I sat and stared at the book in shock. I have been a Shadow Artist for my entire life, and even the outputs I’m most proud of were created in that role. What’s it going to take for me to rediscover my artistry?
Howdy, welcome to the Letter. This letter was written to the tune of a loud fan, while sitting beside a sleeping toddler. White noise is an incredible thing! Today I’m going to share with you what it means to realise you’re not an artist’s arsehole. As always, if you love this reading please share it with one person who’d enjoy it too.
My mum-in-law grinned and gesticulated.
‘That’s what a woman who read my cards told me. Just do it. And I got really mad,’ she laughed. She puffed herself up and put on her annoyed face, demonstrating how self-righteously pissed she was. ‘How dare she say just do it. Doesn’t she know that I have this, and this, and this, and this? What does she know of my life. And then,’ she swept her arm out in front of her, sitting back relaxed. ‘She was right. I had to just do it. You leap, and then everything—the time, the money, everything—just sorts itself out.’
This isn’t a new concept to me. But it still petrifies my spine.
I nod in agreement.
Conscious mind: Yes this makes sense.
Inner feelings: Hahahahahahaaaaaaa bullshit.
During this conversation about focusing on art rather than money or jobs or {insert social expectation}, M.I.L. mentioned that she read ‘this book’ and it really helped her to focus.
She’s an award-winning visual artist.
She’s a fellow of the local visual art society.
She travelled internationally because of her art and her understanding of who she is.
But it all began with The Artist’s Way.
Mum-in-law had mentioned the book in passing several times over the past six months, and now I knew that the book wanted me. I could take a hint. I bought the e-book and read the introduction and first chapter at close to midnight, my Kobo glowing softly in the pitch-black room.
It painted a picture of me, right now.
I was stunned at how precisely it painted that picture.
It took my breath away. Me, sitting here decades into a career that I’ve carved out for myself in supporting others rather than creating my own work. A career as a critic, as an editor, as a ghostwriter, as a service provider.
Meanwhile, a mentor’s words echoed back to me:
Why do you have to make money from your writing? Read tarot. Do anything else. Write because you want to shift consciousness.
This entire life, my inner artist has been scratching desperately at the concrete walls in which she’s been encased. The walls aren’t white any more. They’re painted a muddy brown. Her fingernails are long gone, her fingers bloodied stumps.
Still she scratches. She scratches while losing her very self to her cage.
It’s only now that I can feel her, can hear her wailing.
It’s only now that she stops for a moment to notice the dust motes dancing in the light. It comes through a single, filthy window that rests high up against the ceiling.
She’s noticing the light and I’m only four days into Julia Cameron’s 12-week Artist Recovery program.
The Morning Pages have become frenemies. Friends because I love them; enemies because doing anything for myself around a 15-month-old toddler who demands my attention constantly is almost impossible. Friends because I’m beginning to unlock all kinds of barriers, limitations, thoughts and ideas that are unhelpful; enemies because this unlocking makes me wish I didn’t have to do it. I wonder if the morning part is essential, or the stream of consciousness part? It can’t be the former because that just enables me to stay blocked. It must be the latter. Nap-time just became therapy.
Mum-in-law has been writing morning pages since 2007, and she’s filled 67 notebooks. When I asked her how it changed things for her, she told me that it enabled her to tuck the art that nobody had seen—not even her family—under one arm, and walk into a gallery and ask if they’d represent her. She told me that it enabled her to travel halfway around the world because she knew what she wanted.
It enabled massive shift.
Right now I’m still in the willing part of recovery. I’m willing myself to do it. I’m willing myself to keep going. I’m done waking up with a hangover from a lifetime of regret. The hangover is sharp. Every time I move, think, breathe I’m confronted by a career-cup filled with the egotistical pretense of someone piddling about in the sidelines of something she wishes she was doing for herself.
I’m done beating myself up about having been a prolific and brilliant writer at age 21 and then losing it to the wilds of life.
I didn’t lose it to the wilds of life.
I played a very focused role in pushing the art away. My pride has forever been attached to the praise of others. Why, then, would you become an artist when you could go into business instead? Business is an art, you rationalise. Each rationale forming another brick in the wall designed to hold your artist back.
So here I sit, denied now the ability to hide from this epic (but fragile) framework of lies. Lies that I’ve listened to; lies that I’ve created; lies that programmed how I think, feel, and be. This therapy is forcing me to face the guilt and shame and sadness from which my inner artist’s cell is built, but it’s a gentle power. The therapy unlocks, the emotions well up, and as I turn to face the path they take as they drain away I realise that I’m being remade by the flood.
Ahead of me is my mother-in-law, a shining example of possibility.
She gave her studio spaces to others to use, to be ‘kind’. And when she realised that she’d blocked herself again, she began sitting in her (tiny) lounge-room.
If she can paint portraits for others in that space, what’s to stop me sitting here with a notebook and a pen, at nap-time? That’s ten hours every week just for Artist Recovery. Ten long, glorious hours.
What can change in just three months? Everything and nothing.
Right now I’m staring at the blackness of the void, hoping that the descent brings me to a cavern filled with sparkling and spectacular stalactites, a river that nobody has ever seen, and the ability to become one with it and follow its otherworldly journey until it emerges.
And you, darling reader, are my witness.