I’m not sure what set off the cascade of doom that filled my mind a couple weeks ago, but it was pretty much all-consuming. It seemed as if nearly every part of my life was off kilter.
Funny how these things happen. One moment you think you’re all in alignment and the next moment you find you’ve been standing at the top of a Jenga stack and playing pieces are being removed rapidly below you. You just stand there, waiting for the inevitable end where everything, including you, crashes to the ground.
I hate when that happens.
It would have been easy to let all that happen too. It certainly was easy in the past. At one time I sank into a yearlong Jenga game that played out anew every morning. The building blocks would begin to stack up just fine, by mid-day something was askew, and by day’s end I was an absolute wreck, teetering on the brink of doom and gloom.
It went on for a year, leaving me in a deep depression and a real sense of hopelessness.
There was just one thing that pulled me out of this nose dive. No, it wasn’t the Lexapro. That sh*t just made me numb and listless, lacking any sense or appreciation for consequences.
Instead, it was The Artist’s Way. This was a period in my life when the well of creativity was absolutely dry. It was painful to try to write or design. So I did what I always do when I need self-improvement: I read a book.
I’m not sure what drove me to read this particular tome. There are thousands of choices out there. This one just seemed to fill the hole I had in my life, the few pages I previewed on Amazon.com really resonated.
I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I’m not going to go through all the steps in the book, there are just too many great things. Things like an artist’s date when you take yourself to a gallery, museum or park to refill that empty well. Or the God Jar, where you drop in your worst fears and worries, giving them up to a higher power. By the way, this is soooo freeing that I highly recommend it.
These are all great, but there was one technique that I had totally forgotten about until recently. One of the basic tenets of The Artist’s Way is that you need to eliminate all the crap that goes on in your head. You know the stuff, those niggling thoughts that are the equivalent of mental masturbation but without the happy ending.
The answer: Morning Pages. It’s the Dustbuster of your mind, cleaning out all the nooks and crannies in your head that hold all your most distracting thoughts. There’s no right or wrong to them. It is three handwritten pages of stream of consciousness. You simply write down everything that is in your head at the moment.
Let me warn you. These ramblings can be very pissy. You can sound like a total whiner and loser in these pages. This is O.K. The goal is to remove the clutter in your head, the things that are keeping you from being creative, from being aligned and being able to act purposefully in your day.
Over the years I’ve engaged in Morning Pages several times. In the beginning, I wrote every morning, filling pages and pages with my fears, worries, troubles, anxiety, thoughts and endless diatribes. Notebook after notebook of handwritten pages pouring forth.
It was so amazing, so healing. In no time I was out of my funk and back in fine form, largely because I had emptied my mind of all that nonsense that was supposedly troubling me.
I never read them again. That’s part of the secret. You write them, put them behind you and move on. You don’t revisit them, at least not any time soon. While the actual rule is to never read them again, there has been a time or two when I have happened upon them, reading through my entries which seen through the lens of the passage of time, seemed petty and fruitless.
They weren’t, of course. As I mentioned I wrote a modified version of Morning Pages after my last marriage. I covered some of this in an earlier RobZerrvation.
That missive was a tremendous help this time around. For it was still top of mind as I sank into the pit of despair recently, reveling in more doom and gloom that sent me into my three-day spiral.
Instead of continuing to sink this time, I wrote. Fast and furious I wrote, penning all the thoughts that were consuming my mind. Thousands of words poured out in about an hour’s time; uncomfortable truths, unfounded fears and tons of whining and self pity.
The pages covered a lot of ground. This is to be expected. There is no plot to cover here, no singular focus. It is your thoughts unfiltered and unedited, laid down at the moment you think of them, coursing their way from your head to your fingers to the pen to the pages. Sloppy penmanship that is as sloppy as your mind.
Did they help? At first, not. I continued to be in my funk for the rest of the day and into the evening. Sure, I played the Little Brave Toaster for those closest to me, all the time letting the pages work their magic until I finally fell asleep.
In the morning, everything was gone. All the worries, all the woes. Gone. I can only assume that the Morning Pages did their job once again. Everything in my head had gone down on paper, so that when I finally went to sleep, my now settled mind had other things to think about, more pleasant things, more positive ones, and most important, actionable items instead of destructive thoughts.
That is the power of the pages. If you haven’t done this, I highly recommend it. Get up first thing in the morning, before the coffee, make yourself comfortable and write away. Don’t stop until three pages are filled. Rinse and repeat as necessary in the ensuring days.
I think you’ll find the journey amazing and the truths they uncover profound. They certainly were for me.
In the Emerald City, killing trees for a really good cause,
– Robb