility: ‘But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play?’ Yes…the same age you will be if you don’t. So let’s start.” — Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way, pg. 30

And I’ll be damned if that wasn’t exactly the wake-up call I needed.

6. All you have to do to be a writer is…WRITE.

This feels like a very basic statement, but as a recovering perfectionist, it is extremely difficult to just put my writing out there for anyone to see and pass judgment on. Because of those perfectionist tendencies, I gave up on too many hobbies to count in my younger years.

If I wasn’t automatically good at it, I didn’t want to do it anymore. As I got older, that turned into pre-judging whether I thought I would be good at something and just choosing not to start anything I had the potential to fail at. That meant that I didn’t do tons of things that I thought I would enjoy just to avoid failing.

As I move into week 2 of The Artist’s Way, this is me finally writing and hitting publish instead of trying to avoid failure.

Is this a perfect story? Nope.

Will anybody care? Who knows?

And that is perfectly okay.

Thank you for reading! Any feedback is much appreciated. If you are interested in working through The Artist’s Way, please consider using my affiliate link to purchase your copy of the text. If you prefer a free digital resource, here’s the link to an older PDF version of the text.