Recovering a Sense of Safety – TAW Week One

Check in time! Week one of The Artist’s Way went smoothly for me. I had a few interesting thoughts and worked through many of the assignments.

Morning Pages – I did the morning pages 6 of the 7 days. This morning was the one time I didn’t do them. I had a different morning routine seeing Joshua off on a business trip, and I never came back to do the morning pages. I find it pretty tough to get through three pages. The longhand writing annoys me. I can have a thought pop into my head, fully formed, and it’s so irritating to then have to wait several minutes to get it out on paper. I feel like I only get through one real thought each morning, where if I was typing, I could get down so much more. I know it’s always an option to write more than three pages, but I doubt I’ll ever do that.

Artist’s Date – I blocked out time for the artist’s date a couple of nights ago. I just picked a fun, silly, vaguely creativity-related activity with no real goal. I realized while I was doing it that I’m kind of uncomfortable doing something on purpose that has no objective. I don’t mind “wasting time” on the internet, with video games, or with a book – things I do that are just for the purpose of passing time. But when I’m doing something for fun that doesn’t produce a result then I feel like I “should” be doing something else. Something to ponder.

Assignments – Some of the assignments were related to mining the past for people who have helped or hindered my creativity. Trying to find people from my childhood who encouraged me was a depressing venture. I mostly just came up with one person, which was my band director. I had no trouble coming up with people who criticized me or pushed me down in some way. The only hard part was remembering to think of more people than just my mother!

I remembered one incident with my mom that isn’t tied directly to artistic  expression but that really stands out in my mind. We were clothes shopping for back-to-school for my freshman year. I came out of the dressing room in a bright yellow fitted skirt and a bright matching colorful button-down shirt. I was super bouncy excited because I’d found the perfect outfit to wear on the first day of school. My mom proclaimed that the outfit looked slutty and I couldn’t buy it. Three things come to mind about this:

One, what a strange fucking thing to say to a child. I was 14 years old. I had just recently had my first kiss and it would be another three years until I had sex, and my mom basically said to me, “You look like you fuck too many people.” What the hell. Two, while there’s more in the mix than this one incident, I find it interesting that I never wear bright colors. All of my clothes are black, brown, dark blue, etc. It’s just in the last couple of years that being a burner has encouraged me to wear more colors. Three, I have no idea what I ended up wearing on the first day of school that year. I remember every detail of that yellow outfit, though, and how much it hurt to have my choice insulted and to not be able to have it.

Synchronicity – I’ve had two phone call conversations with people from the past this week. One was an old friend from high school who I’ve been talking to some online. I loved our conversation. It was awesome to drop right back into chatty mode with someone I haven’t talked to for 15 years. She’s someone I was really close to in high school, and I like the person she is now, too. The other phone call was with a member of my extended first family. She emailed me out of the blue, and I gave her a call. She’s glad to know I’m alive and well, but the conversation was kind of awkward for me. My feelings about my first family have to be categorized as really fucking messy, but I’m doing the best I can with them. I was seriously stressed out the whole day before and after our phone call.

Next Week – Next week is called Recovering a Sense of Identity. That sounds fun. It’s always interesting to me when people tell me how confident and sure of myself I am, because a lot of times I don’t feel that way at all. Frank, a commenter on my Gateway Drugs post, said he liked my “belligerent acceptance” of myself. I love that phrasing. It seems to describe me well. I’ve been almost angrily myself lately, because I’ve spent so much of my life denying myself to the extent that I barely know me. A TAW chapter on identity sounds like it could turn up some fun, useful stuff.

Photo by Criss!