The Artist’s Way: Recovering a Sense of Connection (Week 7)
On perfectionism, creative risks and jealousy
Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. We’re in Week 7 of The Artist’s Way, a community exploration of the intersection of creativity and recovery.
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.
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! 💕
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I’ve written part of a story I started based on a dream I had about Hugh Grant and #MeToo set on an academic campus, for example.
Or at least that’s how it appears from the internet - who knows what it’s really like?!
A quote from Paul Gardner
Clare, would you ever be open to sharing that poem you wrote on the beach? I, too, have been experimenting (playing!) with poetry more these days, and I have found doing so has reinvigorated my love of language. Paying sharp attention to external observations, I believe, is molding me into a better writer overall. And poetry can convey something that prose cannot, especially by using white space.
Anyway, about jealousy--I am learning that when I feel jealous/envious, I can give myself some time to have that inner temper tantrum, where I whine and shake my fists and say, "It's not fair!" Usually, I cool off and am able to grasp a more balanced and healthier perspective about my place and my voice.
Recently, I had one of these tantrums to myself, and I reminded myself that my voice matters just as much as the celebrities who are showing up on this platform. Even though my audience is much smaller, it doesn't matter. There is a place for ALL of us at this huge Substack table! And I also remind myself that what matters most is that I show up as my authentic self each day, because no one else can share my story through my unique lived experience.
Clare, loved your take on this chapter and thank you as always for exploring it so deeply and honestly. I agree with you here: "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."
First, I do claim the identity of perfectionist, or rather I did claim it with a begrudging sense that it was a personality trait I should rid myself of, that it got in the way of my happiness. And certainly "maladaptive" perfectionism does that. But in 2023 I happened to read a book The Perfectionist's Guide To Losing Control by the psychotherapist Katherine Morgan Schaffler and it flipped everything i thought I knew about perfectionism on its head. I recommend it to everyone who feels perfectionism is part of their identity, and a trait they'd rather not have. When we can see our perfectionism as a kind of superpower, by not warping in its more maladaptive behaviors, we can own it with pride. We are perfectionists because we care. Because we strive to do better. Because we have ambitions for ourselves, others, this world. It is also a beautifully written, warm-hearted book and it remains one I turn to again and again when I find myself dipping back into a more maladaptive frame of mind. So yes, Cameron is not at all in sync with me when she bascially says, "Get over your perfectionism. It is bad for you." And I totally agree with you that when perfectionism makes us unhappy, the driver is fear, not pride. The maladaptive perfectionist in me lacks pride in her work which is why she keeps striving. She fears it will never be good enough.
On the poetry example you gave, about trying something outside of our creative comfort zone, yes! I am writing "poemish" things as part of Jeannine Ouellette's Writing in the Dark community and it does make you pay much more close attention in a detailed, concrete way of our surroundings, and the feelings it evokes, like when you note down what you observe in nature. Jeannine calls these "shimmers and shards," because sometime they shimmer beautifully and sometimes they are shards that cut a little, that don't appear to be beautiful or pleasant but are important to pay attention to nevertheless.
On Jealousy, I do think it can be a teacher for us. It always reveals a shadow within us, as Carl Jung teaches. What we envy in others, we want for ourselves and often something is preventing us from daring to go for it. It is easier and safer to hide in our jealousy than to explore what it is there to tell us.
Also, this week for my artist's date I finally bought myself a basic watercolor kit, brushes and a paid of paper and markers so I will attempt the mantra exercise and maybe just let my little five year old artist self play. I find it so hard to let her simply play, with all the adult things we have to get done each day.
Week after week, the exercises elude me. I either avoid them, or rather, they don't call to me as much as other daily writing and medititative and self development exercises do. I am not sure why. I think perhaps because I have "done" the Artists' Way so many times before and assume, even if I can't remember, that i did the exercises. But that is a flimsy excuse. I am a different person, a different artist than I was then, and there is more to be discovered about what is blocking me and what may inspire me.
What I'd love to happen as I move forward in these remaining weeks is to return on a daily basis to the novel in progress that excited me so much last summer and into the fall but which has been dormant for half a year now. I am part of a writing group and in two weeks I have an opprtunity to share up to 30 pages of writing with my attentive group of writers and I don't want to miss the chance. I think the exercise, some of them, can help me unlock why I don't prioritize returning to my first and best writing love, which is fiction.