listening to week five of the artist’s way, i’m listening to Julia talk about how when artists don’t take solitude and time for themselves, we get snappy and hostile and aggressive and bitter. she’s just using pretty strong words, but i mean, i agree with it all, honestly. i think she’s a little heavy-handed there, but i think she’s just trying to illustrate the point that when you abandon yourself and abandon your own authenticity, you become a shell of yourself. and that’s gonna cause intrinsic dissonance within yourself, with yourself.
and so, that hits home right now. it really does. i feel like that’s where i am right now. i’ve left that behind. that self-abandonment life. that doormat, people-pleaser life. i’ve left it behind, and i’ve outgrown and transformed into not anything in a final stage, just the next chapter. the next stage. the next era of me, which is boundary me. who likes to look at the ducks. i love that for me, honestly.
authenticity felt like a buzzword to me for a long time. recovering a sense of possibility, and the idea of helping hands and a God figure helping me while i live my life, sending me creative abundance, is crazy to me. i don’t really give a fuck if she wants to call it skepticism. so yeah, i’m struggling with that.
and i feel like i remember in 2024, no, in 2023, when i did this book a couple times ago, i really bought into it. i really, really did. and i sort of sold myself out in a way just to buy into the magic. and i realized the magic isn’t in the language that she uses, for me. it’s too religious-coded and systematic and weirdly institutionalized. i don’t know. it’s not woo-woo magic enough for me. it’s woo-woo.
and so i’ve been trying to dismantle that for me this time, and not just blindly buy into a framework that i don’t really believe in outside of the book. because last time i stopped the book, and i stopped believing in all of that shit, and looking for helping hands and all that kind of stuff, which also made all my synchronicity die. and looking for symbols and all of that, all of it died. all of it stopped with that.
and so i would like to train myself to adapt the language and this habit that i am honing, essentially, of noticing tiny things and symbolism and colors. and the magic in everyday life. i’m essentially training myself to notice these things, and find the symbols, and pause long enough to see these signs, right? but i feel like i’m not willing to see them if i’m inherently feeling like the messages are from some type of religious figure that i don’t necessarily even believe in.
so, this time around, i’m translating the language into something that feels right for me. and i think that still means that yes, i believe in the synchronicity. and yes, i believe in the general idea of helping hands and manifesting abundance and little gifties from the universe. but at the same time, i feel like a lot of this is agency. that’s what we’re talking about.
and a lot of it is identity shifting, in a way, where you visualize and manifest and see how you want to be, and who you want to become, and what art you want to create. and then you essentially step into that vision, and that idea, and that concept, and become it. or create it. and it becomes real. that’s manifesting to me. but that’s also agency. agency in your own life.
that’s thinking of the idea and then acting on it. not planning it to death and never acting. i struggle with that too. i want to plan everything to death. everything becomes a project. oh, i can plan something to death and never start it. oh, i love planning. but i’m realizing it’s a form of procrastination. it’s a form of not doing the fucking art. and i’m here to create some fucking art.
