The Artist Way - Week One
Reading week one felt a lot more resonate this time around. The chapter focuses on finding a sense of safety - in both yourself and your creativity. I’m not going recap the entire chapter for you. I believe that if you’re going to take on this process, you should experience it all first hand. I’m going to focus on what felt like the highlights for me.
“Judging your early artistic efforts is artistic abuse.”
I am a perfectionist. I’m not easy on myself, and I want consistently amazing work from myself. No matter what. That’s not how it work, though. You must allow yourself to be mediocre in order to progress towards greatness. Easier said than done, of course. This blog is a sort of practice in that. I know I am no Joan Didion. My personal narratives are not groundbreaking, and they never will be if I don’t consistently work at it. Getting better means getting started, and this week I was reminded of that.
The chapter also addresses the negative core beliefs we may have about what it means to be an artist. For a long time I believed that being a true artist meant going through a lot of pain in life, and using that experience to deepen your work. I believed that I wasn't a good artist while in a committed relationship. That being with someone got in the way, and to be able to give everything to your art required you to be truly independent. I’ve been working through these ideas since before I started The Artist’s Way the first time, over a year ago. However, I’m not sure I truly identified them as problematic until very recently.
The truth is experiencing life in all capacities is what deepens and our art. Pain, unfortunately, comes naturally in life. No one needs to go search it out. There are relationships that are bad for you - ones that stop you from doing what you love - but the right one supports you. My ideas about how romantic relationships effected my art came from a place of denial. I blamed the failings and the end of my four year long relationship on my need to be a “true artist.” The fact of the matter is that I was in a situation that was out of balance. It was all or nothing.
Getting out of that, I sought out experiences that I felt were emblematic of the way I thought artists were meant to live. I crafted a summer out of an Eve Babitz novel. I worked late nights in a bar. I spent the days I didn't work on the beach, trying to find a party for after the sunset. I spent all my money on nights in the city drinking. I got myself into the messiest romantic entanglements. I couldn't create anything worthwhile. I was blocked, and lost, and in a consistently negative headspace.
My six month stint as a party girl was a distraction from problems I was not ready to face within myself. I don’t regret that time in my life at all. I don’t want to go back to it either. What I spent half a year avoiding required six weeks of being alone and getting serious to actually work out. This all would have been a lot more cost-effective if I had done that from the beginning, but you can’t force yourself to be ready. All that chaos - no matter how fun or glamorous it felt at times - wasn’t good for me.
Being an artist doesn’t require a rollercoaster of a life. You are just as much an artist in a quiet, Sunday kind of lifestyle as you are in a Chinatown dive bar kind of life. I must remind myself of that sometimes. This week was good for that.
