30 Days in April: Day 25


free dandelions

I might have already written something about this before, but I'm hoping not.

In the very first week of activities in The Artist's Way, Cameron implores you to take the bad things that you tell yourself about your creativity and turn them into affirmations. It's a simple technique--just writing out, say, "I am a bad writer" if you feel that way and then changing it to "I'm an excellent writer," and so on. This method goes right along with the fact that Cameron sort of frames this process as your "artist's recovery."

Anyway, the weird thing for me was how many of these things came out rather quickly the next time I wrote after reading it. I began bracketing them with <> in my paper journal and then writing the affirming starements right after them.

Now, I've gotta say, a lot of Cameron's recovery language really feels over the top to me, because I feel more like I am cleaning out the cruft than that I am spiritually exorcising demons of self-doubt.  But while I think of myself as someone who totally supports people as creators--"Dude, if you're writing, you're a writer, PLUS, you're an artist," that sort of thing-- I'm finding, through this exercise, that, as always, I'm better at supporting others than at taking my own supportive advice.

So I'm working on it.  This project has taken up enough of that late night "free time" that I've dropped the daily morning pages and weekly exercises of TAW, to pick them back up in May.  But I will keep thinking about (and discovering how much I limit myself, so that hopefully, I'll stop doing it so much.