🎨 We did the Artist's Way together!
What I learned (& what's coming next 🤞🏻)
Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. We just completed The Artist’s Way, a community exploration of the intersection of creativity and recovery.
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”
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
From my desk to your’s: thank you for being here 💕
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! 🙈 )
“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.”
“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 💕)
“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.”
“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.”
“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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Thank you again, Clare, and all the participants, for this enriching experience. I will keep going, at my slow pace, trying to complete the challenge, and the exercises, and I look forward to new ways of connecting as part of the Artist's way here on Substack.
Clare, how lovely to read your final reflections & those of our community, too. It was truly a special experience and I thank Tracey for introducing me to you, Clare, your work, this great community and this collaborative journey. Enjoy your time off & many blessings on your upcoming wedding! 💗