The Artist’s Way: Recovering a Sense of Identity (week 2)

Reflections on attention, skepticism and what it means to be sane

Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. We’re in week two of The Artist’s Way, a community exploration of the intersection of creativity and recovery.

How it works

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 take a rest/integration week every three weeks, so the whole process feels more sustainable. Here’s our schedule for March:

It’s not too late to join us!

This isn’t about doing The Artist’s Way “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.

Photo by Toby Schumacher on Unsplash

Our first virtual meeting

Huge thanks to those who voted in last week’s poll. There was clear interest in a virtual meetings, so I’m proposing Sunday, 30th March at 1pm Dublin time (IST¹). This would be 6am in Saskatchewan, 7am in Denver, 8am in New York/Ontario, 4pm in Dubai and 7pm in Thailand. (I really tried to find a time that would suit everyone!)

If you would like to attend, 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.

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

The Artist’s Way Week 2: Recovering a Sense of Identity

This week’s chapter is about attention, skepticism and what it means to be sane. I re-read it on Saturday afternoon. It was International Women’s Day, and I’d spent the morning winding my way through the streets of Dublin as part of a protest against gender based violence. It was a bright, Spring day and after a long, difficult Winter, there was a crackle of possibility in the air.

Chapter 2 is one of my favourites from The Artist’s Way. I love how Julia Cameron writes about attention, which I talked about in this popular post from last year:

I don’t have many regrets, but this is one.

“A creative life involves great swathes of attention. Attention is a way to connect and survive”

One of my most reliable ways to connect to my creativity is to mine the world for scenes. When I’m on the bus or waiting to order at a restaurant or on a walk, I try to absorb the idiosyncrasies of the world so that I might be able to capture them in language. I outlined my first novel by sorting through all the snippets I’d been collecting over the previous decade and shaping them into a narrative. Cameron writes that “attention is always healing”, and though I’m not sure I agree, it is absolutely central to my creative life.

“Creative recovery is an exercise in open-mindedness.”

The book suggests that “we gently set aside our skepticism - for later use, if we need it - and when a weird idea or coincidence whizzes by, we gently nudge the door a little further open.” This is excellent advice in creativity (& in life), though it requires me to stretch a little. When I’m heart-broken or suffering, leaving space for possibility feels vaguely idiotic, as if I’m making myself vulnerable to further pain. In those moments, I want to retreat into self-protection but I think it’s worth trying to stay open. (We’ll return to this theme in chapter 3 too!)

I struggled with the sections on “poisonous playmates” and “crazymakers”. They didn’t feel true to my experience but more worryingly, I was concerned that they might be harmful for some readers.

Cameron blurs the boundaries between people who interrupt our creative work and abusers intent on destroying our lives. She glibly suggests that recovering artists dump the “crazymaker” and buy a book about codependency, which is a wholly inadequate response to abusive relationship dynamics. I tried to read these sections generously, and to acknowledge that I come to this subject with significant baggage. I interpret the word “abusers” very differently than the author perhaps intended, but her perspective on gaslighting and abuse still felt wholly inadequate.

Her perspective also reinforces dangerous myths about tortured artists who torment the people around them and still go on to be celebrated for their work.

There’s never any excuse for abusive behaviour, and it’s long past time that we abandoned the myth of the tortured artist.

People who are targeted by abusers need a lot more support and resources than are offered in this book, which veers dangerously close to victim-blaming.

Cameron writes about recovering artists who find themselves trapped in abusive situations through the lens of self-sabotage. She wants them to leave, without giving any attention to the complex economic and societal systems that force them people to stay. If the book was published today, I hope it would better reflect the complexity and nuance of these questions. I hope it would also give more space to the messiness of unravelling genuine self-sabotage which is a challenge many creators grapple with.

When I’m struggling with self-sabotage, I find it useful to lean on my Morning Pages (& my therapist!) to try to identify and interogate my patterns. This doesn’t necessarily change things, but it helps me to see the dynamics more clearly.

How creative recovery echoes recovery from trauma

Reading this chapter, there was a lot of overlap between the things Cameron recommends for creative recovery, and the things which were essential in my recovery from sexual trauma. Such as:

• “Your own healing is the greatest message of hope for others.” This is true both in creativity and in life, I think.

• “Draw a sacred circle around your recovery.” This was essential for my recovery from trauma too!

I wonder if this is also true for other survivors.

Other things I underlined throughout Chapter Two:

• “Any little bit of experimenting in self-nurturance is very frightening for most of us.” In my experience, this is especially true for trauma survivors.

• “Early in our creative recovery, self-doubt can lure us into self-sabotage”.

• A question: how will I know when I’ve crossed from self doubt into self expression, if my self-expression is mostly about my self-doubt? 🙃

• “The joy of practicing your creativity. The process, not the product, will become your focus.” I appreciated this reminder, especially after receiving three rejections for a short story I wrote. I’m not giving up, but oof, three rejections in two days was a lot!

Tasks:

At the end of each chapter of The Artist’s Way, there’s a list of tasks to explore in the coming week. The author suggests that you do a mix of tasks, prioritising those you feel drawn to and the ones you really don’t want to do. Our goal is creative sustainability, so please don’t push yourself too much with the tasks. Be especially mindful of anything that has the potential to be triggering. As always, you are the best authority on you so please trust your own judgement.

Here are the tasks I’m going to prioritise this week:

• Make a list of 20 things I enjoy doing, and when I last made the time to enjoy them. The book suggests that this will be a useful list for future artist dates!

• Find small chunks of lost time and try to use them more creatively. This feels like a doable task in what’s shaping up to be a very busy week!

• Make a life pie. The book suggests a six-slice pie where you rate how satisfied you are with your life in the following categories: spirituality, exercise, play, work, friends and romance/adventure. I plan to define my own categories, but I am curious to see what my life will look like through this exercise.

• List 10 tiny changes I’d like to make in my life. These should be small things, but I bet they’ll feel like a lot if I manage to do a few of them.

  

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

Don’t worry if you don’t have the time or headspace to do it perfectly. As a community, we have only two goals: explore our creativity and cheer eachother on. If you read this post, that’s enough. If you find the time to write some Morning Pages or take an Artist’s Date, that’s great. You are welcome here, regardless of how the experience is unfolding for you. 💕 (And if you’ve fallen off, please don’t beat yourself up. You’re always welcome to jump back in!)

💬 In the comments, I’d love to hear your reflections from this chapter. I’m curious about what resonated with you, and what didn’t ring true? If you’ve read this chapter before, did it feel different to you this time?

💕 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.

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1. Turns out, Ireland uses Irish Standard Time during the summer months and GMT during the Winter months. I had no idea, and thanks to

Rai Marsh

for clarifying in the comments. Put simply, Ireland is always in the same time zone as the UK and we'll be meeting at 1pm on March 30th. Hope to see you then 💕