My War of Art

Yeah, it’s been a long time since I posted anything. I read my “non-negotiables” here and laughed aloud. I’ve allowed life to knock me down too many times. I’ll tell you something, I’m tough when it comes to physical pain. Through the process of natural childbirth I learned how to pinpoint any area in my body that feels painful and just wash the pain away with deep breathing and relaxation. But when it comes to emotional pain, I am way too fragile. I kneejerk my way through any kind of situation that triggers my old wounds in this area.

And that means I have been neglecting my work, which in this case is my writing work. The work is for me, not anyone else, which of course means I don’t get any financial reward. But I do get to be sane for another day, and that’s a big thing. My emotional pain has been talking me out of writing for a while now, so it has become this cyclical thing – the less I write the worse I begin to feel and the worse I feel the more I allow this emotional pain to keep me from delving into the difficulties of being vulnerable on the page. Or if I do write, I then hide it from the world because either I think it sucks or it is wonderful but too raw, too honest, too personal.

But I am re-reading The War of Art and taking Steven Pressfield’s words to heart. I have to stop allowing Resistance to win this war. I have to sit down and do the work of writing even when it feels so painful to even try, when it seems like doing the laundry is ever so urgent, or taking a nap, or checking Facebook. I have to do it even though the words are halting, awkward, and just plain shitty. I have to be willing to sit down and write crap, every day, until the muse shows up to reward me for my diligence.

I’ve proven to myself before that this happens (after the first time I read The War of Art) – the angels come and give me my prize when I make it my first priority to write each day. Eventually the stars align and I look back on what I’ve written and I think it’s pretty good stuff. I feel so much more purposeful, settled, aligned, and content when I am writing every day. It is my Work. Whether it is crap or pretty good, whether anyone ever sees it or not, it’s something I have to do for myself.

The cold shock of meaningful writing

I’ve distilled the source of my happiness and contentment into three daily things: eating right, moving my body, and writing something meaningful. If I do these things, at the end of the day the odds are great that I will be at peace with myself. I like peace.

I want to focus on the meaningful writing. For me that means it can’t be stream of consciousness stuff like morning pages. I have given morning pages the old college try. I’ve done 750words.com for years. I’ve have a few streaks of writing my morning pages by hand as soon as I wake up. I love the feeling of the ink on the page. But no matter how I do the morning pages, by hand or typing, I always end up asking myself, why am I doing this? It is meaningless to me to write to myself about what I am going to do today or how much yesterday sucked.

For me, meaningful writing is beautiful, or it works out a dilemma, or both. Meaningful writing is structured in some way and it is directed and purposeful, not aimless. It leaves me feeling satisfied that I have “done my work” as a writer.

Meaningful writing is not easy to do. It accesses everything that is vulnerable inside me and for that reason it meets with resistance. It taps into the pain and shame of the past, or the insecurities of the future. If I show them who I really am will I be rejected again?

Because of the pain that lurks inside the work of meaningful writing, I find myself dancing on the threshold of it. I long to do it and I need to do it but I avoid it. It’s like how I used to feel as a kid, toes curled over the smooth concrete edge of the swimming pool, half-naked in my suit. I wanted to swim, to dive down and touch the depths while holding my breath, to feel the freedom and weightlessness of the water.

But the water is shockingly cold. I dip my toes in and confirm this. It doesn’t feel good and it will feel worse to be enveloped in that cold. And what if I jump in and my bathing suit dislodges from my body? Old traumatic memories die hard.

So I hesitate. I hem and haw and dance. I go inside and get a snack. I tell myself I don’t really want to swim in this pool. My heart tells me different. I try to shut up my heart. And then I have no peace.

When I was a girl, and I finally screwed up the courage to jump off the side into the chilly clear water, the shock of the cold was striking. It was uncomfortable. I would rise to the surface and draw in a shivered breath. But now that I was in, it was much better to stay in then to climb out and expose my wet skin to the air. I was committed. The cold wasn’t so cold anymore.

So it is with my meaningful writing. I have to jump in to get past the pain. I’ll feel it for a few moments but as I swim and stay with it, the water feels much warmer.

Photo by Léa Dubedout on Unsplash