Raise Your Hand if You’ve Ever Been Personally Victimized by The Artist’s Way
Kelsey Allagood
Every week, a writer friend and I meet over Discord to discuss our writing progress and to set new goals for the week ahead. And for about 12 weeks at the end of last year and the beginning of this…
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Writer Unboxed
Every week, a writer friend and I meet over Discord to discuss our writing progress and to set new goals for the week ahead.

And for about 12 weeks at the end of last year and the beginning of this one, our check-ins began with one question:

“So, how has Julia Cameron personally victimized you this week?”

Julia Cameron isn’t anyone either of us know personally, nor is she trying to specifically victimize us (probably). She is the author of The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, a self-guided course that’s been a classic among creatives since it first came out in 1992. A lot of you have probably done the course or parts of it, or at least heard of the concept of “morning pages”—the daily practice of writing three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness thoughts—that originated with it.

For those who don’t know, The Artist’s Way aims to help people overcome creative blockages, whether it’s in specific artistic projects, career paths, or life. And despite, as far as I know, not having a background in psychology, Julia (we started calling her Julia in our check-ins as well, usually to say, “Damn it, Julia!”) really nails some of the root psychological causes of creative blockages.

Getting out of my own way

Getting to this point required overcoming a few of my own internal hurdles.

“I don’t feel blocked,” I thought, ignoring the fact that I do not have a published book under my name in no small part because even when I finish a book, it is not “good enough,” I know I can “do better,” so what if I just “rewrite it a little,” (repeat ad nauseum).

But after two separate friends—within a few weeks of each other!—highly recommended the book to me, I bought a used copy, recruited another writer friend to be my accountability buddy, and jumped in.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I started, figuring it was best to go in with as much of an open mind is possible.

I’m wary of popular self-help books in general, and warier still of self-help books with the word “spirituality” in the title. My friends had assured me that the “spiritual” part of the Spiritual Path was open-ended, less about “spirituality” as it’s commonly understood and more about each person creating their own understanding of their personal creative flow.

As a skeptic, I find that these books often just don’t vibe with the way I see he world. And there was definitely some creative (hah) thinking I had to do to get around some of Cameron’s language. But overall it’s obvious that while Cameron may have a certain belief system of her own, she’s at least trying to create frameworks of thought that are accessible to everyone.

So here are a few things I learned about myself during the process of doing this course, and three more things I’ve changed about the way I approach creativity.

Things I Learned

1. I don’t let myself play.

This was a tough one to accept.

“Of course I know how to play,” I would think to myself. “I do things that are fun!”

Yeah, that’s not what that means.

“Play” in this case is the doing of things that bring us joy, wherein joy is the only and ultimate goal. Putting stickers on our calendars each day we write, reading something “trashy,” impulse-buying a plastic dinosaur from the toy aisle because it reminds us of when we were a Jurassic Park-obsessed six-year-old—things that our adult selves may want to scorn as “frivolous” or “wasteful”—that is the kind of play that is essential to creativity.

I came screeching right up against this block when I started trying to do the weekly “artist dates” that are presented as a nonnegotiable part of the course. This does not mean I had to go on dates with other artists: an artist date is a playdate with the self, with what Cameron refers to as “your inner artist-child.” It means taking an hour or two each week to let that child out to play. The point is to have fun, alone, in a way that nourishes creativity.

By far, this was the hardest part of the course for me.

The inner artist-child is a stand-in throughout the book for one’s creativity, which, like a child, reacts to ego wounds by trying to protect itself. This protection often takes the form of creative blocks. Sometimes those wounds came from an overly harsh mentor, or someone being cruel about early artistic attempts; just as often, the wound(s) come from general societal pressure to “be serious” and not “waste time on a luxury like art,” or well-meaning parents who insist that art is a fine hobby as long as you don’t let it get in the way of Real Things (implying that art and creativity are not Real Things, or things that matter).

To engage in the type of play that nurtures creativity, one must be able to release all of those wounds—at least temporarily. All the voices saying that “you should be bettering yourself instead” or “you are being childish and immature” or “you should be hustling, you can’t afford to take time away to browse a junk store or take yourself to the beach or go solo bowling”—they must be overcome if we’re to let ourselves really play.

And damn, those voices got loud once I started noticing them.

2. Those voices I thought I ignored really did stick in my head.

I’ve always considered myself lucky that I never received artistic feedback so unnecessarily cruel and critical that it still sticks in my head. I had adults and mentors in my early life who encouraged and celebrated my creativity.

But early in The Artist’s Way, an exercise had me identify the negative voices that popped up in reference to my own creativity, and then investigate where those voices originated, and oh, the things that came forth:

All the times I was asked “but how are you going to make money writing?” when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up (shockingly, eight-year-old Kelsey did not have a firm grasp of career paths, and so could not answer, which was then for some reason used as proof that there was no viable path to making money writing rather than an opportunity to explore those possibilities together).

Being on the receiving end of an adult’s frustration when I did not want to do an elementary school extracurricular activity dedicated to art, saying that I would never become an artist if I didn’t practice, implying that I didn’t actually want to be an artist or I would be trying harder.

That one political science professor in college who derisively referred to “art therapy” when I explained my interest in using art as a tool for conflict resolution as a career.

I didn’t think I’d internalized those voices, which were fewer than the encouraging ones. But doing The Artist’s Way course helped me recognize that I’d instead internalized those voices so well that I didn’t even realize they weren’t mine.

3. Having a harsh inner critic is not a sign of maturity.

In high school, I attended a magnet school for the arts, where I had a creative writing teacher that more than once made a student cry with his no-holds-barred approach to critique. That I was never one of those students was always a point of pride. It meant I was tough. It meant I could take criticism like an adult.

Really, what it meant was that I already believed my work was trash, so that hearing harsh criticism from anyone else never hurt worse than the criticism that I heaped upon myself.

What a helpful adaptation! I made it so that others couldn’t hurt me because I hurt myself first. Take that, George! (That was the writing teacher’s name.)

The reality is that while having a thick skin and not taking critique personally is helpful, that is not the same thing as “being so harsh on yourself that you don’t value your own work.”

That adaptation is, as Julia Cameron might say, a symptom of the wounded inner artist-child, and it is a child’s idea of what protection means. As children, we haven’t fully adopted the nuances of valuing oneself while still remaining open-minded to legitimate criticism. What we know is that hurt = bad, and that finding any way to avoid hurt feels key to our survival. And one of the ways to avoid letting others hurt our feelings is to make sure those feelings are either 1) nonexistent or 2) already hurt.

And of course, what happens when you’re an artist who doesn’t value your own work? You become a perfectionist, or you are so open to criticism from others that you start chasing their approval over your own artistic version, or you never believe in yourself enough to share your work to begin with because “oh, it’s not very good.” Boom: blocked.

So, what to do?

Julia’s thesis, more or less, is that most of our creative issues can be traced back to the wounds our inner artist-child has suffered (an important note: the inner artist-child is a way of understanding how we need to treat our creative selves—with care and encouragement—not a declaration that these wounds must have been dealt in childhood. Many are, but many can also stem from our experiences as adults).

Everyone will need different things, but for me, I learned that I need to help my inner artist-child feel safe enough to come out and play. That’s looked like:

Learning to practice luxury. Giving myself the permission and the space to do things that aren’t always about building moral fiber, or improving myself, or virtuous suffering or any of the other Puritanical lessons of certain belief systems. And yeah, maybe I spent less than ten dollars on a book of 1,000 animal stickers that I put on my calendar every day that I work on my book. Did I need them to survive? No. Are they silly? Yes! Does it make me happy every time I get to find a little cat or rabbit to stick under today’s date? Heck yes!

Spending more time nurturing myself. It seems like as we get older, many of us have the mistaken belief that we no longer require nurturing. We become the nurturers, or we look at nurturing as something we have transcended the need for as Serious Adults with Serious Jobs, or we just think that nurturing ourselves means making sure we eat breakfast and doing a face mask every week or so. But I’ve also been looking around at my surroundings. Do I really need those mittens with the hole in them? Don’t I deserve a nice set of bed sheets? Would a house plant brighten up my desk? I never thought of myself as a neglectful person, but once I really started looking, I realized that I’d often not been treating myself very nicely in small but meaningful ways.

Treating myself more like a child. Ooh, this one feels wrong, doesn’t it? We don’t want to be treated like children. This required me to rethink what it means to treat someone like a child. Does it mean condescending to them, talking down to them, letting them ignore responsibilities without consequence? I hope not. Treating someone like a child should mean treating them with care, grace, and understanding: treasuring them like we would treasure someone we loved. Now, what if we treasured ourselves like that? Practiced the kind of self-talk that sounds like, “Mistakes happen. I’m sure you’ll do better next time!” instead of, “Wow, this is so You, messing up like this. You’ll never amount to anything.”

Did all this work? Well, I recently sent out a few queries “for fun,” and I’m presently partway through drafts of two different books as I wait for replies. I’d say yes.