"The Artist's Way"... again.

Julia Cameron is a genius. An angel. A taskmaster. I'm now on volume 3 of my latest go at the "morning pages". Some fellow acolytes and I've shared (and giggled at) what we've produced in response to some of Cameron's prompts and exercises. A dare followed by a clink of champagne flutes: a blog.

Prompt: Why I Write...

I cannot help but write. I prefer pen and paper, but when I simply must get words out before I combust I will opt for typing. But holding a pen and sliding the fatty side of my hand across stiff paper is where therapy, truth and hope emerge. There is gravitas in that it’s not so easy to delete a phrase, but also a lightness to the exercise because it’s mostly for my eyes only.

As a child I would write song lyrics and poems as a way to bring order to a world I found lovely but confusing. My pink, lock & key diary at age 7 was where I first recorded anything that struck me as odd, often re-citing the same event multiple times and then checking later to see if the details stayed the same. Repetition brought certainty, but with it often came a dread that my observations – and experiences – of the adult world in which I lived were indeed real.

When I suffered my first broken heart, I grieved through volumes of poetry. The rhythmic beat of a familiar pentameter could soothe me to sleep on nights I couldn’t stop crying or picking apart why he didn’t love me. Never mind that it was only 11th grade and I had no idea what real love was. I was in pain and there was no balm but Tori Amos on replay and my words on paper.

As an English major I was ordered to write, including fiction. I am not a fiction writer. I wrote a novel. It was abysmal. I knew it was wretched even as I dutifully tacked my storyboard cards to the wall of my apartment. I was not passionate about the experience or the story but was compelled to complete it as evidence that I could. I finally finished it after my first year of law school. The manuscript officially liberated me from all vestigial inklings of becoming a great novelist.

I write to pay the bills. I don’t like being a lawyer all that much, and I don’t like the game of verbal sparring. Marshalling my wits in real time, often against older men with more experience and more confidence than I, is a joyless enterprise for me. But, I do find it gratifying to write briefs and motions and letters, to find new ways to say the exact same thing over and over. Even if I didn’t enjoy some part of this job, I would still do it. I have to.

For much of my life writing has served as a Rosetta stone for the noise inside. Perhaps that makes me sound as if I suffer a mental illness, that I toil with multiple personalities or voices. I am well, however, but have always battled a constant, raucous interior dialogue of self-doubt about virtually every thing, moment to moment. I do not need to like what I see on paper, but seeing myself reflected back from a static medium grants me absolution and peace, even for just the time it took me to jot it down. After a fight with my love, I simply must sit still with my words in order to process what was said, to examine how I truly feel about the issue disguised by momentary anger, and just how to emerge from the epic pout I will absolutely dissolve into. Even as I write this now (trying very hard to follow the instruction of just letting words flow) I realize that perhaps writing is, in fact, a crutch. An enabler. That steady friend that doesn’t challenge you, just pours you another drink and nods along as you recount what an asshole everyone else is. Well, that is a humbling thought. Could my passion be an impediment to real growth? Could I be a better mother, lawyer and friend if I could just get out from behind the security of a keyboard or my beloved journal? Am I just Peter Pan, avoiding growing up? Has my therapist been giving me bad advice all this time, that writing is a valid and healthy exercise to be embraced at every turn?

Truth is, I don’t know. I will have to write about it first to find out what I really think.