Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. Earlier this year, we completed The Artist’s Way. We’re concluding the year with The Artist’s Advent Calendar. This is the final post in that series.

We did it!

More than 3 weeks ago, we began experimenting with small creative prompts. Every morning since the beginning of December, I’ve shared a fresh prompt on Substack Notes and Instagram. Folks joined in from all over the world. Our mission wasn’t to complete any big creative projects. No-one has written any novels, or completed any great works of art. But we have maintained a consistent, experimental practice of exploring our creative lives and in doing so, we’ve become more ourselves through the darkest weeks of the year. As we wrap up this project, I’m deeply grateful to those of you who’ve shown up to experiment with me over the last few weeks. Few of us have done something everyday - even I have skipped a few days! - but we have done more than we might have without this creative container, and I’m proud of us for that.

Here’s a round up of what we’ve been doing over the last week, together with my reflections on each task:

Day 17:

On day 17, we edited our social media feeds. Our brains don’t have the capacity to filter through the volume of information we’re exposed to everyday and by reducing the volume of noise, we can make more space for the work that really resonates with us. This task kind of backfired for me. I went to Instagram to try to trim back the list of people I follow, and ended up getting pulled into the algorithmic vortex. I did unfollow a few folks, but I think it’d be better to do that while I’m already sucked into the social media world rather than going there explicitly with this task in mind.

Day 18:

Day 18 was a simple one: remove one item from your wardrobe that you don’t feel good in. I over-achieved on this one, and removed a short stack of ratty old t-shirts.

Day 19:

On day 19, we took quizzes! As a teenager, I loved doing those quizzes that were published in teen magazines. They’re not supposed to be serious (or even to tell us anything meaningful), but it’s fun to answer questions and it can help us to think differently too. I suggested a few favourites:

• A brand archetype quiz.

• This feminine archetype quiz

• The Classic Enneagram

I did the brand archetype quiz and discovered that my “brand”/creative work is a Magician. TBH I’m not sure that’s correct, I love Oprah and Apple as much as the next girl but I’m not sure my work really belongs in that category. That said, it was fun to think about my work through a new lens, especially one that’s a little more visual. How did you get on? I’ve love to hear about it in the comments:

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Day 20

On day 20, we wrote to our future selves. This was by far my favourite task of the week. It was such a relief to disconnect from the day to day pressures of this time of year, and to think about what I wanted my future self to know. Writing to future-Clare was surprisingly emotional, and it allowed me to access what felt like a deeper, more profound register. If you’d like to schedule your letter for your future self, you can use this tool!

Day 21

“The sun, with all those planets revolving around it, still manages to ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else to do.” - Galileo Galilei

On the Winter Solstice, we worshipped the sun. Since ancient times, many cultures have celebrated the shortest day of the year. It is the deepest point of Winter. After the Solstice, the days begin to lengthen again. This was such a simple task but it was one of my favourites too. Throughout the day, I was more mindful of the sun’s rays. Our lives are literally only possible because of this awesome burning star in the sky and I almost never think about it.

Day 22

On day 22, we made origami birds. Or at least, we were supposed to! I’d arrived in Rome and decided to prioritise a walk around the city and a slice of pizza instead. But that’s OK. The Artist’s Advent Calendar isn’t about “completing” tasks, but experimenting with them. Maybe I’ll find time to make an origami bird another day, or maybe I won’t. These prompts are invitations, not mandates. If something doesn’t feel right, it’s OK to skip it!

Day 23

On day 23, we thanked the folks whose work has meant something to us over the last year. I chose to thank Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way. I know this might be a controversial choice. There was so much about the book that I didn’t like! There are also things that I think are actively harmful for trauma survivors. But it’s also a book that has transformed my creative life every time I’ve engaged with it. It’s a book that helps me think more broadly about what creative work can be, and how it can transform our world for the better. The Artist’s Way also gave shape to my professional growth over the last year, and I’m immensely grateful for that.

Day 24

Today, we stretched for 5 minutes before what is often a busy day. I got a little teary on my yoga mat thinking of folks in many different parts of the world who’ve joined me throughout this experience. I’m so grateful to everyone who has shown up for this project and more importantly, for their inner artists. I’ve also been missing my mother as I always do at this time of year, so it was a tearful yoga practice but a worthwhile one too.

Thank you for being part of The Artist’s Advent Calendar.

A particular shout out to those who participated quietly - you might not have been very active in our comment threads, but I know you’ve been quietly incorporating these invitations into your daily lives and I’m grateful for that.

Here are the other posts in this series in case you missed them:

If you would like to leave a testimonial for The Artist’s Advent Calendar, I would love that. You’re welcome to share your thoughts via the comments below, or through this simple form.

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If you find this time of year difficult, you might find resonance in this essay I shared last year. (Short version: before meeting my wife, I spent many Christmases alone. Sometimes, it was awful. Sometimes, it was fine. I have a lot of feelings about this time of year, which I tried to find my way through in this essay:

I am going to take a short break to refill my well, enjoy some offline time and plan some exciting new offerings for 2026. I’ll be back in your inboxes in January.

Until then, I wish you a restful festive season.

💕 If this piece resonated with you, please tap the heart below to help spread the word.

💬 In the comments, I’d love to hear your reflections on this experience. Feedback (both positive & constructive) is also very welcome.

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Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. Earlier this year, we completed The Artist’s Way and we’re concluding the year with an Artist’s Advent Calendar. From December 1st - 24th, I’m sharing creative prompts to help deepen your connection to your inner artist. Here’s an overview if you’d like to learn more:

🚫 If you’re not interested in this aspect of my work, feel free to update your subscription here.

I’m writing to you from my couch, with a blanket on my feet and a cat curled up beside me. I’m tired, friends. It’s been a year! But I’m also very grateful to be ending the year with a little daily creative experimentation. Especially in our toughest moments, creativity can be a balm. We have 8 days of (free!) prompts left. The tasks are small but have the potential to be quietly transformative too. I share them via Substack Notes and Instagram every morning and would love for you to join us 💕

Here’s a round up of what we’ve been doing over the last week:

Day 10:

On day 10, we choose 3 books at random from your shelves and looked for connections between them. My three books were Milk by Alice Kinsella, Love in Exile by Shon Faye and The Candy House by Jennifer Egan. You can read about the lines I selected at random, and the connections I found between them in the Note above.

Day 11:

Day 11 was a fun one! Our task was to play with a pet or interact with the non-human world in another way. wrote about all the majestic sea creatures that surrounded her sailboat, stopped by a local dog park to and shared the joy that is Maru. (Watching this video might have been the best 92 seconds of me week!)

Day 12

On day 12, we wrote tiny poems. You can click the Note above to read them all. Even when we’re just jotting down a few lines, there’s so much poignancy to be found in these tiny works of art!

Day 13

On day 13, we did a short digital detox. This was my favourite task of the week. I loved the quiet that came from not consuming audiobooks or podcasts. I loved the feeling of spaciousness and peace it created. I loved feeling more physically embodied. I also realised that a single day is not enough to get the full benefits of a digital detox so I’m excited to try a longer stint between Christmas and New Years.

Day 14

On day 14, we made vision boards. Or at least, we were supposed to. I completely ran out of time, but that’s OK. Few of us have time or headspace to follow every single creative invitation. I’m going to save this one to do between Christmas and New Year’s too!

Day 15

On day 15, we made pickled red onions. These was very satisfying to make, and deeply delicious too. I loved the deep luxurious pink of the finished jar, and the tangy flavour they added to my scrambled eggs on toast.

Day 16

On day 16, we danced. This was another favourite from the week. Martino and I danced to All I Want for Christmas is You while the kettle boiled for my morning cuppa. It made me a little sad because it brought back the memory of dancing to the same song with Budino last year, but it was a sweet kind of sadness to remember our beautiful boy. (For those who don’t know, our older cat Budino died last January 💔)

That’s it for this week’s round up. I’ll be sharing 8 more creative invitations before we finish on December 24th. You’re so welcome to join in whatever way makes sense for you.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might also appreciate:

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💬 In the comments, I’d love to hear your reflections on this week’s tasks. Which tasks did you enjoy the most? Were there any that pushed you outside your comfort zone? It’s always a joy to hear from you, and I look forward to chatting in the comments!

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Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. Earlier this year, we completed The Artist’s Way and we’re concluding the year with an Artist’s Advent Calendar. From December 1st - 24th, I’m sharing creative prompts to help deepen your connection to your inner artist. Here’s an overview if you’d like to learn more:

🚫 If you’re not interested in this aspect of my work, feel free to update your subscription here.

For the last 10 days, I’ve been sharing small creative invitations every morning via Substack Notes and Instagram and readers from all over the world have been tuning in to experiment with me. The tasks are small - most take less than 30 minutes, many take less than 10 minutes - but they have the potential to be quietly transformative too.

Here’s a round up of what we’ve been doing over the last while:

Day 1:

On day 1, we shared five words to describe our creativity in 2025. Here are mine:

My five words are: expansive, in community, in touch with nature, fulfilling and insatiable/always wanting more. That’s a lot more than 5 words, but it does capture what my creative life has felt like in 2025.

My creativity is more expansive than it was a year ago. I’ve gotten more into cooking and baking, and have enjoyed experimenting with collage and scrapbooking. I finally used the travel journal my wife bought me 4 years ago (!) and have really enjoyed tactical creative projects that involve playing with glue, magazines, colouring pencils etc

In previous years, most of my creative life unfolded on a screen. I identified primarily as a writer, and used that craft to move myself through deeply painful experiences. In 2025, I’m grateful to have expanded beyond that.

Day 2:

Day 2 was one of my favourite days because I got to read so much beautiful poetry. Huge thanks to , , , , , , and for sharing some of their favourites.

Here are some of the poems we read:

• Deborah Quibell’s “Tenderness and Lilies” (from her book Soul Bird: Poems for Flying). This was a poignant line: “Your panting heart cannot keep up with the ambitions of your mind.”

• Sacred Ground by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (from her book The Unfolding)

• Little Palm by Lesyk Panasiuk

• He and She by Christina Rossetti

• Dogs by Marchette Chute

• Let Them by Donna Ashworth

• Full Moon Blessings by Andrea Balt

• At the end of November by

• Time to be Slow by John O’Donohue

• The Thing Is by Ellen Bass

• Good Bones by Maggie Smith

• Poetry is not a luxury Instagram account

Day 3

On day 3, we did jumping jacks! It wasn’t my favourite activity, but it did give the cat something to stare at on a dull December morning 😻

Day 4

On day 4, we made a beautiful slice toast. (I was supposed to eat it mindfully, but I gobbled it up before I even had a chance to take a photo. It was *that* good!)

Day 5

On day 5, we took a walk in nature. (See selfie above!)

Day 6

On day 6, we revisited our Artist’s Altar. This was one of my favourite tasks of the week. I made my first Artist’s Altar back in June, and refreshed it in August. Since then, it’s gotten a bit dusty and stale. It was a joy to add a few new trinkets to my Altar, including a postcard sent to me by Kate Horowitz, a few things I’ve collected on recent walks in nature and some polaroids from my wedding in June. Collectively, these items help me to remember the power of creative possibility.

Here’s a little more about my Artist Altar:

Day 7

On day 7, we made soup. Click through to see soups (& recipes) from folks around the world!

Day 8

On day 8, we drew what we could see outside our windows. My final creation was pretty bad (🙈), but the task helped me see the world around me more clearly. The task’s instructions were to make it impefect, and I certainly did that! (You can click through to see my drawing in the Note above!)

Day 9

On day 9, we drew what we could see from outside our windows looking in. If you’ve joined any of our virtual gatherings, this view might be familiar to you. It’s the wall behind my desk where I have a cozy chair and a mini gallery wall. This is our only two-part task, and it was interesting to use a window as a natural frame to reflect on how we think about perspective. It was also just fun to draw! (My drawing is linked in the Note above, if you’d like to see!)

That’s it for our first 9 days of tasks! It’s not too late to join us if you’d like to take part. I share a small creative prompt every morning via via Substack Notes and Instagram and you’re welcome to dip in and out in whatever way makes sense for you.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might also appreciate:

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💬 In the comments, I’d love to hear your reflections on The Artist’s Altar so far. How has it impacted your creative life? And do you have any feedback (positive or constructive to share)? It’s always a joy to hear from you, and I look forward to chatting in the comments!

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As 2025 comes to an end, I’ve been reflecting on how my creative work has unfolded this year. To be honest, it’s been sobering. I spent a lot of time this year supporting other folks to bolster their creative selves which was deeply fulfilling for me, though it also meant that I never found the same deep focus for my own creative projects.

That novel I wrote during covid? I still haven’t revised it.

The podcast series I planned out? I haven’t made the time to pursue it.

The stories I wanted to pitch and submit? Many didn’t make it off my computer.

That’s OK, though. There are years that are dense with the deep work of creative imagination, and there are years where other priorities take over1. While I haven’t made much progress with my big creative projects, I have felt deeply in tune with my creative self this year. I deepened my exploration of The Artist’s Way by doing it in community with others, and I’ve been steadfast in my commitment to small, creative habits throughout the year. I’ve also diversified my creativity away from being exclusively focused on writing and incorporated other forms of creative expression like scrapbooking and cooking.

That said, I am a bit bummed that I didn’t even manage to open my novel’s Scrivener file. I’m ambitious for my work and the realisation that a whole year has passed without adding a single word towards that dream.. that stings.

I’m sure I’m not the only one grappling with creative disappointment as this year draws to a close. Many of us are deeply passionate about our creative work and it hurts to feel like we haven’t made as much progress as we hoped to. I didn’t want to end the year feeling bummed, so I decided to create The Artist’s Advent Calendar. Between December 1st and 24th, I plan to share 24 creative prompts designed to reinvigorate my inner artist. Initially, I wanted to make an advent calendar for myself. I wanted to end the year feeling a renewed sense of creative accomplishment, but as with most things in life, I decided it’d be more fun to do it in community.

I have to be honest: when I started dreaming about this, part of me thought “really Clare? Another new project? A month before the end of the year and you want to add ANOTHER thing to your list”. My body is tired. My mind is tired. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that’s exactly why I should do it. It’s the busiest time of year for a lot of people. Over the weeks ahead, many of us will be stretched to our limits. We’ll be navigating family dynamics, painful trauma triggers and trying to manage our mental health through the dark, cold days of Winter.

It’s because we are busy and stressed that we should prioritise our creative lives. Our lives as artists give us a little more room to breathe. It makes a little more space for choice and intentionality. It helps us feel more like our truest, deepest selves.

If you’re feeling complicated about your creative work this year, I hope you’ll consider joining me.

Here’s how it will work

Every day, I’ll share a small creative task via Substack Notes and through the Life after Trauma instagram page. I’ve worked hard to prepare bite-sized creative invitations that will take no longer than 30 minutes to complete. Many of them can be completed in 5 minutes. On the weekends, I’ll suggest longer activities (1-2 hours).

Some activities are drawn from The Artist’s Way. Some are suggestions from my own life. All of the prompts are invitational. If you feel drawn to them, you’re welcome to spend a few minutes experimenting with them. If they don’t appeal to you, feel free to skip them. You don’t have to complete every activity. I don’t think many people will. But by the end of this season, you’ll hopefully have been more creative than you would have without this project.

Here’s the prompt from December 1st as an example (together with my response to the prompt in the comments of my Note!):

The prompts are a starting point. Experimentation and adaptation is encouraged. For example, with the above task, you might like to write about the words you selected. You might like to take the question with you as you move through your day, noodling on it on the bus to work and jotting your thoughts in your Notes app. You might like to doodle your words, and create a mind map of things they bring to mind. It’s up to you how you’d like to play with these invitations.

On December 24th, I’m hoping to share a downloadable resource which collects all of the creative prompts we’ve experimented with. Each week, I’ll share my own reflections on the week’s prompts through my newsletter too.

As we come to the end of the year, it’s easy to focus on the creative projects we haven’t managed to complete. But the year isn’t over yet and we can find a few minutes a day to connect with our inner artists.

Even if these experiments don’t advance our larger creative projects (I’m looking at you, novel languishing in a digital drawer!), they will help keep us in touch with our creative instincts. They will help us to feel more invigorated and alive, and that energy can bolster us through the drama, stress and pressure that often accompanies the Winter holidays.

I hope you’ll join us!

🎨 Ready to get started? Check out the latest creative prompts on Substack Notes. (Or Instagram, if you prefer that platform!)

💕 I’d love this offering to reach as many people as possible. If there’s someone in your life who might benefit from some creative experimentation at this time of year, please consider sharing it with them. 🙏 Restacks are also deeply appreciated.

💰This Artist’s Advent Calendar is a free offering that’s open to everyone who’d like to engage with it. At the end of the season, there will be an option to contribute towards covering the costs of this project but for now, please focus on enriching your creative life.

💬 In the comments, I’d love to hear your reflections as we begin. If you participated in The Artist’s Way earlier this year, I’m curious how your creativity has unfolded throughout the year. Does The Artist’s Advent Calendar feel like an opportunity to reinvigorate your creative life? Feedback (positive & constructive) is always welcome, so please do share below! (or via DM if you’d prefer not to share it publicly!)

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🚫 This project will be shared through The Artist’s Way section of my newsletter. If it isn’t of interest to you, feel free to update your subscription so you don’t receive newsletters on The Artist’s Way.

We did it! I’m so proud of us 🥹

We completed The Artist’s Way. No-one in this community has done it perfectly. We skipped Morning Pages and Artist’s Dates. We said we’d complete tasks, and never got around to them. We read some chapters deeply, and others not at all. But we stuck with it. We kept showing up for each other and for our inner artists. For some of us, this experience coincided with difficult moments in our lives. Our community has experienced grief and loss. We’ve struggled with burnout. We’ve been trying to find our way through turbulent life circumstances, and yet we have still showed up to nurture our creativity.

What follows is a short personal reflection on the last few months, what I’m planning to bring forward into the next chapter and some beautiful perspectives from members of the Life after Trauma community. Before we start, a few statistics:

Since we began The Artist’s Way on March 4th, there have been:

• 12 weekly posts (one for each chapter of the book, all available to read for free)

• 12 weekly comment threads (ditto)

• 3 rest and integration weeks (essential - The Artist’s Way is a dense book, and I really needed that extra time to process what I was reading!)

• 3 virtual gatherings, with participants dialing in from Ireland, Lisbon, Canada, Barcelona, Dubai and the UK

• 500+ comments

• Dozens of Notes, DMs, emails and other conversations with you 💕

I have:

• Filled two moleskine journals

• Experimented with poetry (& shared one of my poems for the very first time)

• Created an Artist’s Altar

• Became a fan of Lego!

• Gotten all riled up about money

• Daydreamed about writing a book about creativity someday!

• Found some new mantras, including: “I’m strong enough to take the risk”, “the real artist makes their art”, “rest is a sacred connection to our creativity”, “creative recovery is an exercise in open-mindedness”, “art is the act of structuring time”.

• Created a Monster Hall of Fame (aka a list of enemies to my creative work)

• Leaned into my anger

• Reconsidered my envy

• Realised I’m probably a workaholic (why does this feel like a humblebrag? It shouldn’t!)

• Gave up on being a “good girl”

• Failed at growing plants

• Failed at reading deprivation (though I plan to try again!)

• Abandoned the idea of “laziness”

• Had one really good, embodied day

• Took lots of walks in nature (look at this baby leaf!)

• Thought a lot about faith

• Had my first 99 of the season!

• Bought a new suit

  

Thank you so much for being part of it 💕

I’ve said it again and again, but this was only possible because folks showed up each week to experiment with your creativity and share your experiences in the comments. Thank you for making The Artist’s Way a part of your life for the last few months. Thank you for trusting me to shepherd us through this ground-breaking, imperfect and often maddening book.

All this has only been possible because of you and I hope you know that I never take your time and attention for granted.

I’m a very small fish in the Substack pond, and I’m very grateful to the friends and colleagues who helped me to promote this experience. Particular thanks to , , , and . Thank you for sharing my work, and for cheering me on from afar. 💕

Thank you also to my paid subscribers who make my work more sustainable. I can’t begin to tell you how much that means to me.

What happens next

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about how to extend the magic of this experience into the future. I’ve gotten so much from hosting The Artist’s Way, and the feedback has been lovely too. In particular, I’ve loved hosting our virtual gatherings, and the folks who came along also really enjoyed them! I would love to expand on what we have built together over the last few months.

That said, I also know I need to take a minute. This has been such a rich creative season in my life, but I also want it to be a sustainable one. I’m planning to take a few weeks off to refill my creative well.

As for The Artist’s Way, I’m planning to stick with the basic infrastructure over the coming months. I’ll continue to write my Morning Pages; showing up to meet myself on the page every day has become an essential part of my creative life. I plan to loosen the rigidity of the weekly Artist Dates, though I’d like to maintain the practice. I think I’ll aim for a handful of quick, low intensity Artist Dates throughout the week, and schedule a monthly Date that feels a bit more special. I’m eager to experiment with another week of Reading Deprivation, and to get back to my long-neglected first novel. I’m also getting married soon and am looking forward to spending a few weeks away from the internet, and deep in the real-world love of my partner and our families and friends.

What The Artist’s Way meant to you

Before concluding The Artist’s Way, I wanted to give members of this community a chance to share their experiences. I’ve learned so much from chatting with you in comments, Notes and in our virtual gatherings and I wanted to capture some of those lessons here. (I feel quite sheepish about sharing the nice things they said about me in my own newsletter! But I didn’t want to edit their contributions so please know that I am squirming in my chair as I send this! 🙈 )

’s is a journalist, novelist and essayist who publishes Living in 3D on Substack. The tagline is “life lessons in embracing desire in every decade from a late-blooming woman in her 60s still in the process of becoming.” Amy has just launched a new chapter of her life in Barcelona.

“Clare led this collective experience with grace, honesty, deep engagement and beautiful facilitation of our community. I am grateful for the deepest experience I've had yet with The Artist Way, despite first encountering it and working through it over 30 years ago and returning to it a few times since. This is the first time I did the 12-week program in community and it was so enriching, thanks to how Clare inspired and engaged us. Also so valuable to me was the community of people who joined in and met for our periodic video calls to share honestly, vulnerably and beautifully of their own experience. Writing is, or can be, a lonely activity and participating in The Artist's Way with Clare and community transformed these past few months into a shared journey of exploring and celebrating our creativity. I have been doing the morning pages consistently for nearly a decade but this experience reminded me of the joy and necessity of Artist Dates and the richness of Julia Cameron's exercises for self-exploration. While this was an experience in which Clare invited us, through her own example, to take what was useful and leave behind what was not, from The Artist's Way, there is much I still want to explore in the coming weeks and months. Best of all, I have a wonderful new set of Substack "friends" to follow.”

is passionate about fairness and equality. She works with people living well as they can with Alzheimers in their own homes. She is interested in poetry, painting pictures of trees, dancing, swimming, hiking, singing, baking, gardening, stonework and Mary Magdelene. She wonders where the women's voices are from the beginning of Jesus’s ministry and reads and shares faith with many different groups here in Ireland and around the world. She is challenging heryself to do more of what she loves and invites others to join her.

“I want to say thank you to Clare and all who participated. I really appreciated the posts and everything that was shared. I attended one of the zoom meetings and it was a privilege to meet everyone there. The reading deprivation week was the week I most participated in and it has had a lasting effect. I also made a list of wishes mostly activities for my 50th birthday which I shared with family and friends. I had a special moment of synchronicity with a grasshopper and wrote my first poem in years. I found some photos I took with a view to painting. I took them 9 years ago. Last time I shared my paintings during the Artist Way around 10 years ago I promptly stopped painting again. I love the space held by Clare to partipate as I was able. I appreciate the permission and invitation to really trust myself. I am at a very important time in my life this year. I am turning 50. I am 25 years married. Its 30 years since I met my husband and many of my dearest friends. My youngest child of 5 has left school and is turning 18. I am spreading my wings and reclaiming my autonomy. I am excited and energised. Even though I gave only a little time to the Artists Way this time around it was important. I have also realised that I still write the pages as if they might sometime be read by someone. I am not sure what to do with that but I notice it. I wish all of you every happiness and success personally and professionally and especially wish you Clare every blessing and happiness as you celebrate your wedding.” (Clare’s note: Thank you so much, Ana 💕)

is a social anthropologist and a professional coach. She writes two Substacks: Scattered Cumbs and Tangled Tales and Liza Debevec, and is currently trying to write more Artist’s Way–inspired posts.

“Participating in The Artist’s Way with Clare and the other lovely people here helped me in several ways. One was the outer accountability, which meant that I did morning pages almost every single day, except for a few days when I was really ill with a nasty flu and a couple of times when I had to get up and leave the house before 7 a.m. I loved going on Artist Dates and really enjoyed thinking up what to do. There were weeks when I went on two Artist Dates, but then there were some weeks when I went on none. So, consistency is still a struggle for me. The same happened with the exercises for each week, some weeks I did all the exercises and some none, and there is still some sense of guilt around that. But I have a feeling I want to keep going and will just take longer to complete. Like when I did a 30-day yoga challenge with Yoga with Adriene, but it took me 36 days to complete it as some days I didn’t do it. So giving myself permission to do this at my own pace is something I am learning to lean into. I also loved the monthly calls and learning from everyone. Finally, I have been inspired to write several Substack posts because of doing the challenge with you. Here is one on how writing continues to save my life, and another one on grieving my past. I feel like many more of my future posts will be inspired by participating in this Artist’s Way experience.”

is a Canadian writer with a knack for horror with funny bits, and comedy with a dark streak. Just because you never see them in the sun doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a vampire. Find them on Substack and social media: @RhymesWithGenre.

“Doing The Artist Way, which I’ve tried to do twice in the last couple of years, makes me feel like a teenager - which is pretty nice, for a middle aged person. With all her talk of God, her prescriptive language, and her assumptions that the reader is a repressed middle class white person like her, I’ve often wanted to close the book like one slams their bedroom door, and yell at Julia Cameron: “you just don’t get me.”

But much like a well meaning parent, The Artist Way doesn’t have it all wrong. Even when it’s in opposition to what the book advises, I still found kernels of truth that served me. For instance, a lot of the first half of the book focuses on identifying how others get in the way of our creativity, and how the tools to reclaim our time, self esteem, or creative energy comes from within, or God, which, in line with Cameron’s Christian faith, is pretty much the same. I’ve written before about how I had done a lot of that work before I started doing The Artist Way, and therefore didn’t get much out of these exercises, apart from the confirmation that I had made some good choices for myself.

When I started doing The Artist Way last year, I wrote about how rather than subtract, I felt I needed adding: finding like minded people who would support my artistic aspirations, whom I would support in return. In other words: community. Looking back, I am glad to see that I took my criticism to heart and worked on building my network of dreamer friends, and it’s been fun and challenging and joyous.

The best thing that came out of doing The Artist Way last year was meeting Clare, and having this beautiful space to do it again this year. I still haven’t managed to get past the first half of the book, and I keep hoping that I'm missing out on the best part. But I have enjoyed immensely the gentleness with which Clare has shepherded a group of thoughtful people through this iteration, and people’s willingness to share - even when sometimes, all we had to share was that we didn’t do the exercises, or even the readings, but we were still there.

I had a hard time following, this time, because I was busy with creative projects, so it really doesn’t feel like a failure. I’m proud of myself for enjoying doing things very imperfectly, but still showing up. Speaking of imperfect, I just started an Instagram account for something I started during deprivation week last year: follow my very ugly little comics, if you feel like it! Are we doing it again next year?

Thank you, Clare! What a great job you did.”

has a PhD in social justice education and is a critical disability studies researcher and educator. She’s also been a speech-language pathologist and a fine chocolate entrepreneur. She makes sense of life through creative writing. Her newsletter is called Write Out of Hiding.

“I can't say that I fully participated in The Artist's Way, because all I did was read (most) of the chapters and sometimes write morning pages, engaging more in the posts earlier on but then tapering off as we went along. I had difficulty engaging with Cameron's ideas because I found many of them to be from a narrow, privileged perspective, suitable perhaps for some people but not others – especially those who have been socially marginalized. The entire premise of needing to follow Cameron's methods and rules to recover one's individual creative self seems to be an oxymoron. To me, creativity cannot come from following someone else's rules, but in exploring what works for you and I think Cameron's program would be much improved if worded in a more open and flexible way. What I've so appreciated from Clare's facilitation through her weekly posts and comments, is the permission to challenge Cameron's harmful assumptions and framing and other aspects that don't feel right (e.g., the God language and ableist wording throughout were automatic turn-offs for me), while also recognizing that some ideas could still be useful. Clare has helped me to have an open mind and the patience to consider what ideas might be useful, rather than shutting the book and discounting everything – I did find nuggets of information that can be useful to me in my creative practice. I hope this lesson in patience and acceptance will spill over into my relations with people as well. Overall, it was a wonderful experience and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to explore The Artist's Way from a trauma-informed perspective with other like-minded people. I'm thankful for the community Clare has fostered here.”

Thank you for being part of this incredible experience.

In the book’s epilogue, Julia Cameron writes: “The Artist’s Way is a spiritual journey, a pilgrimage home to the self”. I hope the last few month have helped you find a deeper connection to your creative self. I hope that you’ve found friends and community here, and I hope you’ll stick around.

See you on the other side,

Clare x

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💬 Comments and reflections are always welcome!

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Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. This is the final week of The Artist’s Way, a community exploration of the intersection between creativity and recovery. Our goal has been to explore our creativity in a gentle, low commitment way and to show up each week to cheer each other on. Here’s an overview of our approach if you’d like to learn more!

FINAL CALL: An opportunity for you

Before wrapping up The Artist’s Way, I wanted to give you - the members of this community who’ve been chatting with me in comments, Notes and our virtual gatherings - a chance to share a little of what The Artist’s Way has meant for you. I’m planning to do a roundup post next week, and would love to include your perspectives, as well as a link to your newsletter or another creative project. I’ve made a short google form to capture your stories. Please share your experiences by today Friday, June 13th.

Share your experience

It’s time for our final thread. Can you believe it?!

I’m ending this exploration of The Artist’s Way on a high note. I enjoyed chapter 12 and appreciated the opportunity to reflect on my faith as it relates to creativity. I wrote Morning Pages most days this week and had a very enjoyable Artist’s Date at a gig. Irish band The Corrs were playing in Dublin and while I’m not usually a gig person, I had a lot of fun! (& the above ice-cream which was delicious, though my lactose-skeptical digestive system was less enthused!)

I also decided not to sign the creative contract in the back of the book. I’ve appreciated the structure The Artist’s Way has provided but I’m eager to liberate myself from some of that rigidity. Signing another contract just didn’t feel right to me, but I’m curious about your experience. How are you planning to support your creativity over the weeks and months ahead? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Over to you…

I’m also curious to hear how you got on with your Morning Pages and Artist Date this week. Remember that it doesn’t have to be perfect. Showing up regularly-ish, and giving it a try is enough! It still counts as “doing The Artist’s Way”, and you are very welcome here!

💬 Did you enjoy chapter 12? Are there any insights you’d like to share? As always, I'll get us started with some reflections on my tasks from this week.

Leave a comment

Thanks so much for being here. It’s an honour to be in community with you 💕

P.S. If you’re new here, please review our community guidelines before participating too.

You know the drill: each week, we read a new chapter of The Artist’s Way and do our best to write our Morning Pages and schedule an Artist’s Date. On Tuesdays, I share my reflections on that week’s theme and on Fridays, we gather to share our experiences in the weekly thread.

FINAL CALL: An opportunity for you

Before wrapping up The Artist’s Way, I wanted to give you - the members of this community who’ve been chatting with me in comments, Notes and our virtual gatherings - a chance to share a little of what The Artist’s Way has meant for you. I’m planning to do a roundup post next week, and would love to include your perspectives, as well as a link to your newsletter or another creative project. I’ve made a short google form to capture your stories. Please share your experiences by this Friday, June 13th.

Share your experience

The Artist’s Way Week 12: Recovering a Sense of Faith

I can’t believe it’s time to write my final post on The Artist’s Way. We started this process way back in March, and now we’re concluding with a short chapter on faith, mystery and trust. I enjoyed this chapter. We’ve covered a lot of ground over the last few months, and it felt right to conclude with faith. Though I don’t consider myself to be religious, faith feels like an essential ingredient in my creative life.

A few weeks ago, I shared a short video on my evolving views on faith:

I spoke about Bad Faith, an essay I wrote about leaving the Catholic faith. I’m proud of that essay. But as often happens with my writing, as soon as it was published, I felt my views begin to shift and evolve. Then the Pope died and I happened to be in Rome on the day he was buried. And, I began to engage with broader cultural conversations1 about the value of religious belief. Suffice to say that my views on faith are continuing to evolve, and I’m grateful that this chapter gave me an opportunity to consider these questions as they apply to my creative work.

“Life is meant to be an Artist’s Date”

Chapter 12 is both the conclusion of the book and the beginning of something new. Cameron writes about how “creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness”. It requires a gestation period that is often “interior, murky and completely necessary”. She compares ideas to stalactites and stalagmites, new structures which form in drips and drops in the dark inner cave of consciousness. She writes about it poetically:

“Let them grow in darkness and mystery. Let them form on the roof of our consciousness. Let them hit the page in droplets. Trusting this slow and seemingly random drip, we will be startled one day by the flash of “Oh! That’s it!”

Cameron believes that we were born to create. She encourages us to cultivate forms of creativity that do not directly serve our career goals. Household tasks like sewing, gardening, or cooking can help us to unstick ourselves from difficult creative conundrums. While our brain is focused on a small, focused task, our creative muscles can relax. This is one of my favourite ways to unstick myself when my writing feels stiff or stagnant, and I’m glad that it was included in the book.

“Escape velocity requires the sword of steely intention and shield of self-determination”

Chapter 12 includes a long section on escape velocity. It’s never made clear exactly what we’re supposed to be escaping, but I presume it’s the people and circumstances that squelch our creativity. In my experience, creativity is less about escaping things and more about pushing the boundaries of life to make more room for exploration. It’s about bringing a creative mindset to our lives, not just our creative projects. It’s about tinkering with the spices in your favourite soups or dressing with a little more flair. It’s about drawing on the steamy bathroom mirror with your finger tip, even if it’s going to make it more difficult to clean. It’s about allowing your body to express the full breadth of its creative intention, and following those instincts wherever they might lead you.

Cameron warns that when your career starts to take off, many people will self-sabotage. To mitigate this risk, Cameron also encourages us to keep our creative plans to ourselves. “The first rule of magic is self-containment. You must hold your intention within yourself, stoking it with power. Only then will you be able to manifest what you desire”. I see the value in this advice though it also strikes me as deeply lonely. Part of the joy of creative work is sharing it with people. I understand the importance of choosing those people wisely, but I don’t want to keep my dreams to myself. I want them to live in the world, alongside me and the people I love.

Other thoughts & reflections from Chapter Twelve:

• “All too often, we try to push, pull, outline and control our ideas instead of letting them grow organically. The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.” I do this all the time but I’m not convinced that it’s entirely bad. Creativity often grows from limitations, and providing myself with some structure often makes my creative work possible. Surely I’m not the only one?!

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Tasks:

• Write down any resistance, angers and fears you have about going on from here. I’ve already started exploring this in my Morning Pages!

• Take a look at your current areas of procrastination. What are the payoffs in your waiting? Locate the hidden fears. (I’d love to do this task on a recurring basis. We all have distractions that creep into our lives and secretly gobble up our time. I’d like to make a habit of keeping an eye on the things that are coming between me and my creative work.)

• Revisit the Core Negative Beliefs from Week 1. Cameron encourages us to laugh and note our progress. That feels a little optimistic to me, but I’ll give it a try 🙃

• Mend any mending.

• Repot any plants that need repotting.

• List five people you can talk to about your dreams and with whom you feel supported to dream and then plan. This contradicts the rest of the chapter slightly, but I’m still excited to give it a try. I’m always looking for ways to make creativity less lonely, and this seems like an excellent place to start.

Best of luck with The Artist’s Way in our final week!

💕 If this piece resonated with you, please tap the heart below to help spread the word.

💬 Comments and reflections are always welcome!

Leave a comment

💌 I’ll be back in your inbox with our final Friday Thread soon. Together, we’ll share our wins, grieve our stumbles and cheer each other on.

🚫 If you’re not interested in The Artist’s Way and would like to unsubscribe from future posts in this series, please adjust your preferences here.

Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. We’re currently taking part in The Artist’s Way, a community exploration of the intersection between creativity and recovery and it’s not too late for you to join us! Our goal is to explore our creativity in a gentle, low commitment way and to show up each week to cheer each other on. Here’s an overview of our approach if you’d like to learn more!

How did you get on this week?

I enjoyed this week’s chapter and tasks, especially the suggestion to build an Artist’s Altar which was this my Artist’s Date for this week. It was one of the most fulfilling activities of this whole process. I’d hoped to get mine ready in time to share a snapshot with you, but I’m feeling weirdly private about it. I don’t know why. I guess some part of me wants to keep this private, introspective space away from the harsh glare of the internet.

I really enjoyed (& relied upon) my Morning Pages this week. Sometimes, writing them feels like a chore and other times, it feels like a treat. This week, they felt like a important opportunity to tease through all my complicated feelings. I’m thinking about my upcoming wedding a lot, which I’m so happy and excited for. But I’m also anxious, nervous and sad. I’m missing my mother and trying to stretch into a new identity for this moment of my life: I’m gonna be a fucking bride! Anyway, I’ve been having a lot of feelings and my Morning Pages (together with therapy!) are helping me sort through them.

Over to you…

I’m curious to hear how you got on with your Morning Pages and Artist Date this week. These threads have gotten a little quieter over recent weeks, which makes me wonder if folks have dropped out of The Artist’s Way habit. If that’s you, I hope you still feel welcome here. If you’d like to share a little of your experience in the comments, I’d love to hear about it!

💬 Did you enjoy chapter 11? Are there any insights you’d like to share? As always, I'll get us started with some reflections on my tasks from this week.

Leave a comment

A reminder: Our final virtual gathering will take place this Sunday, June 8th at 1pm Irish Time. Please let me know if you’d like to come along and I’ll forward the details.

Thanks so much for being here. It’s an honour to be in community with you 💕

P.S. If you’re new here, please review our community guidelines before participating too.

You know the drill: each week, we read a new chapter of The Artist’s Way and do our best to write our Morning Pages and schedule an Artist’s Date. On Tuesdays, I share my reflections on that week’s theme and on Fridays, we gather to share our experiences in the weekly thread.

Our next virtual gathering will be on Sunday June 8th at 1pm Irish Time. Please leave a comment below if you’d like to attend.

Leave a comment

An opportunity for you

Before wrapping up The Artist’s Way, I wanted to give you - the members of this community who’ve been chatting with me in comments, Notes and our virtual gatherings - a chance to share a little of what The Artist’s Way has meant for you. I’m planning to do a roundup post on June 17th, and would love to include your perspectives, as well as a link to your newsletter or another creative project.

I’ve made a short google form to capture your stories. Please be sure to share your experiences by Friday, June 13th. I can’t wait to hear from you!

Share your experience

The Artist’s Way Week 11: Recovering a Sense of Autonomy

Chapter 11 is about nurturing and accepting ourselves as artists. Julia Cameron encourages us to explore behaviors that strengthen our spiritual base and creative power. The chapter begins with a reflection on money and art. Sometimes, our creative work sells. Sometimes it doesn’t. But those market forces operate independently of the inherent value of our work. Cameron encourages us to find a sense of autonomy away from the whims of the marketplace, which is a beautiful ideal though I suspect it’ll take time (& a strong safety net) for me to achieve that. That said, I love how she encourages us to see that creativity as its own reward: “As an artist, my self-respect comes from doing the work”.

I often think of my creative work as a relationship. When I show up to write, I’m strengthening my relationship with the page. Sometimes it feels like work. Other times it feels like play. But I’m committed to showing up, no matter how it feels. I want to honour how my creativity helps me feel more alive. I’d love to publish books and build a more sustainable career, but that’s a bonus. Feeling more like myself through my creative work is more than enough for me.

“As success comes to us, we must be vigilant.”

Last week, I was looking for more guidance on what happens to our creativity when we become successful. I didn’t get it in that chapter, but there is a detailed section on it here. Cameron encourages us to find satisfaction in the creative process independent of the outcome, and to be cautious about getting stuck in old patterns. We must find a way to stay connected to our inner artist, and to prioritise play over replicating the successes of our past.

I got a lot from the section on making creativity a physical, rather than an intellectual act. Cameron encourages us to move out of our heads and into our bodies. This was a huge element in my recovery from sexual violence too. I needed to rebuild a relationship with my body.

“Exercise is often the thing that moves us from stagnation to inspiration, from problem to solution, from self-pity to self-respect”

Cameron writes about the value of moving meditations which can unearth our body’s deeper wisdom. For me, it’s taking long walks in nature. Before writing this essay, I took my ideas out for a walk. With each step, I felt my body calm and recentre. When I sat down to write, the words came easily. I needed the walk to expel the anxious energy of a looming deadline. Once I felt more rooted in my body, I was able to write to you.

The modern conception of exercise is that it requires special clothes and the input of fitness professionals. Many people think of it as something separate from our day to day lives, but I believe movement is intrinsic to our experience as human animals. We need to move our bodies in the same way that we need to feed and bathe them. Whenever I’m grappling with something, I take it out for a walk with me. It doesn’t always solve the problem, but it helps me to feel more capable of surmounting it.

Cameron writes about exercise as a way to “direct the traffic flow of [our] overcrowded minds”. The “rhythmic, repetitive action transfers the locus of the brain’s energies from the logical to the artistic hemisphere. It is where inspiration bubbles up, untrammeled by the constraints of logic”. I was a little irked by her descriptions of people’s bodies (rude! fatphobic! unnecessary!), but the core message of using gentle, rhythmic movement to unlock a deeper calm and create more space for our creativity to flourish resonated deeply with me.

Building your Artistic Altar

The main task this week is to create an Artistic Altar. I appreciated Cameron’s acknowledgement that many of us come from punitively religious backgrounds. She encourages us to become more spiritually centered through creative rituals of our own. As I read about Artistic Altars, I realised that I have lots of things that could live on mine scattered around my home. I don’t have a lot of space, but there’s a windowsill in my office that I’d like to desonate as my Artistic Altar. From my desk, I often look up and see geese gliding in majestic Vs across the sky. As I write to you, the rain is falling in heavy sheets. I’m so grateful for that window. It’s a constant reminder that whatever stresses I’m dealing with, the world is out there. I can stand in front of it, gulp a few breaths of fresh air and feel anchored by looking at the horizon. I think it’s a perfect spot for my Artistic Altar. Here are a few things I plan to put there:

• A dish of shells I’ve collected from different beaches all over the world

• A Chinese Money Plant that’s dying, alongside a baby plant that sprouted from it. (Every time I look at it, it feels like creative possibility in action!)

• A photo of my mother smiling

• A candle

• A globe totem I bought 15+ years ago to remind myself of the vastness of our planet

• Some honey my friend Tina sent me, made by her bees. (I’m not sure if this is practical - I don’t want to attract flies!)

• Some offerings from nature. (When I teach writing classes, I often encourage my students to find something small from nature to keep close to them as they write. In primary school, we had a classroom Nature Table where we kept the things we’d found in nature. It’s a beautiful practice, and something I’d like to make more a part of my creative life.)

What are you planning to place on your Artistic Altar? I’d love to hear!

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Other thoughts & reflections from Chapter Eleven:

• “I do not need to be rich but I do need to be richly supported. I cannot allow my emotional and intellectual life to stagnate or the work will show it.” I love the idea of being “richly supported”. I want to explore what that means to me in my Morning Pages this week.

• “Creativity is a spiritual practice. It is not something that can be perfected, finished and set aside.” I’m going to add this to my personal set of affirmations!

• “To be an artist is to recognise the particular” I feel like a broken record, but for me creating beautiful art is all about paying attention. It grows from a deep attunement with the world around me, and my job is to translate that onto the page. It requires focus, quiet, time and a deep commitment to the practice of creative living.

• “To be an artist.. is to not keep trying to be something that we aren’t” Yes! Creative work is about becoming more of ourselves. It’s about uncovering who we are at our core, independent of whatever the world tells us we should be.

• “As artists, we are spiritual sharks”. The ruthless truth is that if we don’t keep moving, we sink to the bottom and die.” This feels a little off to me. I’ve often had to pause my creative life (due to grief, mental illness, trauma etc) but I’ve been able to come back to it when I felt ready to. Creativity has been with me throughout my life, though my ability to engage with it has fluctuated.

• “We insist on a straight and narrow path when the artist’s way is a spiral path” This is also true for trauma recovery and indeed life in general. There is no one way. Life unfolds in loops, not a straight line.

• “Creativity is not a business, although it may generate much business” This feels like an important distinction.

• “You don't need to overturn a successful career in order to find creative fulfillment. It is necessary to overturn each day’s schedule slightly to allow for those small adjustments in daily trajectory that, over the long haul, alter the course and the satisfactions of our careers” This is very useful advice. Even if you can’t change your entire career, you can find pockets of time to flex your creative muscles. It mightn’t feel like much but over time, those slices of creative exploration can shape the trajectory of your life.

• “Exercise teaches the rewards of the process. It teaches the sense of satisfaction over small tasks well done.” This is very true for me. Even on the hardest day, I can usually manage a walk.

• In this chapter, Cameron asks us to reflect on whether having a 9-5 job might enable creativity or stifle it. I’ve found that earning a living in something separate from my creative work has brought me a lot of peace. It allows me to achieve a certain level of financial security, while still giving me room to flex my creative muscles outside of work. For me, the key is to find paid employment that isn’t too emotionally taxing. I need low-stress work where I have a certain level of autonomy. At the end of the workday, I need to be able to leave my work aside and return to my life. I’m curious about your experiences of this too. Has 9-5 work been a help or a hindrance to your creative dreams?

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Tasks:

• Build my Artist’s Altar. I’ve started gathering a few things, but plan to add to it throughout the week. Hopefully, I’ll be able to share a picture on Friday!

• Tape myself reading the Basic Principles, and use them in meditation. The sound of my own voice makes me cringe, but I think this could be useful. I’m going to give it a try.

• Inventory how you have changed throughout The Artist’s Way. I’m curious to think about this, though I know I’ll also need a lot of self-compassion for the things that I haven’t managed to change in the last few months. I want to give myself credit for my attempts and experiments, even if they weren’t “successful”.

• List five ways you plan to nurture yourself in the next 6 months. (Courses you’ll take, supplies you’ll allow yourself, Artist’s Dates, holidays etc)

• Re-examine your God concept. Does your belief system limit or support your creative expansion? Are you open minded about altering your concept of God?

Best of luck with The Artist’s Way this week. It’s been beautiful to watch our collective creativity unfold over the last few months. We’re so close to the end, and I’m excited to celebrate our achievements!

💕 If this piece resonated with you, please tap the heart below to help spread the word.

💬 Comments and reflections are always welcome!

Leave a comment

💌 I’ll be back in your inbox with the Friday Thread soon. Together, we’ll share our wins, grieve our stumbles and cheer each other on.

🚫 If you’re not interested in The Artist’s Way and would like to unsubscribe from future posts in this series, please adjust your preferences here.

Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. We’re currently taking part in The Artist’s Way, a community exploration of the intersection between creativity and recovery and it’s not too late for you to join us! Our goal is to explore our creativity in a gentle, low commitment way and to show up each week to cheer each other on. Here’s an overview of our approach if you’d like to learn more!

How did you get on this week?

I’m happy to be back doing The Artist’s Way, and have enjoyed this week’s chapter and tasks. I wouldn’t have predicted that the chapter on self-protection would be so useful for me, but it’s really helped me to reflect on my tendencies toward overwork.

There were a few times during my Morning Pages this week when I decided not to do things. I’m a few weeks out from my wedding and there’s a lot to do, but not all of it matters. I’ve been finding peace by opting out. I know this isn’t revolutionary, but it’s an ongoing lesson for me and I’m proud of how I’ve put it into action this week.

My partner and I are hosting a little pre-wedding party this weekend, so my Artist’s Date was menu planning. I love the creative work of thinking through the guest list & their dietary requirements, and putting together a menu with each of them in mind. I’ll share a few photos of the final spread week!

Over to you…

I’m curious to hear how you got on with your Morning Pages and Artist Date this week. From your comments and emails, I know life has been tough for some of you and I’m sending lots of love and solidarity your way. 💕 If you have the brainspace to share a little of your experience with The Artist’s Way in the comments, I’d love to hear about it! Remember that it doesn’t have to be perfect. Showing up regularly-ish, and giving it a try is enough! It still counts as “doing The Artist’s Way”, and you are very welcome here!

💬 Did you enjoy chapter 10? Are there any insights you’d like to share? As always, I'll get us started with some reflections on my tasks from this week.

Leave a comment

A reminder: Our final virtual gathering will take place on June 8th at 1pm Irish Time. Please let me know if you’d like to come along and I’ll forward the details.

Thanks so much for being here. It’s an honour to be in community with you 💕

P.S. If you’re new here, please review our community guidelines before participating too.

You know the drill: each week, we read a new chapter of The Artist’s Way and do our best to write our Morning Pages and schedule an Artist’s Date. On Tuesdays, I share my reflections on that week’s theme and on Fridays, we gather to share our experiences in the weekly thread.

Our next virtual gathering will be on Sunday June 8th at 1pm Irish Time. Please leave a comment below if you’d like to attend.

Leave a comment

An opportunity for you

Before wrapping up The Artist’s Way, I wanted to give you - the members of this community who’ve been chatting with me in comments, Notes and our virtual gatherings - a chance to share a little of what The Artist’s Way has meant for you. I’m planning to do a roundup post on June 17th, and would love to include your perspectives, as well as a link to your newsletter or another creative project.

I’ve made a short google form to capture your stories. Please be sure to share your experiences by Friday, June 13th. I can’t wait to hear from you!

Share your experience

The Artist’s Way Week 10: Recovering a Sense of Self-Protection

I can’t believe it’s time to tackle the final 3 chapters of The Artist’s Way. When we began this process back in March, I couldn’t really imagine how it would go. Would people show up? Would they care? Now that we’re a handful of weeks away from finishing this crazy adventure, I know that I’m really going to miss it.

But it’s not over yet, and I’m going to try to finish strong. I took some much needed rest over the last while1, but I want to conclude this creative journey with intentionality and as much mental energy as I can manage. That means a steady commitment to my Morning Pages. Even if they’re rushed or incomplete, I want to make time to meet myself on the page. In terms of Artist Dates, it’s a good time to see if there’s anything else you’d like to prioritise before this process ends. I’d like to find an hour to spend with my watercolours, experiment with some project baking and maybe write some more poetry. (An aside: I can’t believe I shared a poem during this process. asked nicely in the comments a few weeks back, and I drummed up my courage to share a poem-ish thing that I don’t think is very good but that I did manage to complete last year!)

How are you feeling about the final leg of this journey? Are there any particular Artist’s Dates that you’d like to make time for? How are you feeling about your Morning Pages?

Leave a comment

This chapter begins with God in the first sentence, which is always slightly off-putting. Cameron lists the various things people use to block their creative energy (food, work, alcohol, relationships) and suggests that we break those habits and focus on our work instead. Great idea! If only it were that simple..

She believes that despite all the hurdles before us, we can have faith in our ability to overcome them. There’s something encouraging in her optimism, but I don’t think just wanting to change is enough. Throughout the book, Cameron sees creativity through a very individual lens but our lives are deeply influenced by the world around us. If we want to build a sustainable creative life, we can’t do it alone. We need the support of others to achieve that goal.

I got a lot from the section on workaholism. I no longer identify as a workaholic (pause for laughter - I’m editing this at 9.47am on a Saturday morning!). Earlier in my career, my identity was fully subsumed in my career (which led to some pretty devastating consequences). I don't work like I used to. My behaviours have changed, though perhaps my mindset hasn’t quite caught up. It often feels like I should be doing or achieving more, that I don’t deserve to rest, that I’ll just tick off a few more things before I let myself relax.

Perhaps the best way to illustrate it is to show you my results of the workaholism questionnaire:

Looking at the results, it’s hard to argue that I don’t have a problem with workaholism. It’s much better than it used to be, but it’s still not great. When I wonder why I’m not progressing with my creative work, this feels like an important factor.

“We have doubted, yes, but we have stumbled on”

I’m going to admit something that might be controversial, but I haven’t had a lot of experience with creative drought. That’s not to say that I haven’t had periods in life where I couldn’t do my creative work. There were years lost in this tailspin of trauma when I couldn’t organise my thoughts enough to write a paragraph. There were times when I had no space in my mind to consider anything but the next immediate steps in my practical survival. There were times of deep emotional pain, times when I couldn't face my subconscious and didn’t trust myself to be able to handle whatever emerged from it.

But when other creative people talk about experiencing drought, I can’t really relate. I’ve always had ideas. I’ve always had creative impulses that I wished I had the time to pursue. I’ve had times when my creativity was pushed aside by overwork (see above!) or mental ill health or the demands of trying to survive what many people would say is unsurvivable. But my creative instincts have always pulsed with life.

Perhaps I’m splitting hairs here. Perhaps it doesn’t matter why my creativity was stalled, only that it was. But I think it’s important to be accurate. I think it helps to be clear and precise about the things that are causing problems in our lives. For me, it was the long tail of trauma caused by childhood sexual abuse. It took decades to find my way through that trauma, and I don’t think I would have gotten through it without writing. I kept doing my Morning Pages. And I kept moving forward, because sometimes you just need to keep living long enough for things to change.

In a lot of ways, creativity was what helped me rebuild my life. It was the catalyst for broader changes in my life. Creativity wasn’t something I rediscovered when I was “cured”, it was an essential tool in getting well.

I was curious to read about fame which frankly terrifies me. I hate the idea of being known, even if it’s because people enjoy or respecet my work. I know that I’ve both consciously and subconsciously kept myself small in order to avoid it. It’s why I hate social media. It’s why I hate self-promotion (though I also know that I need to get better at it!) At my core, I’m quite shy. I’ve been happily writing for several decades without much of an audience, and it’s fuelled me in so many ways. I don’t need an audience in order to enjoy my work, though if I want to make it a more sustainable career, I know I need to overcome my hesitations. Interestingly, Cameron has no advice on this perspective. This section is focused only on those creatives for whom “fame is really a shortcut for self-approval”. I’m sure that’s a struggle for some but it’s far from a universal experience. What about us introverts? The shy creators beavering away in isolation without much interest or success in finding an audience? I think we also need some guidance.

Other thoughts & reflections from Chapter Ten:

• “If creativity is like a burst of the universe's breath through the straw that is each of us, we pinch that straw whenever we pick up one of our blocks. We shut down our flow. And we do it on purpose.” I like this metaphor. It’s useful to think about what I do to stall my creative flow, though I think it’ll require more than understanding it to be able to meaningfully change it.

• “There is a difference between zestful work toward a cherished goal and workaholism. That difference is less in the hours than it does in the emotional quality of the hours spent” This is so true. There have been seasons in my life when I worked long hours but felt deeply fulfilled by my work. I treasure those times when I achieved that flow state and felt in tune with what I was creating. That’s something I strive to recreate, and it’s important to distinguish it from workaholism.

• “For all creative beings, the morning pages are the lifeline - the trail we explore and the trail home to ourselves.” This is beautifully put.

• “Blocking is essentially an issue of faith. Rather than trust our intuition, our talent, our skill, our desire, we fear where our creator is taking us with this creativity. Rather than paint, write, dance, audition, and see where it takes us, we pick up a block” What are your blocks? I have so many, but the ones that come to mind are overwork, mindlessly scrolling (especially the news) and not leaving enough mental space to think, breathe, create. Share yours in the comments:

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• “In creative recovery, it is far easier to get people to do the extra work of the Morning Pages than it is to get them to do the assigned play of an Artist Date” This struck me, as it seems like the opposite has often been true in this community. Obviously, it’s not a scientific study but my impression is that more of us have struggled to face ourselves on the page than have struggled to make time for an Artist’s Date. Perhaps that’s partly due to this community being framing around painful topics like trauma? I’m not sure.

• “Never, ever judge a fledgling piece of work too quickly. Be willing to paint or write badly while your ego yelps resistance.” This is great advice and something I want to remember when I return to my novel later this summer. I’ve written 2.5 drafts but I’ve a sneaking suspicion that I ought to go back to the first one. I think my edits and revisions have actually made the book worse. I think those changes (which were made from a position of self-consciousness) squelched the pure, youthful voice of my protagonist and I’ll need to dig through my manuscript and try to unearth her again..

• “When the fame drug hits… pick up the tools of your work and begin to do just a little creative play” This feels like really good advice. (It also made me smile to see Cameron compare fame with nuclear waste which seems a bit of an exaggeration. This book was first published in 1993. I wonder what Cameron would make of the fame machine that has exploded in the decades since.)

• “The desire to be better than can choke off the simple desire to be” This chapter concludes with a section on competition, which felt like an echo of Chapter 7 on creative envy. “Only when we are being joyfully creative can we release the obsession with others and how they are doing”

• “All work is influenced by other work. All people are influenced by other people. No man is an island and no piece of art is a continent unto itself.” A helpful reminder!

Tasks :

• Dance it out! Inspired by , I want to dance it out when something doesn't go my way.

• Cameron encourages us to set some boundaries around work which I’ve been trying to do over the last few months. I’ll try again this week.

• Touchstones. Make a quick list of things you love, things that are happiness touchstones for you. We’ve done a few tasks in this vein throughout the Artist’s Way, but I’m eager to experiment with this one. I love the tangibility of keeping more things I love closeby.

• Cherishing. List 5 small victories. List three nurturing actions you took for your artist. List three actions you could take to comfort your artist. Make three nice promises to yourself. Do one lovely thing for yourself each day this week.

• Another task from the chapter itself: mail yourself a fan letter. This feels both kind of cheesy, but maybe also necessary? I’m going to give it a shot!

Best of luck with The Artist’s Way this week.

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💬 Comments and reflections are always welcome!

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💌 I’ll be back in your inbox with the Friday Thread soon. Together, we’ll share our wins, grieve our stumbles and cheer each other on.

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Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. We’re currently taking part in The Artist’s Way, a community exploration of the intersection between creativity and recovery and it’s not too late for you to join us! Our goal is to explore our creativity in a gentle, low commitment way and to show up each week to cheer each other on. Here’s an overview of our approach if you’d like to learn more!

How did you get on this week?

This has been a good week. I woke up feeling wildly anxious this morning but sorted through those feelings in my Morning Pages. Turns out, I’m probably not going to get cancer and die soon!1 🙃

I had one really good day when I set the goal to be as embodied as possible. I did my Morning Pages in bed and read a chapter of a memoir (Currently reading Love in Exile by - it’s so good!). I did a yoga practice which was both physically tough and very emotionally discombobulating. I have a photo of my mother on a bookshelf and for some reason, I kept catching her eye as I huffed and puffed through sun salutations. It made me feel both sad and connected to her. I made myself a delicious lunch (this cabbage, leek, cracker concoction developed by ) and took a long, quiet walk in the park. Looking back, I see it as a kind of extended Artist’s Date. I wanted to try to prioritise my body ahead of my ‘to do’ list and on this particular day, I managed to. (Full disclosure: I also spent many hours glued to my desk ticking off tasks on my sprawling to do list. It wasn’t all peace and embodiment, but I managed to get all most of my work done while also taking care of myself!)

I also watched to share this ice-cream cake I made for friends on Monday night. It requires zero cooking, but made everyone ooh and ahh when I serve it.

I also experienced some beautiful synchronicity:

I’ve been thinking about how to extend the magic of The Artist’s Way after we finish the book, and one idea is to make our virtual creative gatherings a recurring part of our community. I’ve made a quick poll to see if you might be interested in that. I’d really welcome your thoughts on it in the comments too!

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Over to you….

I curious to hear how you got on with your Morning Pages and Artist Date this week. Remember: it doesn’t have to be perfect. Showing up regularly-ish, and giving it a try is enough! It counts as “doing The Artist’s Way”, and you are very welcome to share your experiences in the comments!

💬 Did you enjoy chapter 9? Are there any insights from your experience that you’d like to share? As always, I'll get us started with some reflections on my tasks from this week.

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A reminder: Next week will be our final rest & integration week! I’ll be back with Chapter 10 on May 27th.

Huge thanks to our paid subscribers whose support makes this community possible. If this exploration of The Artist’s Way has made a positive difference in your life, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get access to bonus content (including my collection of resources & the popular Ask Clare column), and you’ll help to keep my work freely accessible to every survivor who needs it.

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Thanks so much for being here. It’s an honour to be in community with you 💕

P.S. If you’re new here, please review our community guidelines before participating too.

You know the drill: each week, we read a new chapter of The Artist’s Way and do our best to write our Morning Pages and schedule an Artist’s Date. On Tuesdays, I share my reflections on that week’s theme and on Fridays, we gather to share our experiences in the weekly thread. Next week, we’ll be taking our final rest & integration week. We’ll return for Chapter 10 on May 27th.

Our next (& maybe final?) gathering will be on Sunday June 8th at 1pm Irish Time. Please leave a comment below if you’d like to attend.

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Here’s an overview of our schedule for May:

The Artist’s Way Week 9: Recovering a Sense of Compassion

I enjoyed chapter 9. Julia Cameron was unusually encouraging and advised readers to have empathy for our mistakes and missteps, to ask for help when we need it and to create a work environment that encourages play more than rigid, disciplined work. Compassion (& especially self-compassion) are growth areas for me. I’ve gotten a lot better at it, but it doesn’t come easily or intuitively to me.

But in this moment of my life, I really need to find some self-compassion. I’m deeply exhausted. I’ve been neglecting myself. I’ve been pushing myself too much. I’ve been dealing with envy. I look at other people’s work and feel the sharp agony of ‘less than’. I’m trying to have compassion for my maladaptive coping mechanisms (people-pleasing, neglecting myself, sacrificing myself to keep the peace) but it’s easy to slip back into old habits of self-recrimination. Chapter 9 was a welcome reminder of the power and necessity of self-compassion. It’s always a good time to “reparent the frightened artist child who yearns for creative accomplishment”.

“Do not call the inability to start laziness. Call it fear.”

I hate the word lazy. My younger self used that word as a cudgel to beat myself with. In my experience, it’s almost never accurate. It’s a cruel word, and also a profoundly inaccurate one. Cameron encourages us to begin with creative baby steps. It reminds me of something I heard from Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh, the inventor of Sugru, a playdough-like substance that hardens into a strong, flexible rubber overnight. One of her mantras is: start small but make it good.

This community is far from some of the biggest on Substack, but I believe in doing good work. I think good work attracts the right people, and from that foundation you can grow. But everything starts with one small step: the next scene, the next idea, the next creative experiment. “The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist”, Cameron writes and I appreciated the reminder to focus on the small, consistent daily steps that make up any creative project.

Cameron dislikes discipline, which she describes as “useful but short-lived”. For me, discipline has been profoundly useful. My creativity thrives within a structure. When I don’t have a framework for my ideas, I feel rootless and overwhelmed. But the reliability of discipline has made my work possible. This is where The Artist’s Way lets us down. It’s a book that proselytizes about Julia Cameron’s kind of creativity, without leaving much room for folks to explore and discover their own perspectives. It asks us to accept one person’s experience as fact, without offering us an opportunity to experiment and see what resonates in your life. It reminds me of ’s book ‘The Four Tendencies’ which examines how different personalities respond to motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic) and rules (either imposed by you, or by another person/institution). It’s a book that acknowledges how unique people are, and offers a framework to understand how we can best support ourselves to do good work. It’s impossible to find a ‘one size fits all’ solution to something as complex and multifaceted as creativity, and the fact that The Artist’s Way tries to achieve that might be its biggest failure.

“Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process, a loving recognition of all the creativity around us”

Leaving discipline aside, Cameron encourages us to rely on enthusiasm to sustain our creative work. In my experience, this is bad advice! Enthusiasm is a beautiful thing to bring to our creativity. But when you’re 60,000 words into a sprawling project, feeling lost and overwhelmed, it’s not enough to sustain you. Enthusiasm is a fleeting thing. You’ll need something else to keep you going through the hard moments, thoughI did appreciate her perspective on prioritising playfulness: “Convince your artist it is safe to come out and (work) play”.

Perhaps my biggest take-away from this chapter was Cameron’s systematic approach for starting a new project by listing your fears, resentments and what you stand to gain by not completing this creative project. This could be a really helpful thing for me to do later this summer when I feel ready to return to the novel I wrote during Covid. The only thing I’d add to her suggestion is a list of the things I would gain from embarking on this creative project. As we’ve seen before, Cameron tends to have a bias toward the negative but I know I’d find the positive things deeply motivational. It reminds me of something I saw in the launch coverage for ’s new book ‘Consider Yourself Kissed’. Jessica motivated herself through the draft with M&Ms and a massage after every 10,000 words. It’s such a fun, playful way to acknowledge progress toward a big goal and is something I’d love to experiment with!

Other thoughts & reflections from Chapter Nine:

• “Art is a process. The process is supposed to be fun” Yes! Amidst all this strategising, I never want to forget this.

• “A productive artist is quite often a happy person” And often, an unproductive artist is an unhappy person.

• “The blocked artist typically expends a great deal of energy - just not visibly. The blocked artist spends energy on self-hatred, on regret, on grief and on jealousy. The blocked artist spends energy on self-doubt.” It’s no wonder I’m so tired! 🙃

• “A successful creative career is always built on successful creative failures” I appreciated Cameron’s perspective on creative U-turns and the importance of developing resilience in the face of setbacks. I was grateful to see that her first instinct was sympathy. She acknowledges that creativity can be scary and it takes courage to leap. Her analogy of a skittish horse who refuses a high fence and needs to circle the field a few times before trying it again really resonated with me.

• Throughout this chapter, Cameron encourages artists to ask for help, which pairs nicely with chapter 7 about creative jealousy. How would my creative life change if I saw the people I envy as peers and fellow artists, rather than living, breathing embodiments of my failures to achieve some arbitrary goal?

• It wasn’t in this chapter, but huge thanks to who shared this list of 100 Artist Dates. There are some great ideas here, if you need some inspiration!

Tasks

• “In order to work well, many artists find their work spaces are best dealt with as play spaces” I often find the most enjoyable and useful tasks not in the ‘tasks’ section of the chapter, but somewhere littered throughout the text, which is where I found this idea. I’m lucky enough to have a small home office. You might have seen it in pictures or if you’ve joined one of our virtual sessions. It’s lined with rainbow bookshelves, has a cozy armchair for reading and a fluffy rug that adds an extra layer of cushioning when I roll out my yoga mat. Cameron has some other ideas to make a workspace feel more like a playspace, which I’d like to explore this week. Do I need a fish tank? Some Christmas lights? Some flowers?

• Read your morning pages. Ehh.. nope, not going to do this. Or at least not right now. I’ve done this in the past and found it very useful, but it requires a certain emotional solidity that I know I don’t have right now. If you decide to do it, please let me know how you get on in the comments.

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• Visualising. One of the worst things about my PTSD is that my vivid imagination kept horrifically traumatic scenes alive in my mind and body. It was one of the things that made my recovery much more difficult. I’ve often thought about using those imaginative skills to dream about a more beautiful future, and I’m excited to give it a try this week.

• Priorities. List your creative goals for the year/month/week. Creativity often feels like an amorphous, fluid thing which makes it hard to know where to start. For me, I always default to my novel. You might have noticed that over the last few months! 🙃 But it’d be useful to expand my lens a little. Beyond that project, what other creative ideas would I like to bring to life?

• Work through a creative U Turn. Oof, this’ll be hard. My trickiest examples are the times I sacrificed myself/my creative projects (why do they feel like the same thing?!) to earn money or do something more “sensible”. I might not have the heart- or brain-space to work through those questions this week, but I know I need to. I am adding it to my list for this summer. (An aside: The Artist’s Way is a dense book and I often find myself craving a little more time to live alongside these ideas and see what resonates with me. Even with the rest/integration weeks I’ve built into the process, it often feels a little rushed. Do you have the same experience? I’ve been thinking about writing a post reflecting back on this experience in 3 or 6 months time. Let me know if you’d be interested in reading that!)

• “Choose an artist totem… something you immediately feel a protective fondness toward. Give your totem a place of honour and then honor it by not beating up on your artist child” Just reading this suggestion made me emotional, which makes me think I need to do it. Even if it’s just a simple stick figure, I think having a physical object could help make my artist child feel more real and therefore more worthy of protection.

• REST. I need more rest. Longtime readers might have observed a cycle of exhaustion/burnout and mild recovery over the last few months. I’ve noticed too, and know I need to find a better way to balance my creative energies. I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I know that I won’t find it until I make space for some deep, restorative rest. That’s my priority for the weeks ahead.

It brought me so much joy to sit and write this post to you today.

Thank you for reading. I have gotten so much from this experience of shepherding this community through The Artist’s Way and that’s only possible because you show up each week to read what I write and share your experiences in the comments. I hope you know that I never take your time and attention for granted.

💕 If this piece resonated with you, please tap the heart below to help spread the word.

💬 Comments and reflections are always welcome!

Leave a comment

💌 I’ll be back in your inbox with the Friday Thread soon. Together, we’ll share our wins, grieve our stumbles and cheer each other on.

🚫 If you’re not interested in The Artist’s Way and would like to unsubscribe from future posts in this series, please adjust your preferences here.

Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. We’re currently taking part in The Artist’s Way, a community exploration of the intersection between creativity and recovery and it’s not too late for you to join us! Our goal is to explore our creativity in a gentle, low commitment way and to show up each week to cheer each other on. Here’s an overview of our approach if you’d like to learn more!

How did you get on this week?

I’m ending this week feeling the kind of exhaustion I know to be wary of. I snapped the above selfie at 6pm last night, and wrote a proud note about how I was going to stop working and read instead. Ha! I somehow got dragged back into my laptop, and ticked off a few more things.. My goal for this weekend is the same as all the ones that came before: rest. Fingers crossed you’ll be able to get some too!

I missed two Morning Pages sessions this week, but I used that time to get out in nature which felt restorative in another way. I haven’t managed a “proper” Artist’s Date yet this week, but I did make a particularly delicious batch of hommous. There’s something about the process of soaking the chickpeas, simmering them in a pot and whizzing them into a perfectly-balance condiment that I find deeply restorative. My secret ingredient is a dusting of sumac on top. So good 🤤

Over to you….

How did you get on with your Morning Pages this week? Our goal is to spend some time with them every morning, but I actually think it takes more commitment to come back to the practice after you’ve skipped a day or two (or 6!)

How was your Artist Date? Or do you have something planned over the weekend? It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. A simple walk in the park works!

💬 Did you enjoy chapter 8? Are there any insights from your experience that you’d like to share? As always, I'll get us started with some reflections on my tasks from this week.

Leave a comment

Huge thanks to our paid subscribers whose support makes this community possible. If this exploration of The Artist’s Way has made a positive difference in your life, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get access to bonus content (including my collection of resources & the popular Ask Clare column), and you’ll help to keep my work freely accessible to every survivor who needs it.

Subscribe now

Thanks so much for being here. It’s an honour to be in community with you 💕

P.S. If you’re new here, please review our community guidelines before participating too.

You know the drill: each week, we read a new chapter of The Artist’s Way and do our best to write our Morning Pages and schedule an Artist’s Date. On Tuesdays, I share my reflections on that week’s theme and on Fridays, we gather to share our experiences in the weekly thread. Huge thanks to , , , and Michelle for coming along to our second virtual gathering on Sunday. I really enjoyed our conversation. 💕

Our next (& maybe final?) gathering will be on Sunday June 8th at 1pm Irish Time. Please leave a comment below if you’d like to attend.

Leave a comment

Here’s an overview of our schedule for May:

The Artist’s Way Week 8: Recovering a Sense of Strength

When I think about the limitations in my creative life, there are two main ones: money and time. The deeper I get into The Artist’s Way this time around, the more I think I need to add a third: my own self-limitations.

For as long as I remember, I’ve dreamed about having wide open stretches of time to devote to my writing. I got that during the pandemic (& wrote my first novel), but I also learned that a life centred only on my creative work (however fulfilling that may be) is a barren one. I want a full life. I want to be in love, to be part of a community and to spend time in nature. I want to stretch myself physically and emotionally as well as creatively. Creativity is important to me, but it isn’t my whole world.

As a younger person, I trusted that my work would never let me down. It would never abandon me. I devoted so much time to it, knowing that it would always be there for me. I haven’t always been creatively successful1, but developing my creative muscles has served me very well. Chapter 8 was a welcome reminder to focus on consistent daily actions. I love a big picture plan. I love to daydream, although it often spirals into worry. But when I’m doing that, I miss out on being able to make steady, plodding progress toward advancing a creative vision. I’d like to prioritise that more in the weeks ahead.

Cameron almost lost me early in the opening section of this chapter. She compares artistic losses to miscarriage, emotional incest and sexual harrassment. Clearly, they are not the same thing and these comparisons felt both inaccurate and deeply insensitive. I’m sure people struggle terribly with their artistic failures, but it’s not the same as living alongside serious trauma.

“In order to recover our sense of hope and the courage to create, we must acknowledge and mourn the scars that are blocking us”

My first reaction to this sentence was despair. I’m not sure I have it in me to do any more mourning right now! The weight of it is too much, but I suspect there is more to be grieved. I’ve lived through some significant creative disappointments. I rarely acknowledge them, but they hurt me deeply. Perhaps it’s time to give myself some space to honour this grief.

This chapter also talks about the need for encouragement, a word which made me tear up as soon as I saw it. What I wouldn’t give for a little encouragement?! I’ve always been hard on myself. My internal voice says I’m wasteful with my time, that I prioritise the wrong things, that I’m not a real artist. I know that’s not true, but it’s often how I feel. It was only when I saw the word encouragement that I thought I could cheer myself on a little more. I could cheerlead, rather than criticise. I really needed that reminder!

“Every loss must always be viewed as a potential gain”

Cameron’s tendency to use absolutist language (always, never, must, should etc) always bothers me. This line stung, in particular. Sometimes there’s nothing to be gained from loss. Sometimes it’s just agonisingly painful. It can be hard to accept the finality of this loss, but denying it serves no-one. Cameron views loss as an orientation tool: “How can this loss serve me? Where does it point my work?”, she asks. These are fruitful questions, and can help to reorientate you but it’s not always possible to just shake off the agony of the loss. “Metabolise pain as energy,” she advises without acknowledging that pain can often be completely paralysing. She cites an example of one creative who always tries to find new outlets for their creativity. There’s something to admire in that can-do spirit. It’s another form of creativity to always be looking for another option, to see our work more expansively and imagine it beyond the constraints of what currently exists. But that’s not always easy to do. When you’re grappling with loss, I think it’s OK to just grieve.

“A creative life is grounded on many, many small steps and very, very few large leaps.”

This was the most useful lesson in chapter 8 for me. Our society (& my own mindset) overemphasizes the finished product. We fetishize seeing our book’s cover in the window of our favourite bookstore but “creativity lies not in the done but in doing”. I remember hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk about his award-winning book ‘Between the World and Me’. He described it as feeling dead to him. He’d spent years working on it in private, and when it was published, it belonged to the world. He had already moved on to his next work. When I dream about the day my first book will be in my hands, I deny myself the joy of being in the weeds of my story, of trying to figure out how to bring it to life. The published book is a monument to creative work, but once it’s in the world, the hard (& deeply fulfilling) creative work is done. There’s a grief in that too, I think.

This chapter also helped me realise how much time I spend thinking about my art, rather than just doing it. Cameron encourages us to remember the “dignity of art as process”. She suggests that we leave aside the odds of success or failure, and just do the work. Everyday. Consistently. This chapter is a rallying cry for the steady daily plod of steps in the right direction and it’s a lesson I want to bring with me into the weeks ahead.

Other thoughts & reflections from Chapter Eight:

• “We must remember that our artist is a child and that what we can handle intellectually far outstrips what we can handle emotionally”

• “The halls of academia, with their preference for lofty intellectual theorems, do little to support the life of the forest floor” There’s a long section in this chapter the intersection between academia and creative work. It didn’t feel relevant for me but I imagine academics would find plenty to critique in Cameron’s perspective of that world. If that’s you, please feel free to share your feedback in the comments.

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• “The entire thrust of intellectualism runs counter to the creative impulse. For an artist to become overly cerebral is to become crippled.” This is a mindset I’d like to shift in my own life. I often approach my creative work with a business mindset. I think about the most efficient way of writing something. I wonder about what might find an audience. I make strategic plans for my work. But in the end, I think I'd be better served by leaving the strategy aside and just focusing on play. This is a stretch goal for me, but one I’d really like to experiment with in the weeks ahead. ( and I have been chatting about this in the comments too - a playful approach can be useful for a lot of us!)

• “The key to career resiliency is self-empowerment and choice” Cameron writes. I’d also add money, time, support, resources…. 🙃

• “The key here is action. Pain that is not used profitably quickly solidifies into a leaden heart, which makes any action difficult” Oh if only it was that simple..

• “Instead of painting anything, I will worry about it some more” Guilty!

• “Fantasizing about pursuing our art full-time, we fail to pursue it part-time - or not at all” Also guilty!

• “Work begets work. Small actions lead us to the larger movements in our creative lives” This could be my new mantra!

• “Art is the act of structuring time” I love this concept and want to explore it more in this week’s Morning Pages. It feels like a very rich vein for exploration.
  

• “I’m too old” is an evasive tactic. It is always used to avoid facing fear.” This is another example of harmful, absolutist language which makes me crave a more nuanced perspective. As we get older, our perspective on life changes in ways that I’m not sure I (at 37) can really understand. As I get older, I expect my perspective on life and creativity to evolve. I imagine that I’ll feel differently about what I want to prioritise and what kind of creative legacy I might like to leave behind. I’d really welcome comments on this one too!

Tasks

When I read the tasks this week, I could feel that I wasn’t up for some of the heavy emotional work. Just reading the affirmations made me tear up, so I knew I didn't have capacity to make architectural drawings of my deepest creative dreams, or to imagine what a perfectly nurturing childhood might have been like. I don’t have the emotional resources for that this week, so I’m skipping them. This is your reminder that you can do that too: you are the authority on you and you can make The Artist’s Way whatever you want it to be. I’ve gotten a lot from this book, but I’ve also benefited from giving myself some space from the strictures of it. I really encourage you to do the same.

• When I first saw the list of affirmations, I started to cry. That tells me that 1) they touched a nerve and 2) there’s more going on for me in this moment than I can really see or understand. I suspect it’s grief. Grief for the loss of some of my creative dreams, but also the time I spent trying to rebuild my life after trauma. I lost a lot of time, and the weight of that can be difficult to bear. I’m going to try to work with these affirmations this week. Hopefully they can help me believe that I deserve a more creative life, even when it feels like I'm scrambling to breathe.

• “Watch yourself for a week and notice the way you will pick up an anxious thought, almost like a joint, to blow off - or at least delay - your next creative action” This is a task I found in the chapter itself, rather than in the tasks section. I’m curious to observe this in action this week.

• Complete the “Early Patternings” exercise which seeks to untangle childhood conditioning from my present day creative dreams. I expect this to unpack a lot of difficult stuff, and I want to make sure I’ve enough capacity to wade into those murky waters. If I feel up to it this week, I’ll do it. If not, I’ll leave it aside for another time.

• Ideal day: plan a perfect day in your life. This could be fun to explore.

Best of luck with The Artist’s Way this week.

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💬 Comments and reflections are always welcome!

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💌 I’ll be back in your inbox with the Friday Thread soon. Together, we’ll share our wins, grieve our stumbles and cheer each other on.

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Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. We’re currently taking part in The Artist’s Way, a community exploration of the intersection between creativity and recovery and it’s not too late for you to join us! Our goal is to explore our creativity in a gentle, low commitment way and to show up each week to cheer each other on. Here’s an overview of our approach if you’d like to learn more!

📅 Our next virtual gathering is happening on Sunday, May 4th at 1pm Irish Time and I’d love to see you there.

Please leave a comment below or send me a DM if you’d like to come along, and I’ll forward the event details. For safety reasons, I don’t want to post them on the internet.

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How did you get on this week?

I’m ending this week feeling tired but very happy! I prioritised giving myself a little more room to play this week, and I’ve really felt the benefit of it. Like a lot of people, my life is ruled by my to do list. In general, that really works for me. (✔️ Love to tick off a task!) But sometimes, I need to just live/mess around/have fun.

I lost some momentum with Morning Pages this week. I spent the early part of the week in Rome, and came home deeply exhausted. I still wrote my pages most days, but they were a lot shorter, sloppier and more rushed than I like. I’m hoping to reprioritise them over the weekend.

Can shopping be an Artist’s Date? I hope so, because it might have been my most creatively fufilling task from this week. I needed to find an outfit for a friend’s wedding and due to some complicated inter-personal dynamics, I really wanted to feel confident in my clothes. I brainstormed a bunch of ideas, and found a suit I feel really good in. There was something about trying to find the colours/textures/shapes I wanted that was deeply satisfying for my brain, and I was also proud to have bought myself something. That doesn’t always come easily to me.

Over to you….

We’re more than half way through this process, and I feel deeply in the rhythm of our weekly activities. Are you enjoying them? Do they feel too rigid or too loose? I’m really curious to hear. Remember: you don’t need to do The Artist’s Way perfectly in order to be part of this. Even if you’re not actively participating, you’re still very welcome to contribute.

💬 Did you enjoy chapter 7? Are there any insights from your experience that you’d like to share? As always, I'll get us started with some reflections on my tasks from this week.

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Thanks so much for being here. It’s an honour to be in community with you 💕

P.S. If you’re new here, please review our community guidelines before participating too.

You know the drill: each week, we read a new chapter of The Artist’s Way and do our best to write our Morning Pages and schedule an Artist’s Date. On Tuesdays, I share my reflections on that week’s theme and on Fridays, we gather to share our experiences in the weekly thread. We’ll be gathering for our next live conversation next Sunday, May 4th at 1pm Irish Times. Please leave a comment below if you’d like to attend.

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Here’s an overview of our schedule:

Welcome back to The Artist’s Way. I hope you found our latest rest and integration week restorative. I’m writing to you from Rome where I’ve come to celebrate my inlaws 50th wedding anniversary. The city is packed with people attending Pope Francis’s funeral, and I got to dip my toes in the sea for the first time this year!

As I read this chapter, I noticed a bubbling sense of energy in my body. In some ways it felt oppositional to chapter 3 on shame and anger. This chapter, on jealousy, risk and perfectionism, is also about difficult emotions but it feels much more fertile to me. There’s so much that can grow from it. While shame freezes us in place, jealousy has the potential to give us a renewed direction to move forward with. Let’s get into it!

The Artist’s Way Week 7: Recovering a Sense of Connection

I really connected with Julia’s perspective on creative work being about deep listening. The nuance she captures between getting something down and thinking something up really struck me. My best creative work (almost) always comes from a deep engagement with the world around me. Occasionally I’ll have a dream that sparks a creative idea1. But that’s rare. Almost always my best creative ideas come when I’m deeply entangled in the process of living. I get my best ideas when I’m washing my hair or folding clothes or trying to scrub crusty food off the bottom of an old saucepan.

“We are more conduit than creator of what we express,” Cameron writes. Regular readers will know how much I struggle with the idea of God but I have to agree that when it comes to fiction, that sentiment really resonates with me. I don’t think it’s God I’m channeling but when I’m deep in creative work, it feels like I’m touching something much larger than myself. When I’m writing non-fiction, it feels like I’m digging deeper into myself and the past to try to find something true. In both cases, creativity isn’t something that exists “out there”, but an instinct that lives deep inside me. I think that’s true for everyone. We all have a deeply rooted creative spark, though for some it’s been more thoroughly stamped out than others. Creativity is our life force. It’s part of what’s so powerful about exploring creativity as a means to rebuilding after trauma. When I was shredded by trauma, that fundamental creative instinct to strive towards life was a big part of what kept me going.

As we work our way through The Artist’s Way, our goal is to tune into those creative instincts, to prioritise them enough to make the space to connect with them and to use our attention to capture what we see, hear, feel or sense. This chapter encourages us to practice this skill which regular readers will know is an important aspect of my creative practice. When I feel out of the rhythm of creative work, I make a special effort to capture small moments of life. On the bus, I’ll open my notes app and jot down the details that make life feel rich, tangible, precise. I’ll slide into the rhythm of a walk in nature and feel my breath sync with the trees around me. While I struggle with the God stuff, I always find nature deeply sustaining. Nature is always enraptured in creation. It has a voracious, insatiable appetite for creating new life.

“Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop - an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are making and to lose sight of the whole”

I have a lot of issues, but I don’t think of myself as someone who battles with perfectionism. It’s not part of my self-conception, but I still got a lot from this section. As someone who publishes every week, I’m deeply familiar with the need to just finish the thing. It might not be perfect, but it’s good enough to share.

I remember getting some feedback from a snooty work colleague that my attention to detail needed to improve. I was happy when something that was 80% good enough, especially in a context where my work was never appreciated. I thought she stressed unnecessarily about details that didn’t matter. Her feedback stayed with me, even though I also felt confident that in that instance, I was right. Everytime I publish a piece with a typo, I worry that I’m not a real writer. My inner critic says I’m sloppy or careless or disrespecting of my audience. It admonishes me for not taking a proof-reading course or reading a book about grammar or finding someone to read my work before it goes out. But the wiser me knows this isn’t true. The wiser me thinks we all make small mistakes sometimes but that’s OK. We can correct them, and move on. We don’t need to let it derail our creative work.

Cameron puts perfectionism down to pride. I suspect it has more to do with fear. It’s the feeling that we must be perfect in order to be worthy. It often grows from a childhood experience of never feeling good enough, of needing to be perfect in order to retain the love you need to survive. Cameron encourages us to break outside our comfort zone and explore new ideas, though she doesn’t spend much time talking about the reasons we’re hesitant to leap. Reasons that, in my experience, deserve some exploration and unpacking. That said, perhaps my instinct towards talking about hard things could further delay our creative growth. I believe in the power of trying to understand what’s underneath our most challenging emotions. But Cameron doesn’t seem to find much value in that.

She ignores the deep subterranean roots to our perfectionist tendencies and instead says, ‘stop doing that’. Perhaps this is an instance where there’s value in just trying: in choosing something that feels outside your creative comfort zone and giving it a shot.

For me, it would probably be poetry. I’d like to play with language and distill my ideas down to a single kernel of truth. I’d like to shape it with rhythm and rhyme, into a poem that might make a reader feel something more deeply. I tried writing a poem on the beach last summer and was surprised by how much it sharpened my attention. The resulting poem was, of course, crap but the process was more enjoyable than I could have imagined. Maybe it’s time to try again.

“Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire.” - in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

I read that line close to two decades ago, but it has always stayed with me. I don’t like my envy, but it’s a reliable guide of what I most want. I still remember the powerful jealousy I felt as a kid, a feeling I’m sure many firstborns can relate to. There was nothing like the fury that came from being ousted from my coveted place at the centre of my mother’s world. These days, I don’t often get jealous but when I do, it has the potential to floor me. It’s rarely an emotion that I feel lightly - I’m either seething with envy, or blithely uninterested in someone else’s life.

“When you learn to harness its fierce energy on your own behalf, jealousy is part of the fuel toward a greener and more verdant future”

Jealousy is a powerful form of fuel. Like anger, it has the potential to keep me going through difficult moments. Unlike anger, it always tells the truth. I’m excited to make a Jealousy Map this week, and I suspect it’s going to be an easy task. I’m always jealous of women writers who put their art first. They might have jobs, families or financial assets, but their art is central to their lives2. Cameron suggests making a map that lists who or what you’re jealous of and why, together with how you could take a small step toward achieving something similar in your own life. I don’t expect it to be as simple as that, but I’m eager to see where it might take me.

Other thoughts & reflections from Chapter Six:

• 🤦‍♀️ “Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results” (guilty!)

• “A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places3” I’m going to try to remember this next time I’ve been battling with the same draft for hours!

• “My jealousy had actually been a mask for my fear of doing something I really wanted to do but was not yet brave enough to take action toward” Oh, I’ve been there!

• “In order to do something well we must first be willing to do it badly” I think about this concept a lot when I’m writing. The essay doesn’t need to perfect, but I am determined to get it done! And often when it is complete, it’s a lot better than I feared it would be.

• “Safety is a very expensive illusion” This is such a multifaceted concept, especially for people who’ve experienced trauma. In a lot of ways, safety does feel like an illusion to me. Our society is built on the assumption that most people are good and I’m not always sure that’s true. This feels like something I need to explore more during this week’s Morning Pages.

Tasks

A brief reminder: Julia Cameron suggests that we try to complete about half of the tasks. I usually pick a few that appeal to me, and a few that really don’t. Please be mindful of anything that might be upsetting or triggering for you. You might feel like you have the capacity to explore them regardless, or you might decide to leave them aside for now. Either choice is OK.

• Make a jealousy map. (I’m looking forward to this one!)

• Complete this sentence: “If I didn’t have to do it perfectly, I would try…”

• Complete the archeology exercise, which seeks to uncover buried parts of ourselves. I’ve done this before, but I’m curious to see what will bubble up on this exploration. I’m happy to see her include positive prompts too. Sometimes The Artist’s Way focuses only on the things we need to grieve or change, but I do think it’s important to take stock of the things that are going well too.

• Make this phrase a mantra: “Treating myself like a precious object will make me strong.” Create a piece of art around this phrase, and post it somewhere you can see it. (I’m excited to get the art supplies out for this one!)

• Create a wonderful smell in the house. Always happy to have an excuse to bake something 😉

• Quickly list five favourite films. What do they have in common?

• List your favourite topics to read about.

• Buy yourself one wonderfully comforting, self-loving thing. (Still haven’t bought anything throughout this process, so I’m giving myself another prompt to!)

Best of luck with The Artist’s Way this week.

It’s not to late to get involved! Every week, more people sign up to explore The Artist’s Way through this community. Some are planning to jump in during later weeks. Others are re-doing the program to see how it might resonate differently for them now. You are always welcome to join us! 💕

📅 Our next virtual gathering will be at 1pm Dublin time next Sunday, May 4th. Please leave a comment below if you’d like to attend and I’ll forward the meeting details.

Leave a comment

💕 If this piece resonated with you, please tap the heart below to help spread the word.

💌 I’ll be back in your inbox with the Friday Thread soon. Together, we’ll share our wins, grieve our stumbles and cheer each other on.

🚫 If you’re not interested in The Artist’s Way and would like to unsubscribe from future posts in this series, please adjust your preferences here.

Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. We’re currently taking part in The Artist’s Way, a community exploration of the intersection between creativity and recovery and it’s not too late for you to join us! Our goal is to explore our creativity in a gentle, low commitment way and to show up each week to cheer each other on. Here’s an overview of our approach if you’d like to learn more!

How did you get on this week?

I’m ending this week tired, but happy. I’m grateful to (hopefully 🤞🏻) have a little more rest on the agenda this weekend. Our rest/integration weeks always seem to come along when I need a little respite, so I’m grateful for that too. Big thanks to those of you who completed our mid-point survey this week. It was really heartening to see that you’re enjoying this exploration of The Artist’s Way, and I also appreciated the constructive feedback.

To the folks who just don’t like The Artist’s Way itself, I get it. As I re-visit the chapters through a trauma-informed lens and chat with you in the comments, I’m realising just how flawed the book is. One of the gifts of this experience for me has been thinking through my own approach to creativity as a tool for trauma recovery. If I ever get a chance to write a book on the subject someday, I know this experience will really inform my thinking. So thank you for that. I am very grateful for your presence here.

If you haven’t taken the survey yet, I’d still love to hear from you.

Start Survey

I wrote Morning Pages every day this week. My handwriting got pretty messy as the week progressed which is often an indicator of my tiredness, but I still got ‘em done! For my Artist’s Date, I’ve enjoyed doing the Minute Cryptic crossword clue everyday. It’s a fun, brain-twisty puzzle that incorporates word play and humour. I don’t always figure it out but the few minutes I spend on it each morning is consistently fun. I’m also planning an extended vision-boarding/rest/quarterly reflection day over the weekend. I’m excited for that!

One of the key requests from this week’s survey was that more folks would feel moved to share their experiences in the comments.

I would love that too. I love interacting with you in DMs/my inbox, but there’s something about the community conversation that feels especially nourishing. Even if you’re not actively participating in The Artist’s Way, you’re still very welcome to contribute. I’d love to hear your thoughts, reflections and ideas and will do my best to respond to every single one. (It sometimes takes me some time to get to everyone, but that’s always my goal!)

💬 If you’re finding The Artist’s Way difficult, please feel especially welcome to share. Lots of folks have said that they wouldn’t be doing this without the support of this community, so please lean on us. We are here to cheer you on! As always, I’ll get us started with some reflections on the tasks I completed this week.

Leave a comment

Thanks so much for being here. It’s an honour to be in community with you 💕

P.S. If you’re new here, please review our community guidelines before participating too.

You know the drill: each week, we read a new chapter of The Artist’s Way and do our best to write our Morning Pages and schedule an Artist’s Date. On Tuesdays, I share my reflections on that week’s theme and on Fridays, we gather to share our experiences in the weekly thread. Next week, we’ll be taking a rest & integration week. We’ll return for Chapter 7 on April 27th.

Here’s an overview of our schedule:

It’s hard to believe, but we’re half way through the programme. I hope you’re proud to have made it this far. If you’re planning to join in during the later weeks of The Artist’s Way, you might find it useful to start experimenting with Morning Pages and Artist’s Dates. This process gathers momentum as we work our way through it, and returning to those foundational practices might help you get into the flow of it.

At this halfway point, I’d also like to ask for your feedback.

I’ve made a short, 5 question survey which you can complete here. One thing I’m reflecting on is the sustainability of my work into the future. Rest assured that this process will remain free through to the end! But it is an enormous amount of work, and I know it’s not sustainable for me to lead these community intensives for free into the future. It’s 7.35am on Saturday morning when I’m writing these words, squeezing it in before going to a (paid) work event later today! It’s a balance though, because I don’t want to make this community inaccessible to folks who might need it. Right now, I’m still figuring out what a solution might be, and I really welcome your input.

Start Survey

The Artist’s Way Week 6: Recovering a Sense of Abundance

Week 6 is about money and creative abundance. I remember this as a chapter that brought up a lot for me when I first read it. I returned to it determined to be open. I wanted to take what’s useful and ignore the rest, but I found myself getting riled up a few times. More than any other chapter in the book so far, I think this one is deeply flawed. That said, I would really like to revise my ideas about money and creativity. I might never be someone who can create without having a firm sense of security. But that doesn’t mean I can’t try to loosen the grip that financial anxiety has over me.

Cameron believes that we need to work on our money issues in order to fully recover our creativity. I’m not sure I agree. I have a lot of money issues, but I’m still pretty fulfilled by my creative work. It’s true that money is often a block to creativity, but I don’t think it’s as binary as Cameron presents it. It’s OK to want and need money in order to feel safe. For many of us, that feeling of safety is a precursor to good creative work. Minimising that deeply human need for safety serves no-one.

Cameron writes:

“All too often, we become blocked and blame it on our lack of money. This is never an authentic block. The actual block is our feeling of constriction, our sense of powerlessness. Art requires us to empower ourselves with choice. At the most basic level, this means choosing to do self-care”

I don’t agree that poverty isn’t an authentic block. Sometimes a lack of money squelches all creative possibility, but maybe not as often as we might think. When I look back on my broke years, I wish I’d been kinder to myself. I wish I’d let myself live a little more, rather than being so beholden to a savings plan. There are writers I admire who have prioritised their art and published beautiful books, though they still live very precariously. I haven’t published any books, but I have achieved a degree of financial stability. Part of me wishes I hadn’t postponed my creative dreams. But I also know it was the right choice for me. I always took the sensible job and skipped holidays to save money. I still wrote everyday. I still dreamed about being a writer but I didn’t take small steps toward that goal. I didn’t play with my creativity. I didn’t prioritise having fun with it and seeing where it might take me. I wasn’t attuned to the world, hunting for snippets of life to capture on the page. Looking back, I can see that I let a lack of money block me more completely than it needed to.

Cameron draws an analogy between recovering addicts in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and recovering artists. She encourages both groups to surrender to God and allow Him to take control of their lives. It reminded me of ’s paradigm shifting essay in The New York Times about how AA isn’t always effective for addicts who aren’t men.

Here’s an excerpt:

“The truth is, A.A. may be the foundation of global recovery, but it wasn’t made with everyone in mind. It’s a framework created in the 1930s by upper-middle-class white Protestant men to help people like them overcome addiction. Its founders believed the root of alcoholism was a mammoth ego resulting from an entitled sense of unquestioned authority…This program, which was designed to break down white male privilege, made sense for the original members: It reminded them that they were not God and encouraged them to humble themselves, to admit their weaknesses, to shut up and listen. Perhaps these were much-needed messages when it came to the program’s original intended audience. But today’s women don’t need to be broken down or told to be quiet. We need the opposite. I worry that any program that tells us to renounce power that we have never had poses the threat of making us sicker”

There is enormous value in finding acceptance for the circumstances of our lives. But most world religions are still profoundly patriarchal institutions. Artistic surrender to a higher power might help some recovering creatives. But it won’t be my path.

“For many blocked creatives, it takes a little work to even imagine ourselves having luxury”

This chapter encourages us to “pamper ourselves with authentic luxuries”. It was hard to read that without rolling my eyes. After many years of being broke, I learned not to want nice things. When I go to a restaurant, I still gravitate towards the cheapest thing on the menu, maybe the second cheapest if I’m feeling flush. Cameron talks about another artist who indulges in a weekly punnet of raspberries. It only costs a few dollars a week but to her “it’s just more than I thought I was worth”. Even today, some part of me still thinks that nice things are wasted on me.

One of the most controversial activities in this chapter is to track our spending in order to see where our money goes. I don’t need to do this exercise though, because I already track every penny I spend. For me, it’s a hangover from that time in my life when I had to stretch every euro as far as I possibly could. I’ll never forget totting up bills on the back of an envelope a few weeks after my mother died. I had to pay for groceries, the funeral bill, the utility bills, legal fees.. I jotted down each figure on the back of an envelope and saw just how impossible it was going to be for me to pay it. It was in the thousands, and I had only a few hundred1.

For some people, tracking your spending could be a useful exercise. It might help you see where your money is going and that information can be a form of power. But it can also be a tool for self-flagellation. It can fuel our most restrictive thoughts about money, safety and what we deserve. During my lean years, I struggled to buy myself things like a warm Winter coat or enough protein to sustain my body. The security of a safety net was worth more to me than those day-to-day necessities. Cameron encourages us to stay in observation mode, rather than self-flagellation mode while tracking your spending. It’s good advice but for those of us who struggle to believe that we deserve to survive, it can be really hard to follow.

Other thoughts & reflections from Chapter Six:

• ❄️ “Snowflakes are the ultimate exercise in sheer creative glee”

• “Remember you are the cheapskate, not god. As you expect god to be more generous, god will be able to be more generous with you” This felt like ‘The Secret’, which I saw it on Oprah soon after my mother died and bought almost immediately. It’s hard to convey how deeply unhelpful that book was. Not only was my life shit, but it was my fault that it was shit. It was my fault because I didn't believe that I deserved better. I felt like the shit on somebody’s shoe. Sexual abuse will do that to you. But that wasn’t my fault either.

• 🤦‍♀️ Anyone else struck by the moment Julia Cameron bought herself a horse? I’m happy for you Julia, but a lot of us can’t buy dinner not to mind recreational animals that are notoriously expensive to care for.

• “All artists are vulnerable to the shaming ‘I should be working’ side of themselves that discourages creative pleasures” Glad it’s not just me! That exact sentence (“I should be working”) has echoed through my mind for so many years.

• “Creativity lives in paradox: serious art is born from serious play”

• “Art is born in expansion” This feels true to me, though I wish Cameron also acknowledged how much creativity can flow from limitations. Having limited time and money isn’t always a barrier to creative work. Personally, I often find it easier to create while working within constraints.

• “Many of us equate difficulty with virtue - and art with fooling around. Hard work is good. A terrible job must be building our moral fiber.” I’d really like to challenge this misconception in my own mind!

Tasks

• “This week, in your morning pages, write about the god you do believe in and the god you would like to believe in” This is another idea from the chapter itself, rather than the tasks section. Worthwhile to explore

• I’ve been reflecting on last week’s task where I listed the things I wish I owned. I didn’t come up with much but looking back on it, I think I was too modest in my ambition. I think a visual deep dive might help get my creative juices flowing, so I’m going to prioritise making a vision board this week.

• I’m going to complete the ‘Money Madness’ exercise from this chapter. Just reading through the list of prompts made my breathing shallow, so I’ll need to approach it gently. (It includes things like: In my family, money caused ___. Being broke tells me ____. I’m afraid that if I had money I would ____. 😱)

• Clearing: Make some changes in your home environment. I think my office needs a bit of a refresh - nothing major, but perhaps a deep clean, move the desk, swap out the art.

• Practice saying yes to freebies. I don’t need much practice with this. I love a free thing! But I want to include a nice, easy task on this list of more challenging ones.

• Consider scheduling two Artist Dates. I’m in a nice rhythm of Artist Dates, but I liked the suggestion of scheduling a second. My life is still quite busy (see: working on a Saturday morning!), but I like the idea of having two weekly appointments with my artist child. I’m going to try to squeeze in two this week!

Best of luck with The Artist’s Way this week.

It’s not to late to get involved! Every week, more people sign up to explore The Artist’s Way through this community. Some are planning to jump in during later weeks. Others are re-doing the program to see how it might resonate differently for them now. You are always welcome to join us!

If you’ve struggled this week, please know you’re not alone. The material can be heavy, and it’s OK to take your time with it. Be kind to yourself, and reach out for support when you need or want it! 💕

Thanks so much for taking part in this experience. It’s always an honour to be in community with you.

📅 Our next virtual gathering will be at 1pm Dublin time on Sunday, May 4th. Please leave a comment below if you’d like to attend and I’ll forward the meeting details.

Leave a comment

💕 If this piece resonated with you, please tap the heart below to help spread the word.

💌 I’ll be back in your inbox with the Friday Thread soon. Together, we’ll share our wins, grieve our stumbles and cheer each other on.

🚫 If you’re not interested in The Artist’s Way and would like to unsubscribe from future posts in this series, please adjust your preferences here.

Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. We’re currently taking part in The Artist’s Way, a community exploration of the intersection of creativity and recovery and it’s not too late for you to join us! Our goal is to explore our creativity in a gentle, low commitment way and to show up each week to cheer each other on. Here’s an overview of our approach if you’d like to learn more!

How did you get on this week?

This was a better week. I’ve felt burnout nibbling at my heels over the last while, but I think I’ve turned it around. This week, I accepted my limitations, prioritised taking care of myself and sought out small moments of presence and joy. My Artist’s Date was a mindful nature walk and while it wasn’t a particularly exciting activity, it helped me feel more grounded and connected to myself than I have in a long time. I noticed the leaves beginning to unfurl from their buds, and soaked up the bright, Spring light.

My Morning Pages were much shorter this week, but I still managed to write something on 5 out of 7 days. I skipped them on Tuesday morning because I had to finalise this week’s post. This rarely happens, but when it does I think it’s OK to give myself a break.

Over to you….

There were lots of challenges in last week’s thread, so I’m hoping that life has improved for those of us navigating difficult moments. Remember: you don’t need to do The Artist’s Way perfectly in order to be part of this. Even if you’ve had no time or headspace for this week’s activities, you’re still very welcome to share your experiences in the comments.

💬 Did you enjoy chapter 5? Are there any insights from your experience that you’d like to share? I’d love to hear how your relationship with Morning Pages and Artist’s Dates are evolving as we progress through the book too.

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