Dina Climatiano

Morning pages

Some days all I have time, energy and focus for is morning pages. Some days not even that. And most days I don’t even do them in the morning, because mornings are for doing stuff on autopilot until my brain catches up with my body. Today I was preoccupied with other things that I do not want to share (though maybe I will one day), so I will talk about a different aspect of trying to foster a creativity practice.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, morning pages are a practice introduced in a wonderful book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. They are a form of journaling that is basically you spewing all the crap out of your brain in stream of consciousness writing with an actual pen/pencil on paper. You put pen down to paper and you do not pick it back up until you have written 3 whole pages (though the format and font size are up to you I suppose) of, well, anything. These are not to be shared or even read back. They are, quite literally, a brain dump, though I lovingly call them my word vomit. They could be filled only with “I have no idea what to write”, though anyone who’s tried to do this more than once will probably tell you it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be stuck in that loop for very long.

Now I haven’t been doing them officially for very long. I didn’t even start reading the Artist’s Way until halfway through this challenge, though I have heard about the concept and the book decades ago. But I have been known, upon occasion, to sit down and write everything I’m thinking just so it’s slow enough to put into words. I used to do it more when I was younger, but have fallen out of the habit the older I got (and the more attached to my smartphone I got, if I’m totally honest).

The first time I did morning pages, about halfway through this month, I was surprised to learn how much poison was coming out of me. I guess it’s easier to put horrible thoughts into words when I know I won’t read them back or show them to anyone.  

I was stuck trying to think of what I wanted to do that day, so I figured why not try to do some soul searching in written form. See, I thought I was going to write out all the things that I was supposed to do that day, chart out an idea for an artistic endeavor and plan out my offering for that day, but after four pages of non-stop dissociated writing, I was a bit shocked.

Smeared in blue on checkered white was a mean streak that I didn’t even know I had. I think it took three introductory sentences before my inner critic came out. Then I remembered what Cameron said about the inner critic, and one of her tips was give it a ridiculous sounding voice and name it after someone you hate. But I don’t really hate anyone. Not really.

The only person that came to mind was someone whose name I didn’t even remember. It was some bitch at an office party that I’d been invited to, whose first act upon arriving at that office party was clocking me in the corner of the room then promptly telling me that I’m not invited and that I should leave. I was mortified. Then, when I got home, I was angry. It was like reliving in someone else’s high school experience, because mine actually had never been that traumatic. It’s one of those incidents that still makes me shake with anger when it resurfaces in my head at 3AM on the rare occasions when I can’t sleep.

Anyway, I found myself wishing that bitch died alone in a hospital bed because no one cared enough to be there for her in her final moments. Yes, I actually committed that horrible thought to paper. And then I made the mistake of reading those pages back to myself.

So yeah, my ramblings have no point other than morning pages are great, but never ever read them again.