"The Artist's Way" guest post: Rediscovering Enthusiasm By Connecting With My Creative Roots
A guest essay on Week 9 of "The Artist’s Way," plus updates from me about my experience.
Hi there!
We are on week 10 of The Artist’s Way, meaning we are nearing the end of this 3-month experience. The marathon is almost over. I’m tired. I’m burnt out. But I can see the finish line and I’m going to keep running until I cross it.
Strange things have started to happen to me. I’ve had the confidence to make big decisions that I’ve waivered about for months. I’m more honest with myself about my wants and needs than ever before. And then, there’s the synchronicity: A few weeks ago at a party, a stranger told me about a town in the Eastern Sierras that left me eager to visit. When I was craving some peace to go write, a friend offered me her cabin. Guess where it was? Right next to the town. When I got home from the cabin, I drove immediately to a friend’s party and parked behind a car… that had a bumper sticker for the town. Maybe this sort of synchronicity used to happen all the time and I never paid attention to it. Or maybe synchronicity is happening to me now because I’m more connected to myself, my wants, and my creativity.
In my work, the same synchronicity is popping up: A friend recommended me for a job that sounded up my alley. It turned out that a producer I’m already working with on something else is heading up the project. It seems like whenever I question if The Artist’s Way is “working for me,” the universe loudly shouts: OF COURSE IT IS, JUST PAY ATTENTION!
Today, I’m excited not only to share these stories with you but also to share a guest essay from about her experience with Week 9.
Jenna Britton, who’s participating in The Artist’s Way with Little Things, is a writer and content strategist. She has written personal essays and articles for Salon, Thought Catalog, Darling Magazine, and other publications. In 2016, she gave a TEDx Talk on how story has the power to change your life, and she now shares her thoughts on life and learning through her Substack
.Without further ado, enjoy Jenna’s moving essay about reconnecting with her inner child and finding enthusiasm again.
Rediscovering Enthusiasm By Connecting With My Creative Roots
Your inner child knows what you want and what you like better than anybody else. But sometimes that version of ourselves is so buried that it can take years — over 15 in my case — to allow them to truly reemerge.
When the movie, Harriet the Spy, was released in the summer of 1996, I was 11 years old — the same age as the titular character, Harriet M. Welsch.
If you’re unfamiliar with this classic, the premise is that Harriet is an aspiring writer and neighborhood spy because, as she says: “If I wanna be a writer, I better start now. Which is why, I am a spy.”
She carries a black-and-white-speckled Composition notebook and a pencil around in her yellow raincoat as she traverses the neighborhood, “spying” on a varied cast of characters and jotting down observations about them.
I, too, wanted to be a writer — so naturally, I did the same as Harriet. My mom wouldn’t let me wander around our busy Los Angeles neighborhood by myself, but I sat in the swingset clubhouse in my backyard, crouched under the cover of the low wooden awning, taking notes on the people I’d spot passing by my house.
Like Harriet, I had dirty sneakers and small binoculars and a singular purpose: To observe the different details of life and use them as grist for my own imaginative mill. I was protecting the neighborhood, of course, but also finding useful material for my own fanciful stories.
This wasn’t my only creative endeavor as a kiddo. Before I even knew how to scribble words down in a notebook — legibly, at least — I would dictate stories to my mom and pick “illustrations” from her magazines. I wrote poems that I performed as part of a one-(young)-woman show for my grandma in our living room. I submitted an essay on feminism for an anthology called “Girls Know Best” (which was published in Girls Know Best 3!). And I could hardly contain my anticipatory excitement when my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Wolfer, stacked my allotted computer time so that I got one extra-long session to write and write and write.
I was unabashed with my imagination and bold about sharing my creations with anyone who would listen. As a kid, my creativity was inevitable; it was as natural as falling asleep every night and waking up the next morning.
And, as it happens for many of us, somewhere along the way, that ended. Or rather, my creativity morphed into something a little less playful, a little less in-your-face, and a little more focused on paychecks and “performing” on social media; on how I could provide value with my creativity in the ways that it would more likely be rewarded by the world.
In Week 9 of The Artist’s Way — the 12-week creativity program that I’m now doing for the third time, this time in the company of Ali’s community — author, Julia Cameron, writes about recovering a sense of compassion for yourself and your inner artist; about facing the internal blocks that have kept you from fully accessing your creativity including, most often, fear.
“Fear is the true name for what ails the blocked artist,” Julia says. Later she continues: “This fear has roots in childhood reality” — which is why, in this chapter, she specifically speaks to reparenting the “frightened artist child”.
What was my inner artist child so afraid of? I wondered. For the most part, I’d had what I considered a safe and happy childhood, where I felt cared for and loved by my mom; I’d pursued a career that still allowed me to write, if not exactly in the ways I’d always wanted to; I’d pitched and published the occasional essay and article over the years, in the hours when I wasn’t working.
“Are we not . . . living the dream?” I asked my inner artist child deflatedly, subconsciously knowing the answer. I decided to stop guessing and just have a heart-to-heart.
“What are you afraid of?” I recently typed into a blank Google Doc page, surrounded by what I’d like to imagine were my fellow artists communing with their fellow inner artist children at my local coffee shop.
My inner child answered fast and furious:
Not being good enough or smart enough
Not being “chosen” and being rejected
Being seen by too many people at once
Being successful and inviting criticism
Losing the people I love
Oh. Huh.
I felt a little twist in my chest. My little inner artist child had been carrying the weight of all these worries. No wonder I’d felt so disconnected from my creativity as an adult; these blocks were boulders in my way.
But I am, in fact, no longer a child. I am a longstanding adult. As a grown-up, aren’t I better equipped to just . . . deal with it?
Not so, according to Julia: “There is only one cure for fear. That cure is love.”
Knowing what I know now, I asked myself, how could I parent my inner child differently? How could I show her more love?
I started the next week by letting my inner artist child plan our weekly Artist Date: We watched Harriet the Spy, of course, then took our own Composition Notebook to that same coffee shop and wrote down everything we noticed about everybody else, just like the good old days.
I also did a week-long virtual inner child healing workshop that provided daily journal prompts and guided meditation/hypnosis tracks that helped me “meet” my inner child across the various stages of childhood development.
I was both surprised and not to realize that I hadn’t felt like a kid for very long; that I’d grown up pretty quickly — right around the time I turned 12 years old, when my maternal grandmother (my creative cheerleader, my enthusiastic audience member) passed away suddenly in the house we shared with her. After that, something shifted for me: In my mind, it was time to grow up.
After my Grandma died, I was determined to be mature and responsible. I got good grades and helped to parent my brother, so my mom wouldn’t feel any additional stress. I turned away from my more performative personality traits, mostly to avoid the unwanted attention of the men my mom dated. I used my love for writing to earn me the validation I used to gain so freely from my Grandma — by writing strong papers for school, by getting jobs that would seemingly pay me well to use my words, by sounding smart in conversations so men would find me more “interesting”.
For the next 10 years, I stifled that childlike version of my creativity, the part that was playful and fun and unconcerned with whether or not something was any good. Instead, I tried to grow up, be taken more seriously, fly under the radar, and somehow avoid losing the people I love.
But it was painful. Just two years after that, in 2009, I went through The Artist’s Way for the first time. Looking back at those Morning Pages now, I can see where that carefree creative part of me was trying to creep back in:
“I want to be the creator of my own life and if I am working hard, I want it to be for something I am passionate about,” I wrote on August 3, 2009
“I should always be writing, writing, writing — this is what I WANT to do, but what I seem to make the least time for. And I know that is because I consider it to be less of a job and more of a hobby. If it’s fun, if I love it, then it must be extraneous; not as important as the ‘real’ work that needs to get done,” I wrote the next day.
“I believe in myself as a writer . . . [but] I’m not sure what I’m doing with my life. I don’t like this limbo. I don’t want to be lazy and I certainly don’t want to be considered lazy,” I wrote a month later.
And now, another 15 years after that, here I still am — still fighting some of these same creative blocks; still trying to recapture that early creative connection. But for the first time, I feel able to relate to the original source of my creative blocks by accessing the needs, enthusiasm, and inevitable creativity of my inner artist child.
In the Week 9 reading, Julia Cameron writes: “Discipline may work, but it will work only for a while . . . being an artist requires enthusiasm more than discipline.”
These days, as much as possible, I’m starting there — with where I feel that inner child enthusiasm. I’m enthusiastic about the inspiration I get from other artists — going on artist’s dates to book readings and art museums is always a win!
I’m enthusiastic about blasting my favorite music through my headphones while walking down the street, pretending like I’m the star of an early 2000s movie.
I’m enthusiastic about experiences that have a sort of “unfiltered fun” feeling: An afternoon skating at the local roller rink? Yes. Watching a live performance? Yes. Putting down my phone and pretending to be a spy? Yes, yes, and yes.
“Remember that art is a process,” Julia adds. “The process is supposed to be fun.”
And remember, I remind myself, that your inner child knows what you find fun better than almost anyone else.
Reconnecting with my inner artist child hasn’t yet completely erased every creative block I’ve built over the last almost three decades, but it has gotten me closer to a state of creativity that feels easy, that feels natural, that seems to flow in a way I haven’t felt in a long time. It has more often shifted my mindset from one of needing to appear mature, responsible, and always taken seriously, to one of playfulness, leisure, and inspired creative output unlike I’ve seen since my early spy days.
It has made my creativity mine again; mine and little Jenna’s — and that has been the greatest reward from The Artist’s Way process thus far.
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Jenna, I loved this essay! As someone also obsessed with Harriet the Spy and writing in composition notebooks, and doing some inner child work, I SO related to your experience. Learning to connect with our inner child is so fascinating, especially in this creative context 🩷
Jenna, I really enjoyed your essay. Your morning pages excerpts from your first go-round with The Artists Way made my jaw drop. They were eerily similar to journal entries of mine from years ago. That push and pull of “I want to be writing” vs. “Why aren’t I writing?”—ironically I spent a lot of time writing (journaling) about that. This is my first time doing TAW and have found it super helpful. (Thanks Ali!)