Finding my way...

I hate it when I can't sleep. It's not natural for me; sleeping is one of those things that I do best. So, when I can't sleep I know that something's wrong and I need to sort it out. On the occassions it happened when I was younger and less self-concious, I used to write poetry about it. These days everything I do or think or say is tinged with self-doubt and cynicism and the act of writing poetry, or doing any writing that touches to the nerve of me, seems like whiney self-indulgent angst. And yet, I truly believe that self-indulgent whiney angst is necessary in order to function properly. You just have to make sure that you're not letting it take over your life.

I've been thinking a lot about the younger me recently. I feel so souless these days. Everything is an effort or a pretence. I used to be idealistic, optimistic... an absolute believer in the power of dreams and self-belief (although admittedly I still had my gloomy moments).

In a bid to recover a sense of myself and to reawaken the more innocent, earnest me I ordered Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: A course in discovering and recovering your creative self.

It's a twelve week course that's meant to confront your fears and self-doubts and imbue you with the belief that creativity is a gift that must be nourished (she refers to an inner-artist-child that needs to be allowed to play). There are a couple of rules that have to be followed on the course. The first is the morning pages - you wake up in the morning and you spill everything out of your head and onto three pages. You write, write, write and expunge all that crap and debris that clutters in your head and you start the day afresh.

I cannot stress enough how utterly brilliant this exercise is, and the utterly utterly best thing is that you DO NOT read over what you have written. You put it away and you DO NOT read it. If you read it you are simply imbibing it all over again.

When I did the morning papers the world was a brighter place. Did you notice the past tense? Yes, I am no longer doing them. Why? Because I was embarassed about them. And lazy. Embarassed about taking time out to write down stuff that is cluttering my heart and head. But lazy too. Too lazy to get out of bed 15 minutes earlier to do this one thing that makes me feel so much better. The longer I left it, the more ashamed I grew, until I stopped doing the course. I got up to week 8 and stopped. Why? I want to continue it... I felt it was helping and yet I stopped. Foolish foolish me.

The second rule that you have to keep is the Artist's Date. This is a date you make with yourself where you spend two hours, once a week, 'feeding' the inner-artist-child. Basically, it means you indulge. You do whatever you want, as long as it is something completley for you and your artist. And you do it alone. No combining it with a shopping trip, or picking someone up, or doing a favour for someone else. It is a completely selfish two-hours to spend on yourself and your dreams.

I have done 2 artist's dates in the 8 weeks I've been doing it. For exactly the same reasons as I stopped writing the Morning Pages: I felt embarassed by it. Like I didn't deserve to do them. That somehow letting myself have two hours of fun was wrong. I suppose I should have just made sure that everyone else was getting thier two hours of fun too, and then I wouldn't have felt so guilty. But I wish I had the guts to do them. I wish I had the imagination to think of what I would do if I took myself on an artist date.

So, as I was lying in bed tonight with a hundred million stupid things whirling about my head, fluttering in my chest and making the walls close in tight, I made myself a promise. That I would stop punishing myself for wanting to be something. To let myself enjoy things again. To stop taking life so seriously.

Of course, promises are easy to make in the middle of the night when you can't sleep. They help you pull the duvet up a little higher, roll over and drift off to dreamland. I don't know if I can keep it. I don't know if I care about myself enough to do it. But you have to start somewhere. So I've made a promise and I am deliberately writing it in this rather earnest, embarassing blogpost as a sort of testimony to the earlier me who would have thought nothing of penning a few angst-ridden lines to appease her inner-artist-child.

However, to prove that I am taking this seriously, here is photographic proof that I have done my (very early) morning papers today. Normally I write in a notebook, but the closest thing to hand when I got out of bed was some business stationery. Which worked too.


If I manage to keep this promise, I will make a record of it here. I will write about artist dates, I will discuss exercises that worked, or that didnt' work. I will write up inspirational quotes like a starry-eyed teenager. But I will not write about the Morning Pages. Because that is the other rule about them. Apart from the photo above, which is serving as a sort of pledge, the Morning Papers are never to be shared. They are a release. Release and fly free.

To get us started, here is a quote that I absolutely love. I have written it up and stuck it on my wall. One day it will be in italics at the beginning of a book that I have published. Maybe I will have it in every book I ever publish. But for now, it is here for you to read and ponder:

And with that, I bid you good night and hope to enjoy some carefree slumber.

Rosie x