Some of us likely kept a diary when we were young.
If we didn’t, we’re at least familiar with the movie trope of the young girl keeping a diary. (She writes wistfully, then gazes out the window as she contemplates her important thoughts.) I wrote about the boys I had crushes on or the teachers I couldn’t stand. In deeper entries, I wrote down my prayers and desires. The diary represented a place where we could speak and be—a place we could be with ourselves, maybe even uncritically.
But the invocation “Dear diary” starts to fall flat as we grow up. Somewhere amid middle school and high school, I started to wonder if I was just talking to myself. When I tried to write on strictly spiritual topics, I felt I didn’t have room to untangle the humdrum, daily questions.
That tension lasted through college, into early marriage, and through the births of my two children. Simultaneously, I began to recognize an existential frustration within myself. It was as though life and its meaning no longer cohered. For a while I didn’t understand the source of the frustration. Then I began to see that I was confused about how to be a creative as well as a wife and a mom. Furthermore, I lacked a medium through which to process how my existence had changed and was changing.
Finally, however, I found the courage to pick up a book I’d long wanted to read, The Artist’s Way, and learned that one of the ongoing assignments is what the author Julia Cameron calls “morning pages:” to write three pages of longhand every morning about anything and everything.
The pages are not to be read again by you or by anyone—no rules, no off-limit topics, no filter. I started to do the writing, and I started to find rest.
Now, halfway through the twelve-week program, I am beginning to understand the healing power of daily writing. Its regularity communicates stability and safety. It helps us learn about ourselves and face ourselves. It gives physical being to our immaterial feelings and thoughts, distilling and clarifying them.
Throughout the book, Cameron refers to our artistic self as a child. This child wants care and attention just like any child does. In the same way, I also think it wants consistency—the confidence that it will be given quality time regularly. Getting up a little earlier to write everyday tells the artist in us that we will be given time to let loose and contemplate what we need to. We no longer have to live with the slight panic that we won’t be taken care of and therefore with an ever-growing bitterness at feeling unloved. Despite the daily requirements of adult life (for me, these are meals, chores, diapers, errands; for you, they may be the demands of an eight-to-five job), here is a place to vocalize the questions and problems that remind us of our immaturity and basic vulnerability.
In this way, writing gives us room to speak with ourselves. We learn how we think of ourselves and relate to ourselves. For example, I realized there were things I was afraid of discussing with myself and a few things I hadn’t been truthful with myself about. (As a side note here, Cameron often mentions our relationship with ourselves, but she is also concerned with our relationship with the higher being she calls “God.” This being doesn’t necessarily equate to the Christian God. He is still, however, a master creator and the ultimate source of goodness, abundance, and artistic creativity. Writing, Cameron says, also helps us communicate with this higher being.)
Words give physical form to our ideas.
Thoughts and emotions are immaterial things, floating or sometimes raging around inside us. When we speak them aloud or write them down, however, we give them physical reality and presence. By incarnating them, we must also parse them out and confront them: we have to get specific. The clarity we eventually reach invites us to look for solutions because our problems are no longer floating around within us. Difficulties suddenly seem manageable, and we begin to manage them.
I invite you to consider taking up this habit. Three pages (I sometimes only have time for one or two, but I still find it helpful!) of daily longhand writing. Let yourself write about whatever comes to mind. It need not be beautiful or particularly meaningful, as Cameron says. You are giving your creativity a little room. Our morning pages are a place we can unselfconsciously engage in the struggle of articulating our inner workings, a place where the questions and problems and victories can be clarified and finally reveal the truths that we need to move forward with ourselves—maybe with our art.
I like to see this practice as giving that immature girl a little room again too—not to be immature but actually to experience the love she needs to grow up.
Image Credit: Max Leibermann, “Granddaughter” (girl standing writing),
oil on canvas, 1923, via Public Domain
