I’m reading the book The Artist’s Way and making an effort to go through its exercises. This is one of them.
The book’s goal is to ‘unblock’ artists from the mental obstacles that hold them back from being creative. I’m only in Week One of its twelve-week program (that some people have compared with Alcoholics Anonymous for reasons that I don’t see yet), but I think I understand the structure of it. Daily ‘Morning Pages,’ three handwritten (or, in this modern era, 750 typed words) of stream-of-consciousness every morning to clear my head. Weekly ‘Artist Dates,’ going alone on small adventures which would replenish my inner childlike sense of creativity (nothing boring!). And some tasks to do each week; the book recommends picking the easy ones and also the ones I really don’t want to do.
Two concepts in the book have already shifted my paradigm:
Shadow artists. People who wish they could make art, but they don’t believe the word ‘artist’ could ever apply to them. The author gives many examples of people who were creative at one point in their lives, but for some reason they themselves never understood – sometimes trauma or abuse – they closed themselves off. Often these people will support artists (through encouragement or even through tidy sums of money) while never offering themselves the same support. This really hits home with me.
Blurts. The negative core beliefs that pop into my head when I hear praise. It’s easy enough for me to trigger these, just by reading affirmations like “I am a creative and respected writer” … my subconscious comes right up and says No you’re not! and is happy to provide evidence in detail. But the book won’t let me just accept those negative thoughts. It encourages me to insist on turning them around to their positives, It asks me to ‘time travel,’ to look back through my life in five-year intervals, and identify the sources of these destructive beliefs about myself.
And I think I’ve found a source.
I don’t write much. When I do, it’s hard going and I wear myself out by second-guessing every sentence I write, until my work is like a dinner that’s been reheated over and over again – it becomes tough, it loses its flavor. So even though I go to writing club meetings, even though I’m on Reddit offering advice to fledgling writers, I feel I don’t deserve to call myself one because I never actually generate any work of my own.
So as I ‘time traveled’ today, I asked myself: when did I stop? I used to write a lot, back in grade school and high school. I used to not be nearly as self-conscious about it as I’ve become. But I had a difficult time in high school, being bullied incessantly. It changed me as a person.
And today I remembered my school trip to Europe in eleventh grade. It’s not something I’ve ever forgotten, but I don’t think about it any more because I’m over it and I don’t care to relive the details. But one of the tasks the book is giving me for my first week is to write out one horror story from my ‘monster hall of fame,’ so, here goes.
It was a trip through some German-speaking parts of Europe: some of Germany, some of Switzerland I think, and a bit of Belgium. My French classes didn’t help me much, but I did pick up enough German along the way to make Mr. Oeschle (the German teacher who was shepherding us kids on the trip) smile at me a few times. I also had my first kiss on that trip, on a bridge in Bonn with a pretty girl from another school who was following a similar route as we were. (That’s another story for another time.) My school was an all-boys Catholic prep school. I was not a popular kid because I was smart but I didn’t know how to be social, and I got picked on a lot by some of the kids who were along on the trip, but I didn’t care. I figured we were all more or less in some sort of truce for the duration. I had a good time on that trip.
Everything in Europe was so new and different to sheltered, privileged little me. I kept a journal of the things I saw and what I thought of them. I remember in particular thinking (and writing) that the tidy countrysides and small villages out our tourbus windows looked like Lego sets.
Close to the end of the trip, my journal went missing. Another kid in my room rummaged through my bag for it while I was out. I never found out who.
A week or two after we returned home, I found (or was given; I don’t remember which) a photocopy of several pages of my journal. Vandalized, marked up with vulgar drawings and annotations, making fun of what I wrote, highlighting my relevant sentences. I also found out that copies had been distributed through the all-girls prep school down the road, the source of all the girls in the school plays I was in.
I was devastated. I was mocked and taunted mercilessly, even more than I had been. I didn’t know who had seen these vandalized pages (or who had created them!) and who hadn’t. I stopped trusting everyone. I stopped opening myself up. I stopped putting myself out there. I stopped writing.
That was four decades ago. Maybe I haven’t put as much of it behind me as I thought I had. But it’s okay, now; it’s good; this is something I can work with. I owe nothing to my bullies of the past. Having identified the problem, I’ll see if that helps me work past it.
They, on the other hand, owe me the journal they stole from me. That’s the only thing I’m sad about; that I never got it back.