Ink and Vein

This week, I started Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Several people have recommended this book to me, one of them being a therapist, and I purchased it during the pandemic, thinking it would be a perfect time to complete it.

As with many of my planned pandemic projects, I didn’t implement or complete Cameron’s twelve-week program to uncover creativity. I didn’t even open the book during that time. Instead of shaming myself over it, though, I’m just doing it now.

At this juncture, I feel the timing is right to develop new habits, to revisit unfinished projects, and revive some unrealized dreams.

A consistent and persistent dream for me is being a writer. I have one published article in an anthology, and some short pieces in a zine. I want to do more, and sometimes feel like a little bit of a fraud when it comes to my writing workshops and my teaching. I’m not published; who am I to teach writing?

That question could be unpacked in a lot of depth, and I could write about publishing and gatekeeping, etc. That’s not really the issue at hand, here, though.

I find myself frequently lamenting my lack of follow through. Notebooks full of my half-finished ideas fill shelves in my home office, and messy and chaotic research notes live in my hard drives and clouds.

It’s my hope that completing the twelve-week program in The Artist’s Way will help me integrate writing into my life in a more complete way, but will also help me recognize and befriend my own creativity.

For so much of my academic life, I was told that I was not creative, that the work of research and writing and scholarship was not creative. I disagreed with this point of view, outwardly, but I internalized it, too. I frequently felt inadequate on the scholarly level, as well. I didn’t feel quite able to do what was needed or expected, more than once or twice. And I wasn’t. My tenuous mental health, undiagnosed ADHD, and my inability to maintain healthy boundaries between teaching, research, and social life meant that I was a bit of a disaster of a human being.

I’ve done quite a bit of growth and healing since then, and am ready to reconnect with the writer, the researcher, and the creative in myself.

I am only on day 2 of this twelve-week program, but already feel the benefits. One of the first exercises in The Artist’s Way is writing affirmations about creativity, and then listening for the “blurts” or the core negative ideas we hold about our creativity in an effort to rework them into positive affirmations. Another of the tasks in week one asks us to identify and write about three villains in our creative history, three people who discouraged or dampened our creativity and made us believe we were not creative. In doing this activity, I realized that I didn’t have any people I could pinpoint as the villains, but early on I felt the pressure to choose, to define myself, and believed that if I chose one path, I would be permanently closing others.

Somewhere along the way, I learned that financial stability was the most important thing to reach for, and somewhere else along the way I learned that I would have to choose between having a creative career and a stable life. I grew up without much sense of stability, and so I longed for it. My creativity is something I felt I had to push down, in favor of being practical.

Practical isn’t where I want to live or be anymore. At least, not as the governing principle for my life.

I tell all of my students that they are all creative, that they all have something to share. My students in the prison program told me I helped them find their voice, helped them find a joy for writing. They continually thanked me and promised to make me proud.

As I said goodbye to my students in May, many of them said, “Be sure to tell us the name of your memoir when it gets published!” They have great confidence in me, just as I have confidence in them, and I really can’t let them down. It’s time for me to step more fully into myself.

For years, I’ve been a teacher.

Now, I’ll also be a writer.