Ah heck I’ll just write about The Artist’s Way again

I may be beating a dead horse with this one, but starting off my shiny new blog with a promo for Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” 1,2 is on brand for me. I’ve mentioned it a couple times in my newsletter already, only because I keep on getting good lessons from it. My biggest takeaway RIGHT NOW as I’m writing this is that I need to read more books and diversity my influences. But who has time to read books? Sheesh!

For the majority of my life, I’ve been on a fiction kick. If it didn’t have dragons, spaceships, or magic, I wasn’t interested in reading it. In the past year or two, I decided that I wanted my escapism to be a bit more reality-based. It’s nice to zone out from reality and get immersed in a wild fantasy world, but then I hit my mid life crisis and I thought to myself “what the fuck am i even doing”. My midlife crisis sucks by the way. I don’t have nearly enough money to buy a fancy bike, much less a fancy car. I DID buy a fancy bike in fact, and it was used and in the mid-range of fancy bikes. I’m still fast as shit at least. Fancy bike gets me scoffed at less on group rides with dentists who DID actually buy fancy cars during their midlife crisis.

I’ve been laying the groundwork for this shift into being an artist for years. I talked about it a lot. My therapist recommended this book to me. I had picked up a couple “self-help” books (for lack of a better term) and nothing really stuck for me. This one spoke to me. I DO want to be an artist. I DO need different processes. I DO need a different outlook. I DO need to vary my sentence structure a little bit here. This book helped me with that sentence structure, because it forced me to write every day. EVERY DAY! I’m going to call it a diary, because I’ve always felt that “journal” is just lying to yourself. It’s a diary.

This book, as with most “self-help” books, (self-improvement? I don’t know. Someone give me a better term. I don’t like that one) nudged me in some different directions of thinking about stuff in general. Grounding my escapism in actual reality tethered me to actual life a little bit more. And I’m moving forward with a lot of different things. I’ve discovered that I can be more that what I’ve been, and I don’t even fully know what that’s going to be yet. It’s exciting. Here I am blogging for the first time since the aught’s, and I have no idea where it’s going to lead me. We’ll see.