I took last week off – it felt like a heavy week all around and my teeny tiny blog didn’t really fit in any conversations.
In the week I took off, though, I managed to write some more of my project. I’m just over 16k words, and it feels great! I certainly didn’t expect to be here earlier this year, when I had no words of my new or old projects.
Also this week, I joined a friend and some of her friends in doing The Artist’s Way. I’d never heard of it, and we’re onto week one. So far, I’m enjoying the Morning Pages, and they feel more like therapeutic journaling than unblocking my creativity, but maybe that’s the start. It is a journey after all, and hopefully by the end I’ll know myself a little better so that this new project falls out of me like stories used to years ago.
And it is thanks to The Artist’s Way that I finally finished the pages in my old journal. Six years, at least three countries, at least two moves and a lot of personal turmoil later, I am retiring the journal that was originally a present. I don’t know if it’s a writer thing or a me thing, but I was really nostalgic about running out of pages. I still enjoy the feeling of writing on the first pages of a brand new notebook, or even using a brand new pen on an existing journal, but… this journal saw me through a lot and went with me everywhere for a while, especially when I lived in London.
I reread a few pages as a weird exercise – the closest I’ll get to actually reading through it. Handwritten musings and stories are more intimate than typed-up drafts, like an imposition on the version of me who wrote those pages. Out of respect for the person who wrote them (and, to be honest, to avoid the inevitable cringe), I include here some snippets of where I remember being when I wrote those pages. A journey through time is the only travelling I’ll be doing for a while after all…
Do you enjoy new stationery as much as I do, and get as nostalgic as I do when running out of notebook paper?
Two weeks after moving back from London, in September 2018. I now know that what I felt was a tough time adjusting and being out of survival mode. With the benefit of hindsight, I would advise the person who wrote that to wait a little bit longer, that the only way out of the discomfort of adjusting to a new situation, familiar as the setting may be, is through it. I don’t think I wrote anything when I was more settled, but again with hindsight, one wouldn’t notice the exact turning point when a difficult situation becomes manageable again.
My now-abandoned first novel. I went through a phase while I was in undergrad and for most of graduate school where I wanted my big projects to be about motherhood. My undergrad thesis was three short stories about mothers, and I convinced myself that my grad school thesis would be my last piece about motherhood, that it was the last part of the phase. I’ve never been a mom and I’ve never been pregnant, and I ask myself every time I remember the project, “What made you think you were qualified to write something like this?” Now, Julia Cameron would tell me here to be kind to myself, that that kind of negative self-talk is detrimental to my creative self. Speaking realistically, however, and even allowing for creative license and “being a writer,” I was very much out of my depth at 21, 23, 24 and 26. Yes, I did my research on what pregnancy would feel like and what to expect, but I’d be dishonest with myself if I didn’t admit that I have complicated feelings about motherhood as it applies to myself, and maybe these pieces were me working through those complicated feelings at those ages. I still have complicated (read: unconventional) feelings about motherhood and whether or not I want to experience that or have that role, and maybe that’s what this project was for: not to be published but to help me realize something about myself.
My old journal vs my new one. I was drawn to the “Fables” image because I read Aesop’s Fables as a kid, and what better to draw inspiration for a creativity journey?
Like running out of pages felt incredibly nostalgic, buying a new notebook felt incredibly important, like I had to pick wisely because what if I also end up with it for another six years? Realistically, though, it will only be for the Morning Pages while I complete The Artist’s Way. Or, hopefully, for Morning Pages even after I finish the course, if anything to finish another journal so I can justify getting another new one.
Onto write on these crisp blank pages!
From Doodle to Bestseller 