Panic at the Disco

The Artist's Way Week Seven: Recovering a Sense of Connection

For a chapter that bills itself as a lesson on connection, the connection between topics covered in the week seven chapter of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is awfully tenuous.

Cameron starts with a section on listening—to our intuition, to inspiration, to the voice of our projects waiting on us to hear them and help them be born—before quickly moving on to a section about perfectionism that felt like Cameron had bugged my writing space:

“Midway through a project, the perfectionist decides to read it all over, outline it, see where it’s going. And where is it going? Nowhere, very fast.”

As someone who (happily!) spent much of December reimagining the (as yet unwritten) second half of my book because it was galloping in the wrong direction, I feel a smidge attacked. But then I look at my novel laid out in high-level beats on my cork board and my project binder that expands on those beats, and I feel grounded and clear about my novel but decidedly less grounded and clear about Cameron’s program.

Because which is it, Julia?

Do we follow our intuition that our book is veering dangerously off course and take a moment to step back and reevaluate, or are we hopeless perfectionists for so much as considering such a thing?

Nowhere, fast my intuitively fastidious ass.

Profanity aside, Cameron’s chapter for week seven is just getting started!

She moves from perfectionism to a section on risk—“very often a risk is worth taking simply for the sake of taking it”—to a section on how artistic jealousy can serve as a compass that points to the true north of our most urgent desires.

Great topics all—listening, perfection, risk, jealousy—but each subject could easily support its own chapter. And sure, there were some sweet tasks on offer this week—wear your favorite item of clothing just because, actually burn that candle you’ve been saving, and listen to one side of an album with your full attention were my favorite—but I was in too much of a tailspin from the exercise earlier in the chapter that asked us to list all the risks we’d try if we didn’t have to worry about doing them perfectly to pay these sweet tasks much mind.

To be completely fair to Cameron, I was already in a tailspin before I started reading the lesson for week seven because the morning pages have started to sour on me. What started off so joyfully has suddenly devolved into scribblings that felt like the transcript of my inner monologue during a panic attack.

And by midweek I was actually having that panic attack.

For those of you who have never had one, a panic attack feels a bit like that jolt you felt that time you stepped into a crosswalk only to have a car nearly run you down.

You leapt backwards.

Your heart lurched in your chest.

A panic attack feels something like that, except instead of calming down after a few seconds, your heart just keeps lurching and lurching and lurching.

Blame it on the new year, maybe, but for the past couple of weeks my morning pages have been the place I keep asking the Big Questions about the direction of my life. I’m not talking about writing, here—I have a novel project I’m excited about working on—but the rest of my professional life has been fair game. The Pandemic sent a seismic jolt through my field that I’ve finally admitted caused irreparable damage, and it’s time to stop waiting on for my work life to bounce back to pre-pandemic norms, so I’ve been exploring options from slight pivots to complete one-eighties, which has lead me to consider a half dozen viable options, though as yet none of them has declared itself the clear path forward. To another person this might be an exciting crossroads of blah blah blah, but I’m not another person, I’m a person with a history of depression and anxiety who prefers to settle all open questions and create and follow a clear plan (I refer you back to the image of my novel beats above) . That tendency to organize and strategize is a lifeline when it’s time to tackle a project, but it’s an albatross when a half dozen possibilities have yet to coalesce into a viable plan, particularly when you’re spending every morning writing three pages about which direction is the right one for you, and—over and over again—the answer is, I just don’t know.

Is it any surprise I found myself googling “do morning pages cause panic attacks” in the middle of this week?

To be sure, that search unearthed quite a few true believers who insist that morning pages relieve anxiety, not cause it, but there was a reddit post about someone who found them unproductive, and a blog called “Why I Don’t Write Morning Pages (and What I Do Instead” that felt like a life raft from Jennifer Tatroe, a mindfulness writer in Los Angeles.

Tatroe writes that throughout her life, “morning pages have gone hand-in-hand with depression,” and that instead of dissipating negative thoughts—as Cameron swears they will—morning pages intensified them. “As often as not, when I was doing morning pages regularly,” Tatroe writes, “I started the exercise feeling all right and ended in tears.”

That hasn’t been my experience on a day to day basis, but it’s certainly been the case over the seven weeks I’ve been rereading The Artist Way. In my first entry at the end of November, I’m laughing about a silly new novel idea, but in my latest entries my heart is lurch-lurch-lurching about all the questions I don’t yet have answers for.

In her blog, Tatroe writes that “if a daily practice regularly leaves you feeling worse than before you began, it’s not a productive practice,” then details a number of daily practices she prefers to morning pages, among them meditation, guided journaling, and gratitude lists.

I’m not ready to give up on morning pages entirely just yet—though I definitely took a break from this this weekend—but I may dial them back a bit, even though Cameron is downright evangelical that morning pages are three pages written daily, no substitutions.

But the morning pages are just one tool in a writing toolbox, aren’t they? And tools by their very nature are intended to help, not hurt. Freewriting—morning pages’ any-time-you-want-me cousin—works really well for me when I’m trying to work through a sticky widget in my plot. A couple years ago, I had a huge breakthrough in my novel when I decided to try writing a letter of complaint to me from my protagonist about a plot point I knew was wrong but didn’t know how to fix. That exercise not only changed the plot of my novel completely, it earned my character the right to tell her story in first person.

Were those pages actually morning pages?

Cameron would say no: they were guided, they were done at night, and—sin of all sins—they were written on a computer, but damned if it didn’t help.

That said, those same morning pages that made my heart lurch this week also created a temporary answer to the idea of what’s next by reminding me that I’d already answered that with absolute clarity in my December morning pages and the goals for 2023 that rose out of them:

My first priority is finishing a draft of my novel (and if things go especially well, perhaps two drafts).

While my morning pages were in a time-out this weekend, the contents of the pages I’d written weeks ago bubbled through my self conscious. I may still have a lot of exploration to do before I finally decide what’s next professionally, but I do know what comes next, period: my novel. I’d made a promise to myself to put finishing my novel first, but in these first two weeks of 2023, I’d written for just ten percent of the hours I’d intended to write.

And, so, thoughts of anything but the novel are officially tabled until February. For the next two weeks I’m doing a deep dive into my novel with the crazy notion that I’ll write in two weeks for the same number of hours I’d planned to write in all of January, then return to my regular routine and try tackling my non-writing future with my writing present on more solid ground.

I’ll also finish out my reread of The Artist’s Way, here, of course, though I got a copy of Cameron’s new book in the mail this week, Write to Live, and a quick initial skim makes me think this new book might be her twelve-week program streamlined into six weeks. I’ll give it a closer look later this year, but if you want to check it out now, you can order it here.

THIS WEEK’S MOMENT OF JOY

I’m a smidge late to this party, but Marcel the Shell with Shoes on, and it was a fucking delight. I giggled through the whole thing and belly laughed so hard at one point that my husband paused the movie to let me collect myself. Marcel probably won’t help you with your writing, but he may help you smile.