The Artist's Way, Weeks Two & Three

Recovering A Sense Of Identity / Power

At the very start of the text for week 2 of The Artist’s Way, Cameron talks about “going sane”. That is, in the process of trusting and embracing our creativity, we look and feel erratic — as she puts it, “going sane feels just like going crazy”.

I’m not sure I agree. Or, at least, it wasn’t my experience of it. This was my first real hiccup with the programme, the first point at which I thought maybe this wasn’t resonating with me. But I had anticipated such moments of doubt, and this is the reason that, going into this process, I committed myself to completing the full twelve weeks.

By the end of week 3, I understood this “going sane” element a little more. I still can’t bring myself to totally get behind it, but I’m definitely finding that there’s some inner turmoil created by the level of introspection required by the course. Cameron’s approach in this book very much feels like therapy, and therapy inherently requires you to dig, to unearth ideas buried far beneath the surface.

In the supporting text for week 2, Cameron also talks about “poisonous playmates” (those who are creatively blocked, and who — perhaps subconsciously — sabotage your own creative recovery) and “crazymakers” (those who demand attention, create drama, and have an awful habit of taking over your whole life). These sections didn’t resonate much with me, because I am fortunate to not have anyone fitting either description in my life. However, I’ve known both sorts during my time on this planet (and some people who would even fit both categories) and so I definitely understand the value in highlighting these negative influences.

Later on, in week 3, I found Cameron’s preamble to the week’s tasks a lot more helpful. Cameron talks first about how our urge so often is to repress anger, when in fact is it a tool, a signal to be observed. If you can engage with the anger within yourself, you can better grasp the elements of your life you’re unhappy with. Don’t necessarily give in to the anger, but follow the path it’s urging you down. There were also some great thoughts on these pages on criticism, and how best to deal with it in a way that creates a safe space that nurtures the inner child / artist.

I continued with both my morning pages and my artist’s date through both weeks. Though I was feeling confident about being able to complete my pages every morning, a couple of days slipped past me (even now, I don’t know how this happened; I suppose it’s just living busy lives!). If I was building the habit in the first week, the next two weeks were spent trying to improve the quality of my pages. By that I mean: I aimed to get the most value possible out of the tool — not just waffling on about nothing (though I still do that some days!) but using them as a lens by which to focus on what’s really going on inside. I still have a lot of work to do on this, but I am slowly becoming more introspective. I’ve not had any major ‘eureka’ moments, but I’ve definitely experienced some minor ones, some times where I’d only semi-consciously known something to be true. The morning pages brought these buried ideas to the conscious mind.

It’s this same trouble with introspection that had diluted the effectiveness of the weeks’ tasks for me, as well. When I completed the tasks for weeks 2 and 3, I treated them more as box-ticking exercises than as an excuse to dig deep. Even those tasks I spent more time on, I struggled with for this very reason.

One of the tasks in week 2 has you list twenty things you enjoy doing. I honestly struggled to list twenty different things, and my initial fear was that I was a truly one-dimensional soul. But when I sat and pondered it properly, of course there were twenty different sources of joy in my life. Twenty and then some. So why had I struggled so much to list them? It was because between the writing and the advertising jobs, I spend so many of my waking hours working, and my interests have paid the price, being buried by lack of energy and halfway forgotten to time.

Similarly, I struggled in particular with week 3’s tasks that had you delve into your childhood. When asked to come up with five accomplishments from my childhood, I came up with only four — and one or two of those were stretching the definition of “accomplishment”. This wasn’t simply a question of hazy memory; I discovered a very intense resistance within myself to cast my mind back to those days. Doing the work here, as I said earlier, felt like therapy. But Cameron has explained already why that is: The Artist’s Way is about connecting to your inner artist, nurturing and strengthening your relationship and communication with your deep-rooted impulse to create. Is the development of these skills not therapy in a nutshell?

Hatchard's bookshop, near Piccadilly Circus

On the artist’s date front, I went on a trip to buy more loose-leaf tea and to the bookshops on Piccadilly Circus. This is nothing I haven’t done before (it’s something I do about once a month, in fact!) but it was what my heart wanted on the day I’d assigned for my date. I made sure not to go with an objective in mind, perhaps “buy X book”, but instead did simply whatever I felt like in the moment. I bought three books (two outside my usual comfort zone — The Iliad and The Prince), plenty of tea, and a falafel wrap, which I decided would become a tradition.

But my week 3 artist’s date went awry. I’d planned to head down to a green space in south London, but when I arrived at my local station, I found all my trains were cancelled. Determined not to let this stop me from having my date, I went for a walk in the sun around my neighbourhood, stopping at my local art shop for some supplies. But no falafel; already the tradition was broken.

Next, I start week four: recovering a sense of integrity. I know from others who have completed The Artist’s Way before that this is the hardest week, for one reason only: it’s media deprivation week.

More on what the means — and my experience of it — next week.

< Previous Post | Next Post >