This morning I woke up overthinking things and life, until I started my Morning Pages and I felt myself chill the f out. By the end of the first page I wasn’t bothered by the thing that was making loops in my mind. I still haven’t finished The Artist’s Way (by Julia Cameron), but Morning Pages have stayed with me since I first came across it. It took a while to do them in their intended form of 3 handwritten pages, but in all its variations it has been a ritual that has given a lot to my spirituality, mental health, and creativity. The farthest I’ve gotten in The Artist’s Way is Week 8. I started putting it off, ironically and not surprisingly, after I shared how much the book was helping me, and how
good it felt to experience a shift in myself through the process. I can self-sabotage when I’m getting close to finishing a project or making some sort of Big Life Breakthrough. Fear of change, resistance to what I don’t know and haven’t envisioned myself, fear of failure, fear of succeeding, overthinking, worrying about things I know nothing about, worrying out of habit. I don’t think I’m usually too blind to my patterns, but knowing hasn’t always translated to actually shifting my behavior. Lil human things. Before I bought myself a copy of the original, I had gotten hold of The Artist’s Way at Work. One of my best friends was living in Greenpoint at the time, and we were heading back to his apartment after a morning walk. On a box outside a row of town houses was a pile of donated books, and in that pile was a version of a book I kept hearing about, that someone had recently recommended to me after reading my zine “Get Yours”. It felt like synchronicity, a nudge to support my current process of wanting to make creativity the center of my life.
Although I still haven’t finished The Artist’s Way after all these years, I’ve gotten a lot from two of its tools, Morning Pages and Artist Dates. One task is to write first thing after waking up, aiming for 3 pages of long form writing. This is meant to be a ritual that happens every day of the week, regardless of you’re feeling, or how motivated you may be. This dedication is meant to teach us that showing up to ourselves and our creative practice can happen regardless of how we ready we may feel. It’s meant to emphasize that we can remain committed to our creativity, irrespective of what that may going on in our heads or lives. It’s also intended to connect us to our inner knowing and sense of self. I’ve embraced Morning Pages because it has served as a channel for my intuition, questions, dilemmas, affirmations, and life visualization. Once I started showing up daily (as opposed to my sporadic writing in the beginning), I felt more able to pause my anxiety spirals, because I knew that in the very next day I’d have time to process whatever was weighing on me. And because I was committed to show-
ing up daily, I could trust that I’d really get to it. This didn’t happen right away, but with time I found that I could really minimize my anxiety attacks by simply reassuring myself that I’d get to worry in my allotted processing time. I’m hoping to get there again. One day while sitting with my Pages, I ended up writing about how I’d love to make music one day. I’ve always felt a pull towards piano and drums, and in many variations of my bucket lists I’ve jotted down ‘learn to play an instrument forreal’. Soon after this writing session, on my art date to my local library, I saw drumsticks on the window display of a music/electronics store in Fordham Road. I bought them on the spot, and searched Youtube videos for makeshift drumming (books, plastic binders, and pillows, fyi). The seed was planted, and not too long after I signed up for drumming classes. I loved it and immediately wished I had followed that urge years ago. But the biggest takeaway was the reminder that I can always learn new mediums, that as long as I am willing to put in the time and effort I can experiment with whatever I want.
When I found myself writing out versions of ‘ideal life’ in my Morning Pages, I started seeing how close I was to many of the elements I deeply craved. I was already living out some of it, and some really weren’t that far from me. To fill in some of the gaps I signed up for writing groups, volunteered at a printing studio, experimented with cyanotype photography, planned more day trips for myself, and embraced library time a lot more, because I noticed that learning and book browsing helps my anxiety a great deal. I have also gotten to see my patterns, what I’m struggling with, and the things I continue to be frus-
trated by. Seeing how often things pop up helps me take action, or at the very least realize that something does need to change. In my life I’ve had the most creative focus when I feel that to survive and be okay, I have to create. When I find myself internal screaming more often than not, and the fear that life is happening to me permeates everything else. When the thought of unmet potential feels tighter and tighter on my chest and my gut. When my heart breaks and aches and grieves, and I wonder if I’ll see the light again. I create to make sense of things, to put it down somewhere, to do something. And usually in the time that I’m trying so hard to say what I want to say and how I want to say it, I’ll lose sense of time and place and worry. That is one of the biggest things that creating has given me. A space to be still and okay, even if the stillness comes with anger and hard edges. Because once I focus it and channel it, I’m okay with it.
I am very grateful that when things feel helpless, I fight for myself via my creative practice. But the hard part comes when I start to feel better, and I start to neglect the practices that allow me to be okay in the first place. It has been easier to be consistent when I create to make it through the day, except I don’t want to wait for internal turmoil to prioritize my practice. Not when I know that it’s my lifeline, and the more I stray from it the more I stray from my core and wellbeing.
Now that I’m home and quarantined, I find myself wanting to reconnect to my practice at a deeper level, because it’s something that I know I can hold onto. I’ve been consistent with writing and Morning Pages for a a couple of weeks, but the visual part of my practice hasn’t been as habitual. It’s what I need now, though. I’ve gone back to The Artist’s Way, in hopes that it’ll help me anchor my visual practice again, while I embrace making just to make. I’ve been longing for more time at home, to see projects through and make use of the books and art materials I’ve been piling up. But I didn’t want it like this. Not while a virus is threating the lives of the people I love most. My parents are both in their 70s, and my mom has a series of health conditions that make her extra vulnerable to COVID-19. I’ve had a couple of panic attacks, and it sucks having to just wait this shit out.
My goal is to finish The Artist’s Way this time around. I want to get past Week 8, and see what the entire 12-week program will shift in my life and inner self. There’s a lot that is uncertain right now, and it’ll take some time to understand what this pandemic will really do our communities, the ways we work, and how we’ll structure our days and systems moving forward. Right now what I can do is nurture myself via my creative practice, and make an effort to support my community’s own healing and creative process. I’m sharing my process now because it helps me make sense of it, and also to offer more coping ideas for people that resonate with healing through creativity and/or rituals. It’s a weird fucking time, but we’ll find ways bc we always do.
margot terc 4/5/2020
