The Artist’s Way - Week Four
“You are your own promise land”
This week opens by discussing how our morning pages reveal truths about ourselves and our progress. Through these truths, we begin to understand ourselves on a deeper level. It shows us what’s not working and what we really want. We also return to talking about how rapidly changing and healing can have some side effects in the shape of intense emotional shifts.
I’m frankly a little overwhelmed by how true all of this rings to me. Earlier this week, I was having some of the most productive and creatively charged days I have experienced in a while. Yet today has felt so sluggish and emotionally volatile that I feel out of control. My morning pages this morning led to me suddenly analyzing a feat I never knew I had.
Predictably, there have been bad days and there have been beautiful days since I restarted this journey. What I’ve noticed is that those days feel much more intense, and there aren’t very many in-between days anymore.
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Reading deprivation is the big hallmark of this chapter. I also think it is an outdated one. I completely understand the sentiment. Filling our attention spans with the work of others clogs our creative outputs. The point is to clear it out and make room for our own unique voices.
Independently, I’ve done a lot of thinking about how media consumption influences our ability to refine our creative voice. This is something that has occupied my mind for the better part of the past couple of years. In our modern era, however, reading is not the corrupting influence. It's very obviously social media and the internet. One week, I’d love to do a full post about separating myself from the internet for a week. I’m already a very analog person. For the sake of my commitment to the process of The Artist's Way, I amended the reading deprivation.
I set limits. Using a third-party app called Opal (one I have used prior and have continued to use since), I set limits on Instagram and TikTok that would block my access to the apps between the hours of 9 am and 10 pm. I wake up around 8 am most mornings and write my journal pages until close to 9 am, so the risk of getting caught in a morning doomscroll is minimal. If I am working, I am usually just getting off around 10 pm. By the time I get back to my apartment, I’m mere seconds from passing out for the evening. I had a few moments of weakness and would turn off the blocker for a couple of minutes, but overall, it was pretty successful. My most fulfilling days are almost always the ones where my social media usage is at a minimum. And I think it helped that I was not cutting it out completely. I was realistic. I knew that if I fully deprived myself, I would throw a tantrum pretty quickly and abandon the entire exercise. I became very mindful of the time I spent on social media.
I also limited the time I spent in front of the TV. One of the biggest tools in my procrastination toolbox is my TV. I binge-watch shows and put on movies as “research for my current project.” In reality, sitting down and watching TV in the middle of the day is another technique I use to kill time, avoid work, and shut out intrusive thoughts I don’t want to listen to. I’m sure a lot of people use it in similar ways. Once I made an effort to limit that area of consumption in my life as well, I noticed a difference almost immediately.
Between not having social media and not having TV to drown out the noise of reality, I was forced to actually look at my life, see where I felt I was falling short, and what was in my power to do to make things better. I wasn’t easy, but I literally had nothing else to do. Now I have a game plan, the likes of which I think the blog will benefit from.
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To reiterate the quote I included at the top of the page, you are your own promise land. You know yourself better than anyone else. This process is as much about healing as it is about self-discovery. Once we start pulling away from the mechanisms we use to ignore real life, we can start to realize that we are far more in control than we ever realized. We have the power to really shape our lives. We just have to pay attention to the areas that are causing the problems instead of drowning them out.
