Wake up. Write. Repeat.
“Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie for a pet {...} Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do, and you might not like the job it invents.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
The Artist's Way Morning Pages Journal is basically a rebranded journal to The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to High Creativity, originally published in 1992, which went on to sell more than 4 million copies worldwide.
Without The Artist’s Way apparently, we would all be living in a world without a book called Eat Pray Love. (Could you imagine?)
The idea behind Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way is that “by writing three pages longhand and stream of consciousness first thing in the morning, you can overcome the obstacles that stop you from becoming your most creative self...”
Cameron sees her morning pages as a "form of meditation” and as "spiritual windshield wipers.” “Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.”
I asked my boyfriend for The Artist's Way Morning Pages as a birthday gift in May, because I was a complete stress head. I don't have a 9-5 job. I have a when-I-open-my-eyes-to-when-I-close-my-eyes job, which usually amounts to 12-hour days, seven days a week, and it was affecting me in the worst possible way — by stealing the most important trait for any creative type: creativity.
And without creativity, I was losing my productivity. I was in a perpetual state of busyness while also being completely creatively unproductive.
To say the feeling was unsettling is an understatement. Many days I found myself sobbing, “I…just...can’t…seem…to…brain…today.”
Yes, I have tried meditation. I just can’t do it. I even took a six-week course, meditating for three hours on Saturday afternoons. And during most of those classes, my brain was STILL “on,” wondering, “Is this inner peace? Am I in the moment? Is THIS the moment? I'm hungry.” So maybe scribbly meditation — doing morning pages — would work. (You know who has perfected meditation? Cats. Cats seem to have perfected mediation.)
And I was pissed at Maya Angelou, who once said, “You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Had I been duped all these years?
My creative “spark” (which leads to my productivity) was pulling a vanishing act on me (sort of like the money in my bank account.)
Interestingly, 150,000 copies of The Artist’s Way were bought in 2020 alone.
“With its mustard-colour front cover and maroon lettering, the book itself is decidedly un-photogenic, and yet I've seen it more on social media in the past year than ever before, a quiet way of announcing to the world, “Yes, I am working on myself,” Sarah Spellings wrote in Vogue.
Sure, I needed something to settle. I needed to rest, to clear my brain and to find my creativity. Something I had never, ever, had to worry about before, which I write about here. My brain was becoming my worst enemy, and my thoughts more tangled than all my phone chargers combined.
The publisher of The Artist's Way once said that for Julia, “creativity was a tool for survival. It was literally her medicine…” And that’s why it resonates with so many people.
No wonder I felt like I was dying. I didn't have my creative medicine. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was time to kiss my creative soul goodbye forever.
"If I am not actively creating something, then chances are I am probably actively destroying something — myself, a relationship, or my own peace of mind," Gilbert wrote in Big Magic. I couldn't have written a better sentence myself to describe the torture I was feeling.
But I was also intrigued with morning pages after reading Elizabeth Gilbert explain HOW The Artist’s Way led to Eat. Pray. Love. (which sold 4 million copies worldwide, was turned into a meh movie starring Julia Roberts, and is one of the most iconic, beloved, and bestselling books of modern times.)
Gilbert used the original The Artist’s Way — billed as a “twelve-week course that guides you through the process of recovering your creative self,” which includes affirmations, inspirational quotes, fill-in-the-blank lists and tasks, like “write yourself a thank-you letter,” and “describe yourself at 80” — three times in the last decade.
Each time, Gilbert says she learned something “important and surprising” about herself and her world.
“Just to show how influential it's been to me, the first time I did the program, I had decided by the end of it that I wanted to 1) travel to Italy and learn Italian, 2) go to an ashram in India, and 3) return to Indonesia to study with the old medicine man I'd once met there,” Gilbert explained.
“We all know what that decision led to… Without The Artist's Way, there would have been no Eat. Pray. Love.'"
I never got around to my morning pages until I became desperate after recently coming back from…something.
This “something” is called vacation.
Usually on vacation, I have the amazing ability to shut off my brain completely, to the point where it becomes as useless as trying to lick your own elbow. (Try it! Seriously, it's funny.)
I’d regain my sanity, calories didn't count, I’d never set an alarm and, most importantly, I’d give my overthinking brain a much-needed break. (Trust me, if it exists, my brain is fucking thinking about it.)
I would normally return relaxed, motivated, and bursting with creative juices, my brain buzzing with new ideas, with passion akin to steamy sex scenes in romance novels, which we tackle here! Vacations served as my creative muse.
Yet, after 14 kid-free days in Mexico, I did not come back refreshed, re-fuelled or recharged.
It seemed I had forgotten...how to vacation!
So it was only after I’d “failed” at vacationing (my creativity and productivity obviously decided to vacation elsewhere) that I finally attempted to start my morning pages.
Plus, my boyfriend, a corporate tax litigator, had started to journal for 15-30 minutes every morning as well, and he’s a changed human.
“Um, dude. Good luck with THAT,” I would think whenever I caught a glance at his “to-do” list. (If anyone tells you “nothing is impossible,” I’ll shoot you a screenshot of his to-do list. That’ll prove them wrong.)
So, I can attest that morning pages are not just for creative types. (If my boyfriend could find the time to journal every morning, certainly I could!)
I had always been the more laid-back one in our relationship. Sure, I was in a constant state of panic over what I had to get done, but I was also equally like, “Meh. Whatever happens will happen!”
It was maddening to see my stress-head boyfriend, who still sets his alarm at 4:30 a.m most days, become more chill than me.
All because he started journaling in the morning? I mean, my life motto is “Life is better in flip flops!” His life motto could be, “Sure, let me add that to my list!”
Before he started writing morning pages, the tension in his voice was so palpable, it made me tense. Just like if someone tells you their kid has lice and you immediately feel itchy. (Now I’m feeling itchy! You?)
Now? While I wouldn't say his voice is calming enough to read a bedside story, he rarely ever talks to me as if I’m a client (thereby forgetting I'm his girlfriend).
On work calls, he’d pace so much he’d look like a terrified squirrel racing manically back and forth, trying to figure out how to avoid getting run over by a car. These days, I rarely see him pace — and I no longer get whiplash watching him on a call. He’s just overall...calmer.
I wish I could say he was a changed man because of his awesome girlfriend (me!) after he learned about the morning pages from ME. Alas, I cannot.
Like most men, it took another man’s suggestion for him to start journaling, after he discovered that someone he reveres — Tim Ferris, the hyperactive productivity guru and author of The Four Hour Workweek — also cracks open The Artist’s Way Morning Pages and spills his stream-of-conscious thoughts on a page each morning.
Ferris started journaling because he needed “a daily and meditative practice of production,” which is what my boyfriend (and I) needed. Ferris calls his five-minute journaling “the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found.”
By trying to figure things out with his morning pages, he says his worries and problems would “otherwise bounce around all day like a bullet ricocheting inside your skull,” wasting the most precious commodity for people who need to get stuff done: productivity.
By doing morning pages, Ferris says he’s just “caging his monkey mind on paper so I can get on with my fucking day!”
Spewing random thoughts on paper for just fifteen minutes each morning apparently can change even people like my workaholic boyfriend, who used to stress about stress before there was even stress to stress about.
Once he began his morning journaling routine, I would walk by him as he sat at the brightly lit kitchen table, outwardly calmly watching him while inwardly wanting to kill him!
Journaling was helping him get on with his fucking day, be more productive, and chill the fuck out.
I wanted in on it.
What was holding me back, though, was the thought that if someone actually read my “whatever comes to mind," they’d be very worried about me. Or very freaked out, thinking, “She seems a bit cranky with a touch of psycho.” (Let's just say my morning pages are better hidden than my stash of pot!)
But that’s part of the secret behind morning pages. When I asked My Guy what he wrote one morning (and to see if he was writing about me, of course), he emphatically said no. “No one can ever read them! Not even me.”
Which is true. You’re never supposed to look at what you’ve written unless you think a page may be useful one day. The point is to simply get whatever is in your head out of your brain.
The other secret to morning pages is that there are no rules to what you write.
It can be a brain dump, a thoughtful reflection, or randomly incoherent musings — my strong suit! (I’m pretty sure I spent about a third of my day yesterday thinking, “WTF is wrong with people? Or is it me? Why don't I have a puppy already? What superpower would I really like? Why do people like pumpkin pie? I wish I had an assistant. Then the assistant could get me a puppy! Is it a coincidence "stressed" spelled backwards is "desserts"? I think not! Maybe I should try pumpkin pie again.”)
I'm not saying if I write another book — another musing in one of my entries that I've been hemming and aweing over — it will sell 4 million copies. But when I write out my stream-of-conscious thoughts, my brain tends to unclog and more important questions (and not “Why do people like pumpkin pie?”) begin to surface.
Thinking on paper — or rather not thinking on paper — via this type of “scribbly" meditation is actually something I can do. With no rules, it’s something I can’t fuck up. That, in itself, makes me feel accomplished, optimistic, and pushes me to be productive.
And, yes, calmer.
Have you tried morning pages? I’d love to learn how it changed you here!
Until next time, flip your hair and flip the page!
xoxo
Rebecca