To what do you give your attention? What does giving that attention away do for you? These are the questions Julia Cameron asks us to ponder in Week 4 of The Artist's Way in the form of reading deprivation. The book was originally published in the 1990s so contemporary readers will often refer to this challenge as "media deprivation" to encompass all the ways we can now distract and upset ourselves using the tiny computers in our pockets.
We talked about how we each engaged with the challenge in our own ways—or not at all–in the latest iteration of The Artist's Way book club. If you're just joining us now, you can start from the beginning of the process here.
How many days this week did you do your morning pages? How was the experience for you?
Alex Sujong Laughlin: I did my morning pages 6/7 days! Last week continued to be difficult but I kept doing the pages because that's what Julia Cameron says to do. The only day I didn't do them was Saturday because I went out to breakfast right when I woke up and then I had places to be. I'm almost done with the notebook I bought for this, which is WILD.
Chris Thompson: I did pages five days this week. I missed the weekend, which is annoying, because I usually have more time for this kind of thing over the weekend. I woke up Saturday full of intentions and just none of them involved sitting still and chronicling my thoughts.
Kathryn Xu: I did my morning pages five days again this week. I also missed the weekend, which I think is what happens when I don't have the routine of work to keep me on task, and also I kept waking up at around 11 a.m.
Chris: Kathryn, were you up playing video games?
Kathryn: That is a worthy guess, but surprisingly, no! The video game I’m playing right now (Cyberpunk 2077) stressed me out a ton when I first started, so I basically stopped playing past 9 p.m. But also I was trying to stop using melatonin, which made my sleep wonky. My attorney is also telling me to not disclose my typical weekend bedtime.
Sabrina Imbler: I did seven pages this week, which I'm proud of. Despite my lifelong aversion to journaling, the morning pages have proved to be the easiest part of TAW for me. I really feel like it is helping my mental health to simply be able to write down everything good that happened to me, and everything bad. I also have been loving my Sticker Strategy of Success™ (putting a sticker into my journal when I am finished).
Alex: OMG show stickers? Unless they are secret stickers.
Sabrina: Not secret! They are a roll of stickers shaped like candy drops, and it gives me great pleasure to place them on the page.
Alex: OMG cute.
Ray Ratto: I did five; would've been six but some actual life got in the way on Saturday night that forced me to clean my brain of responsibilities on Sunday. I'm not finding any more meaningful revelations (the kind our hall monitor Julia says I should) but it was less nonsensical and tedious than before. I admit I failed to find, in her words, "the snowflake pattern of my soul," for which I am actually quite grateful. If that happens, I am going to hit myself in the face with a cutting board. But I also have not split my writing into "good things that happened and bad things that happened," so maybe I'll try that this week. Actually, I might write about Kathryn's lawyer’s advice to her.
Kathryn: I've been starting all of my morning pages with basically a paragraph a day talking about how I feel about having to do my morning pages.
Did you do your artist date this week? What did you do? How did it feel?
Alex: I spent some time playing music on my synthesizer. It wasn't good, but it was fun to play in ProTools in a way that is different from how I usually use it, and I also learned more about the ProTools software itself. I have felt so out of my depth trying to learn how to use this thing and I am trying to remind myself that that feeling (when I'm like, "Oh my god what is even happening I have no idea what to do") is evidence that I'm actually putting myself in a position where I can learn something new. It really sucks to be bad at things, though.
Ray: Technically this isn't an artist date, but I spent a good deal of one day cleaning up my office and realized that I have about a hundred pens more than I need for two more lifetimes. I also realized I am an arrested third grader who buys pens based on color rather than actual utilitarian value, even though as an actual third grader I hated art. Maybe the snowflake pattern of my soul is just a template of things that annoy me the more I think about them. But I kept the pens in case a sudden burst of doodling breaks out between stupid Super Bowl narratives. Or maybe I can sharpen the barrels and stab myself the first time someone invokes Taylor Swift's relationship with Travis Kelce.
Kathryn: My artist date this week at least had some intentionality behind it, even if it was very id-scratching. I used to do a lot of crosswords regularly and then fell off recently, but I decided to pick up contributing to the shared account I have with my roommate again. The actual date portion was me setting aside some time this week literally doing nothing except mainlining crosswords and Logic Puzzles by Puzzle Baron; I forgot how much better time wasting feels when the chosen activity requires more involved brain processes than going down YouTube rabbit holes.
Sabrina: My artist date this week was not traditional, in that it was not solo, but I went on a nature cruise in NYC harbor to see some seals. I decided this could count as an artist date because I could not alone pilot a boat in search of seals, and that I knew this experience would nourish my soul and, by extension, my art. Also, Kathryn, who is Puzzle Baron?
Kathryn: Puzzle Baron is a cartoon pilot man behind beloved website logic.puzzlebaron.com.
Sabrina: Wow, he's giving the Thinking Man's Johnny Bravo.
Chris: Saturday morning I donned some incredibly filthy gardening gloves and grabbed my bypass pruners and went to town on my climbing roses. This is the right time of year to trim and shape them and prepare them for maximum springtime glory. I love doing this, and it causes me to think ahead to spring, which is wonderful, but for whatever reason I always have a hard time beginning. I can choose a day months in advance and mark it on the calendar and set up automated reminders, and then as the day approaches I will start to dread the task, even while I know that I will enjoy it very much once I start. But this week I needed a convenient artist date and I also needed to prune the roses, and so I combined the two. It was a blast.
I think some of what makes it hard at the outset is that I slip into believing that this is a task with real stakes. And you can stand there all morning holding your stupid shears, afraid that you will screw up and regret your actions. But then you finally snip something, and then you set a rule for snipping, and you snip by that rule until you find something that requires another rule, and so forth, and in the end all it is is making decisions. There aren't mistakes, necessarily, just decisions and consequences.
Kathryn: Show roses?
Chris: Well, this time of year they look just like spiky sticks, especially after they've been pruned down to just the main canes:
Chris: But they look nice when they bloom, I swear! I can assert that the process of shaping them and cleaning them in preparation for the growing season is enormously satisfying.
Sabrina: They look nice even as sticks! A stark kind of beauty.
Alex: Yeah I think this is gorgeous. I was writing in my morning pages today about how it doesn't feel like it but spring is coming and people who have gardens are starting to sow.
Did you experience any synchronicity this week? What was it?
Alex: I talked last week about how I've had this urge to get rid of physical items in my home. Nothing crazy, but I felt this strong desire to part ways with things that didn't serve or reflect me anymore. The fact that Cameron talks about this desire in the Week 4 chapter is a funny enough coincidence, but what has stuck with me this week has been the little experiences I've had that have rippled out from my decision to get rid of things. A man drove two hours to my house to buy an extra continuous glucose monitor for his daughter, a woman bought an old banjo from me for her husband's birthday, and my friend got a new pair of shoes. These are all direct consequences of my decision to get rid of things, so they aren't mind-blowing. But I found myself thinking about all the ways life opens and closes doors based on single decisions.
A much more literal synchronicity: I was thinking that I'd like to get a tattoo on Friday, and when I went to the Instagram account of a local artist I'm interested in working with, she said she had availability for Friday.
Ray: I had an odd relationship with a blood pressure monitor I am now using, mostly trying to figure out when the best time to measure is. I would pull it out at different times and log the results in hopes of finding that special time when the numbers are best so I can tell my doctor that I am doing a hell of a job while changing none of my habits. I am coming to realize that self-cheating is still cheating, but finding out how is an interesting bit of detective work. Solving mysteries for no useful reason—that's me. If that's synchronicity, well, hurray me. If it isn't, well, Julia Cameron can fight me.
Sabrina: I'm still thinking about what this question means. I guess my partner and I invited some friends over for dumpling-making to celebrate Lunar New Year, and two of my friends who had never met before, but who I thought might have a lot in common, met for the first time. And it was really sweet!
Kathryn: I didn't notice any synchronicities, though it might depend on definition. I also did a mini Lunar New Year celebration, when I just went out to hot pot with my roommate, and the day we planned that for also happened to be the day I had to file a long blog I'd been trying to cook up for a couple of months. It's a bit of a chicken-egg situation, if a chicken-egg situation has clear cause and effect, in which case I suppose it isn't a chicken-egg situation at all. But having the hot pot combined with having the blog filed really lit a fire under my ass to Lock In and finish it so I could fully enjoy dinner.
Chris: I didn't notice any, but that doesn't mean there weren't any! Or maybe it does? If a synchronicity falls in the woods…
Kathryn: Oh, actually! Speaking of Lunar New Year, we wound up missing the parade in Chinatown during the weekday. But we incidentally wanted to get lunch in Chinatown over the weekend, and passed by while they were setting off firecrackers and doing lion dances, so we stumbled into some minor celebrations anyway, which was lovely.
Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery?
Alex: Oh my god can we talk about the media deprivation? This was so awful for me. The last time I did The Artist's Way, I had a mental breakdown after media deprivation week because I lived alone and spent entirely too much time inside my head for a week. This was better. Almost everyone I know who's done this has created their own rules for what the deprivation looks like. For me, it was no social media, no podcasts, and no TV or movies. I told myself I could read before bed and for work, and it turns out that encompasses most of my reading life anyway, so I didn't really feel deprived of reading.
Ray: I didn't media deprive but I did spend more time watching and listening to things I don't normally traffic in, notably things my wife enjoys. Not to be judgey, but to try and consider things outside my reference points. It helped that the evil that is football wasn't climbing through my eye sockets for a change, but I have a slightly less unhealthy view of British police procedurals and Teddy Swims, of which my wife has a deep and abiding enjoyment. I still don't pay much attention to them, but I am getting a better sense of why she likes them. Actually, I think I like the idea of doing her artist's way rather than my own. But I'm back on the media horse this week because, well, that's what the rest of us pay me to do, whether they think it's a good idea or not.
Chris: I gave up on media deprivation after Monday. For one thing—and I know Julia Cameron would reject this, damn her—but my job is largely absorbing media. For another, when my child finishes her dinner and there's some time before bedtime and what she wants is to watch 45 minutes of some movie or other, I am not ever ever ever going to be the weird dad who says, "Sorry, due to the sensitivity of my Creative Process I must remove myself to a quiet room." The best I could do here was a few instances where I chose a few minutes of quiet over engaging with media.
Kathryn: I say this with sheepishness, but I also didn't really engage in media deprivation. Picking and choosing more things to deprive myself of like video content/YouTube or video games would've been doable for me—the video content especially, but because I've built up a bit of a backlog of acquired video games, I do feel a monetary responsibility to play through—but I just caved on that front.
Sabrina: Sorry to Julia Cameron, but as soon as I read about media deprivation I knew I would simply not do it. Not to be too personal on main/at work, but my mental state has been pretty fragile over the past few weeks due to everything happening in the world and a few things in my personal life, and I was not about to give up my one certain happiness (The Traitors, Severance, Love Island All Stars, my favorite book about flying saints, etc.) to see what dark thoughts would cross my mind! Maybe if I were a monk in the Renaissance I would be able to turn my eye from my variously tempting illuminated manuscripts and wander the pastures, contemplate a potato, etc. But I wanted to stay true to my approach to TAW, which is to take the parts of it that feel like they might expand my relationship to creativity and leave behind the parts that give me any sense of dread, because I have enough of that already.
Ray: Fight the power, Sabs. Don't let Julia shove you around. Rage against the machine.
Chris: I would be interested in going a week without media. I think it would suck a lot and I imagine I would come pretty close to losing my mind. Maybe one of these years I'll send my child to sleepaway camp and spend the week going sensory deprivation mode, so that when she comes back I am this deeply weird person whom she barely recognizes. Fun!
Alex: I will admit I made it through Thursday before I cracked. I am also Going Through It right now and on Thursday I was doing especially badly, so I watched movies until it was reasonably late enough for me to stone myself to sleep. Before I cracked though, I did appreciate the vibe generally. I'm someone who fills every vacant moment with stimulation; I hate being alone with my thoughts and I always have a podcast going or a TikTok playing or a YouTube video queued up. I know this isn't good for me, but it's crept up over the last decade and taking a few days to go cold turkey on stimulation was extremely uncomfortable but also … kind of nice? I had a new appreciation for how long an hour could last when I was forced to pay attention to it. I'm glad to have my li'l computers back though.
Kathryn: Alex, during COVID my music listening numbers were off the charts (88,000 minutes listened) because I couldn't be alone with my thoughts. It's probably not the correct conclusion to draw here, but I've internalized some inverse correlation between the amount of auditory stimulation I have with the quality of my mental health. That said—and this will sound horrifically Gen Z TikTok brain–pilled, even though I don't have TikTok—I'm really trying hard to be less of a freak while watching videos or playing video games in the sense of not fast-forwarding once I get the gist of what's happening, and actually letting a 20-minute video take 20 minutes to watch. That was, at least, something I was very conscientious of this week.
Alex: Unfortunately, I know exactly what you mean and I'm trying to do the same thing.