💬 Let’s chat about Week 2 of The Artist’s Way
On recovering a sense of identity
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!
Don’t worry about doing it “perfectly”, or having the time to complete every single activity. 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 first virtual meeting
We’ll have our first virtual meeting on Sunday, 30th March at 1pm Dublin time. Our clocks go forward that morning, so apologies for my confusion as I try to navigate international timezones. 🫠 I tried to find a time that would suit this global community, but I’m really open to feedback if another timeslot would suit you better for futher gatherings.
If you’d like to come along, please leave a comment below (or reply to this email) and I’ll forward you the Google Meet details. For safety reasons, I don’t want to post them online.
How did you get on this week?
Morning Pages are a deep seated habit for me, so please don’t judge your efforts against my decade-plus long ritual. But caveats aside, I wrote Morning Pages every morning this week and always felt a little calmer when I finished.
For my Artist’s Date, I read some poetry. I love poetry, but I don’t always make the time to actually read it. This week, I went to bed early and worked my way through Lyndsey Rush’s “A Bit Much”. She is Mary Oliver’s Drunk Cousin on Instagram, which is a great alter ego but not one I was necessarily expecting to be profound. I was wrong. The book is both tremendous fun and more emotionally charged than I expected. I was really happy with this choice of Artist’s Date, as it helped me to question my assumptions about what art should be. I wasn’t conscious of it, but I assumed that poetry had to be deep and therefore couldn’t be whimsical but this book completely upended that idea! (There are a few poems on her Instagram page, if you’d like to get a flavour for her work.)
Over to you….
How did you get on with your Morning Pages this week? It’s OK if you skip a few days. If all you can think to write is: “I don’t know what to write. I don’t know what to write'. I don’t know what to write….’ that absolutely counts.
How was your Artist Date? If you have one planned over the weekend, feel free to share that with the group.
and I were chatting about the pleasure of short nature walks in last week’s thread. If you don’t have an Artist’s Date in mind, I think that’s a great place to start. 20 minutes, no headphones, just walk and let your mind wander.And if you want to skip or opt out of either Morning Pages or The Artist’s Date, please know that’s also OK. You know what makes sense for you in this moment of your life, and I think you should trust those instincts.
I’m so curious about your reflections on chapter 2. Did you have any insights on attention, skepticism and what it means to be sane that you’d like to share?
💬 In the comments, please share your experiences from Week 2. I'll get us started with some reflections on the tasks I completed/skipped this week.
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I did well with my Morning Pages and Artist’s Date this week, but I didn’t tick off as many tasks as I hoped.
I made a list of 20 things I enjoy doing, which was fun though it didn’t unearth anything groundbreaking. The fact that I love reading and writing is hardly news! 😉 That said, I did stumble on a few new ideas for future artist dates which I’m excited to experiment with.
I made a life pie and rated my satisfaction under the following categories: health, wellbeing, creativity, community, fun/adventure and work. Though I feel quite happy in my life, I was surprised that 7/10 was my highest score. That metric felt both true, and a little sad. Creativity was my lowest score at 4/10, which I guess means this is a good moment to be exploring The Artist’s Way! The last few months have been tough, and this exercise helped me see visually just how much it's taken a toll on me. If I do this activity again at the end of this process, I hope my scores will have improved!
The easiest task was listing 10 tiny changes I’d like to make it my life. My always-be-optimising brain is good for some things 🙂 My list includes: tidying my wardrobe drawers (it’s a mess in there and it’s always a pain trying to find clothes for running), get back into audiobooks (I’ve been pulled into a vortex of depressing political podcasts) and get back into morning yoga which doesn’t feel realistic right now, but maybe I’ll aim for it next month.
This week, I wrote Morning Pages every day. I'm finding they help me get clarity on things that have been happening, things I'm stewing over.
I found the overall framing of this chapter to be quite disrespectful and ableist/sanist. "Going Sane," "going sane feels just like going crazy," the entire discourse around "crazymakers." Her choice of language makes it difficult for me to respect her or her ideas, even though I do find some of them helpful - particularly the paying attention (but this is not an idea unique to her). I don't think I'm patient (or forgiving?) enough to want to weed out bits that are troublesome to find the gems. But I'll keep at it for another chapter anyway. I also bristle at her "Rules of the Road, In order to be an artist, I must..." Those are HER RULES, and to be an artist, I believe I must create my own. (As a lifelong rule-follower, I've decided I'm done with following rules, I want to listen to what feels right for me.) I find it counter-productive for a course on discovering and recovering your creative self to present the reader with RULES to follow to be an artist. I've noticed a few of these kind of contradictions throughout and it gets me riled up – something else to address in therapy should I gather the energy to find a therapist again!
I made a list of 20 things I enjoy doing, and discovered that I do most of them semi-regularly. But it has me wondering if I wrote down things that I currently do and like, and if I need to dig a little deeper for things I like to do that have dropped off my radar. I'll think about this some more.