Creative Recovery
I just finished Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, a 12-week program that initiates and supports creative recovery.
Everyone experiences blocks. But some blocks are more severe than others. Some last a few weeks, while others can last for years. One truly bad experience is all it takes to turn your back on what you love doing. Like a jilted lover, you detach yourself from the painful situation and attempt a new life, one where you no longer carry the burden of creating art.
I don't talk about it very often, but I am one of those long-term blocked creatives (fortunately, in recovery). I was a musician for most of my life. I played every instrument the tiny music program had to offer in my elementary school. In sixth grade I was sight reading sheet music and playing the alto saxophone fluently. By the age of fourteen, I had completely devoted myself to the electric guitar, which was the most important thing in my life for the next eight years.
But like other severely blocked artists, I had a series of painful experiences that led to total abandonment of my craft. There is no need to go into great detail, but anyone close to me knows that it was one of the most traumatic events in my life. I had lost my best friend and partner in music. And the only way I knew how to cope with it was to pack my guitars away and focus on something I could be in full control of: my academic record.
For the last nine years, I have struggled to define myself in a way that distances me from my former identity as a musician. Anthropologist. Journalist. Expatriate. Educator. Chinese/Mandarin-phile. Literacy mentor. Entrepreneur. Wife.
While creativity has always been a vital element in all my endeavors, it has yet to totally consume me, or exist purely for the sake of itself, the way it did when I was a musician. But I'm getting back in touch. Through writing everyday. Through painting and drawing ridiculous pictures. Through knitting blankets and scarves. The last 20 months have been more creatively productive than the last seven to eight years. It's time to stop, take a breath, and congratulate myself for that.
The reason I feel the need to recognize this is simple: I know that in a lot of ways, it would have been much easier to just keep ignoring the inner artist. There would be no pressure to express myself creatively, no chance of failure or rejection, no painful reminders of the past. Instead, I made the decision to find that frequency again. To tune in and give shape to the sacred energy that pulses throughout the universe.
Recovery of any kind requires work. The kind of work you must do everyday, whether you feel like it or not. But the pay offs are worth it. One of my favorite parts of The Artist's Way is when the author poses a simple question that we should all ask and answer for ourselves:
How old will I be before I learn to play the piano?
The same age I will be if I never learn.