The Artist's Way and Leaving It All Behind

I’ve been trying out the exercises in The Artist’s Way, a book about unblocking your creativity. I consider myself a blocked artist, not so much in terms of writing the blog, but in terms of my utter lack of outside creative pursuits. The exercises in the book consist of writing “morning pages” every day: 3 pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness writing. This part I abhor for its tediousness, especially when I feel I could be using that time and energy for a blog entry. The other major exercise in the book is going on “artist dates,” where you spend two hours “filling the well” of creative input. The example the author gives of an artist date is to go to a “Five and Dime” with $5 and buy stickers and plastic dinosaurs. I don’t know where I’d get a time machine to do such a thing, but it’s not happening. My only ideas for the artist date have been thrifting or going to a museum or a movie. You’re supposed to go alone because blocked artists apparently don’t get enough time to themselves. I can’t relate. But last week I went to the thrift store for 2 hours and found my men’s 501 Levi’s. So it was productive in some way, but I don’t think I did what I was supposed to do. I was probably supposed to look around, exploring colors and textures and getting ideas for artwork. I didn’t.

There are also these written exercises for each week (I just finished Week 2) and one of them was to write down 20 things you like to do, but maybe never get a chance to do. I couldn’t think of many things I even like, never mind latent projects I want to get back to. It just made me realize how small my world really is. All this reading and writing made me think I should actually do something artistic, so I pulled out my old poetry journal from last summer when I was really, really sick. Sometimes I wrote in it when I was in a total rage or in the deepest of despair, but I remember thinking that some of it was pretty good, artistically speaking. So the other day, sitting at the cafe, I read through the entire notebook. There were a few bits and pieces that stood out to me, so I marked them, but overall it just destroyed me. I don’t think I could ever express just how horrible that time was. I was unmedicated, full of rage, throwing things, screaming at people, and fixated on harming myself. Reading the rationalizations around suicide, the visceral descriptions of my suicidal fantasies, the rage at past abuses committed against me. Some of it reads as kind of adolescent over-dramatization, but a lot of it was spot-on for what I was feeling at that time. I finished reading, starting to cry, and went out to the car. I shut the door and started sobbing, eventually collecting myself enough to drive home.

Later that night I had a full-on panic attack remembering what that time was like. I guess since I’ve been getting better, I’ve just kind of blocked that stuff out. And I think that’s healthy. I think that’s the only way forward. Because reading that just wrecked me. I myself had forgotten what that time really felt like, and plunging into that journal was a mistake. Maybe it put things in perspective a bit in terms of seeing how far I’ve come. But it wasn’t worth the agony of reliving those days. There were some studies I heard about that looked at trauma and how to best deal with it. The results contradicted the commonly held notion that we need to relive and “process” our traumatic experiences. Come to find out, that’s not true at all. The brain blocks out trauma for a very good reason: our survival and ability to go on. Digging that stuff up, our most common therapy technique, is actually a bad idea. Depending on how bad the trauma, it could be a really bad idea. So as much as the artist in me wanted to mine that notebook for material, I, as a person, couldn’t handle it. I sobbed that night, I hyperventilated, I took 2 Klonopin and inhaled some lavender essential oil. Matt helped talk me down and focus on putting it out of my mind. And I’ve done my best since then to just not go there. To trust that moving forward is the only way to go.

In the months leading up to that horrible time of writing in that notebook, I was still trying to practice singing every day. But every time I practiced, I was racked with suicidal thoughts. Thoughts of how terrible my singing was, how hopeless my career was, how angry at the industry I was, and ultimately how I should just end it all. I couldn’t imagine any kind of life without the hope of singing to keep me going. But I was forced to leave it behind. As my illness continued to get worse and worse, it was impossible for me to hang onto those notions of a career in music. Whenever I think about singing now, I feel deeply disappointed and depressed. I feel like an utter failure. So the solution for me is to move on. To put all that behind me and just keep going. I think it’s the only way for me to live. And so, I’m seeking a new creative outlet. Whether or not this The Artist’s Way book will be of any help we have yet to see. But I’ll just keep going.