Grueling.

On the suggestion of a friend, I picked up The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The book is about (re)discovering the artist within. The very first exercise is to write three pages every day. These pages don’t have to be solid writing; it can be viewed as a kind of marathon journaling. There is no subject or theme restriction, and from the examples given in the book, it looked like a basic diary entry. I tried it this morning. It took me about an hour and a quarter, and it was quite possibly one of the hardest things I’ve had to do as of late. My mind kept wandering; I kept finding myself looking blankly into space, thinking about something totally unrelated to what I had written down. There was even a point when I started a sentence, had my train of thought derail and spill millions of gallons of hazardous waste in my head, and when I finally looked back at the page, I had totally forgotten what I was writing about. All I could do was put in an ellipsis and say something to the point of, “I just forgot what I was writing.” Also, near the end, my brain started flying apart at the seams. Nothing really made sense anymore, not on a writing level, not on any level. I felt confused. I felt spent. I felt that someone had smashed my brain with some large, blunt object. When I got to the bottom of the third page, my consciousness felt like a quivering mass of goo that was busily breaking down into its component particles. It was ugly.

I can’t wait to do it tomorrow.

-D out.