Going Sane

Week two of The Artist’s Way is about “recovering a sense of identity”. If that sounds a bit ambiguous to you, you’re not the only one. In reality, the chapter is more about recognizing the things that are poisoning your ability to take yourself seriously as an artist, and striking them from your life. The chapter talks about “poisonous playmates” (i.e. other artists who are having a rough time and bring you down with them because misery loves company) and “crazymakers” (i.e. those people in our lives who are terribly destructive and waste our time and energy with their selfish ways). All in all, the chapter encourages you to look for the things and people in your life that are selfishly keeping you from reaching your full potential, learn how to avoid their destructive ways, and use your newly-freed time and energy to focus on more important things, like your art.

The tasks for this week are based around paying more attention to yourself, to the things you want to do, the person you want to be, and the life you want to live. Because these tasks are a little personal in nature, I don’t really feel comfortable sharing them with the online world. That said, I thought I’d share one of the tasks that I think could be helpful to people in seeing what’s missing in their lives.

The task is called “Life Pie”. First, you draw a circle and divide it into six equal pie pieces. Next, on each of the pieces write one of the following:

Spirituality (for the godless of us, this can mean whatever you feel it means)
Exercise
Play
Work
Friends
Romance/Adventure

Once you have your pie pieces labeled, place a dot in each slice to represent how fulfilled you feel in that area of your life. Closer to the center of the circle means less fulfilled, and closer to the outside of the circle means more fulfilled. So, for instance, if you absolutely hate your job, draw a dot near the center of the circle on that pie piece. If you have a ton of wonderful friends, draw a dot near the outside of the circle on that pie piece. Once your done, connect the dots, going from one pie piece to the next until you have what will likely look like an extremely lop-sided six-point star, like this example:

The point of this exercise is to show yourself where you’re lacking. If you’ve got all work and no play, for example, you’re not well balanced. The pie pieces that represent the most unfulfilled parts of your life are places where you need to work harder to bring a steady state to your psyche.

The second part of the exercise, then, is to do little things to increase the “fulfillment” of the pie pieces that are lacking. If your “Play” piece is almost empty, find something fun to do in your spare time. If your “Exercise” piece is lacking, take yourself for a walk or take a trip to the local pool for a free swim. The key is to stop looking for huge amounts of free time and take whatever you can get to do little things that make you happier.

Without actually sharing it, I can tell you that my pie is horribly lopsided. There are a few full pie pieces, and there are a few nearly-empty ones. Knowing that, I hope to bring a bit of balance, if I can.

How about you? Is your pie balanced, or does it look like a misshapen spider? Did the pie help you realize what is missing in your life? What do you plan to do about it? Please share!

When Life Shoves Lemons Down Your Throat…

The other day while I was browsing the morning blog posts, I came across this one. In this post the author (whose actual name I cannot find on his blog) talks about the book The Artist’s Way. Specifically, he talks about the first step of the book which asks the reader to examine negative people/feelings/occurrences/etc in their life that have prevented them from reaching their full potential. The author of the blog post gave the example of being ashamed of his poor penmanship as a child.

That got me thinking about little things that affected me, growing up as a kid who wanted to be a writer. I was quickly able to think of two examples of things that were said to me, and one example of a choice I made that I believe have negatively affected my forward motion as a writer.

– When I was quite young and just really getting into writing, I used to spend a lot of time laying on my grandparent’s floor, scribbling in a notebook. Practically every time I did this someone (my grandmother, an aunt, an older cousin) would make a comment about how I was always writing and maybe I’d become a journalist when I grew up. It was meant as a compliment, I’m sure, but as a kid it boiled my blood because I had absolutely no interest in journalism. All I wanted was to write fiction, and I felt that by suggesting I become anything but a fiction writer, they were doubting my ability. As a (perhaps overly-) sensitive kid, that perceived doubt really bothered me and set the precedent for me to doubt myself. Kids are stupid that way.

– In the eighth grade I had this awesome English teacher I loved, and once I gave him one of my stories to look at. I couldn’t tell you what the story was about, but I can tell you that when he returned it he gave me a stern talk about the use of brackets. He told me that putting sub-thoughts into brackets patronized the reader by implying that they were too stupid to think of this additional information on they’re own. I’m still not sure I agree with that concept, but at the time I couldn’t help but hear an insult. This was my English teacher, telling me that I’d patronized him with my story. As a (definitely overly-) sensitive teenager, this incident helped me to further slide down the slippery slope of self-doubt.

– As high school graduation was nearing, all graduating students had to see a guidance councillor to discuss plans for the future. This basically involved telling the councillor what kid of career path you wanted to take, and he would explain what steps you needed to go through to make that happen. When faced with that meeting I made a choice. Instead of telling the councillor that I wanted to be a writer (and had, in fact, wanted to be one since I was about 8 years old), I told him that I wanted to do something with technology. I made this choice because, while I loved writing with all my heart, the image of myself as a “starving artist” was always at the forefront of my mind. I desperately wanted to write, but I also wanted a house, a car, a family…in other words, financial independence. I was scared. I’d come I seriously doubt my ability to ever make enough money with writing to survive, much less have the other things I wanted in life. I thought that if I pursued writing I would end up penniless and living in my parent’s basement at forty. So I chose to go where I thought the money was. I can’t say whether that choice was ultimately good or bad (though I’m leaning toward good since things have worked out pretty well for me), but I can definitely say that it has directly stifled my literary potential in a major way.

Life is full of these little setbacks, discouraging moments, and crossroads. The trick seems to be pushing past them. Kids take things out of context, pre-teens take criticism to heart, and teenagers have no way of knowing what is the best path for them. These things have negatively affected my growth and potential as a writer, but they’re also in the past now. I can’t go back and make myself feel or react differently; I can only accept how things happened and keeping a forward motion.

I may have had setbacks, and my life may have taken some different turns from what I expected, but nothing that was ever said or done has made me want to be a writer any less.