We're close to the end of our 12-week journey with The Artist's Way and it's prompting reflection among the more sentimental of us. What have we gained from this wacky, woo-woo experiment in nurturing our inner artist? Maybe it was a journaling habit. Maybe it's a greater sensitivity to the coincidences that pop up in our everyday lives. Maybe it's a deep resentment toward Julia Cameron and a confirmation of our disdain for the self-help genre. As we round out the last two weeks of this project, a few of us are recommitting to the process in the hopes of ending strong, and others are counting down the days. If you've been following along with us, congratulations on making it this far. Which camp have you landed in?
How many days this week did you do your morning pages? How was the experience for you?
Kathryn Xu: I did a 6/7 morning page week. It was definitely better than the week prior, which was a disaster, and aided by the fact that I got tired so quickly during the day, which meant I was both going to bed earlier and waking up earlier than I usually do. Perhaps going to bed before midnight reliably is good for you … I'm sure I will retain this lesson.
Alex Sujong Laughlin: I did 5/7 days this week, and I have to admit, I didn't read the chapter ... I am recommitting to reading Week 11 though since we're almost done. I'm curious if anyone else has fallen off the tasks/reading too though. I feel like, since Week 5 when Julia Cameron talked about money, I lost a lot of trust in her.
Kathryn: Alex, I fell off reading the chapters too, but I actually read this one and found some parts of it to be resonant with how I can occasionally be a competitive freak. And then the rest of it was, well, the rest of it.
Ray: Did my six as an unavoidable task after the weekly book lecture on why I am uncreative. This was a particularly annoying chapter for me, as statements like "Blocking is essentially an issue of faith" always irk me as presumptuous and even preposterous, as if things I do are the enemy of my creativity when the opposite can be said; trying too hard to be creative is the enemy of the blocking devices she presumes we use to avoid creativity. Mostly I feel better when I'm not reading all the things I'm not doing correctly.
Sabrina: I did 7/7 pages this week. I also didn't read the chapter, and to be honest I don't think I read the last few chapters. But I've had no trouble sticking with the morning pages, which to me, as an extremely disorganized person, feel like the real takeaway from TAW … the transformative power of journaling!
Chris: I did six days. Like Sabrina, I also have not read the last few chapters. Also, a couple of days in there my pages included grocery lists or work lists, and one day I just wrote out, in my own words, things that I learned from reading a book about photography. If anyone wants to see how wobbly my understanding is of ISO ratings, they will find several paragraphs on the matter in my morning pages from March 14.
Did you do your artist date this week? What did you do? How did it feel?
Alex: I continue to count my 15 hours of play rehearsals each week as my artist dates, which continues to feel a bit like cheating, but also The Artist's Way directly led to my involvement in this play that now takes up all of my free time, so I refuse to feel too guilty. This week I thought a lot about how the play is showing me an alternative way of managing a longterm collaborative project within an explicitly anticapitalist context and it's helping me deprogram some of the brain worms I've developed after a decade of doing creative work for money. One of the best parts of doing the play is that I get to hang out with a 13-year-old who is just bursting with creative energy all the time. One day they might be drawing a marker portrait of a dog, and the next they're hand-sewing a dress for a Barbie. It's so refreshing to be around someone who creates so prolifically without any intent or desire to create money or a career from it (at least not yet).
Kathryn: I didn't do anything that I would personally qualify as an artist date, but I would say I was engaging in more social activities which I rank relatively highly in importance anyway because I love to be alone. One of these was playing through Civilization VI on a call with a friend—because we were Discord calling and the in-ears I use when I'm on my PC don’t have a mic, I was using the Yeti mic Kelsey gave me and my setup wound up looking like a discount Twitch streamer. And the other is that my household (i.e. my roommate and I) has been completely subsumed by a couple board games we acquired in another fit of "If you want to start doing something, you can just … do it." Which is a kind of funny development from Week 7, when I said I was hesitantly planning on getting into board games. Guess I'm into board games now!
Ray: Among the things I have decided to classify as artist dates this week were: playing cards with relatives, watching Tom Hanks pretend to be David Attenborough, enjoying people in suits going apoplectic over who made the men's college basketball tournament instead of other men, and women complaining about where their teams are seeded in the women's college basketball tournament. It may not be creative, but it is who we are as people now, and watching the parade get weirder and angrier is art after a fashion.
Sabrina: I too am of the team that it's okay to retroactively classify things as artist dates. This was a rare week for me in that I actually planned my artist date: watching the Bellagio fountain for an hour. I walked an eerie, desolate 40 minutes from my airport hotel to the strip and stationed myself in one of the little rounded viewing stations. I had researched the schedule ahead of time and learned there would be a show every 15 minutes starting at 8 p.m., so I thought I was going to see the fountain's rendition of Lady Gaga’s "Bad Romance," a song called "Titanic" that I assumed would be Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," and another song that I forgot. But the schedule I had checked was clearly wrong. The first song was some of the worst electronic music I've heard recently, which I later learned was a song called "Footprints" by an artist named Tiesto. The next song, equally abhorrent, was Mark Ronson's "Uptown Funk."
At this point I was actively miserable, dreading whatever EDM-influenced medley would be up next. Families and couples cycled in and out around me before each new song. All I wanted to hear was "Titanic," or even "Bad Romance," or even one literally good song! The next show was set to some classical music that I'd never heard of before, and this too was disappointing. Then I made it to Elvis's "Viva Las Vegas" which was better. And the final show of my night was Henry Mancini's "Pink Panther" theme, which I loved. I decided to end my night on a high note, and then walked 40 minutes back to my airport hotel, where I learned the smoothie restaurant across the street had closed early, so I had a Chobani smoothie from the 7-Eleven for dinner and passed out. Should've played The Sims!
Chris: My wife and daughter were out of town for a part of last week. I had a few days to myself, which I think accounts for why I was able to come as close to a full week of morning pages as I have in what feels like months. I woke up Saturday morning with no parenting responsibilities and very few home responsibilities, and I was able to get out early and do a real-deal artist date. I drove to the Eastern Market neighborhood of D.C., parked, and spent a couple hours walking around looking for flowering trees. Then I traveled up to a small park near Kalorama and did more of the same. The weather was misty and cool but it was a really good time. I found a few blossoming Yoshino cherry trees and two extremely bright and vibrant Kwanzans, and a flowering magnolia that seemed to be weeks ahead of all other magnolias in the area.
My plan was to take photos but I was surprised at the outset to find that I needed to summon up some courage. Turns out when I am around people I feel weirdly embarrassed to have a camera slung over my shoulder. Saturday I really had to remind myself, over and over again, that no one walking around in a city gives a shit what I am carrying on my person or how I am using it, so long as I am not in the way or causing danger. I did snap some photos, and the awkwardness subsided somewhat, and I wound up feeling very good about the use of my time.
Did you experience any synchronicity this week? What was it?
Alex: It feels really weird to say this right now as our country is crumbling, but things are actually going really well for me in my personal life, like not just "I can't complain," but actively "Wow, is this really happening to me?" I've been trying to let myself feel the gratitude and joy of these moments while they're here because they come so rarely, but wow, it's very emotionally confusing to hold it in the same moment that I'm holding rage and fear and disgust. This isn't exactly a synchronicity in the way we were told to look out for them, but it certainly feels like there's a gravity that is positively affecting the things in my life that matter the most to me right now.
Kathryn: I've had a few fuzzy, local-community-but-mostly-strangers interactions this past week, which I found really lovely especially after the weather has been so nice. I don't know, I just like it whenever people start recognizing me at food places, even if it always comes with a realization that we always go to the same places all the time!
Ray: I went out and committed acts of food and drink with Patrick Redford, Tommy Craggs, and Gabe Fernandez (the latter two being Deadspin alums), which was in and of itself synchronous as well as enjoyable. Finding common ground in uncommon settings is its own reward, though the restaurant could cut back on its reliance on salt as a protein. I enjoy being recognized by fewer people these days, mostly because Kathryn is simply a better person than I am.
Sabrina: I met one of the Sabrinas I have recently encountered in Las Vegas, and we discovered we both did stand-up comedy at one point in our lives, which was a beautiful and humbling experience. More seriously, I think I'm in a similar spot to you, Alex. I'm trying to balance feeling gratitude and joy and deep excitement in my personal projects alongside the enormous grief and dread and fury that deluges me on a daily basis. But I'm finding my work here at Defector extremely rewarding and meaningful right now, as I've been speaking to some civil servants who were fired under the DOGE layoffs. And finding that meaning and purpose has helped lift some of the hopelessness, I think.
Chris: I did not notice any synchronicities this week.
Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery? Describe them.
Kathryn: froghorn.exe
Ray: I had one of my own, but this is better.
Chris: Look at that fuckin' frog go.
Sabrina: …enough said!
