I started working my way through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron this August as a way to enrich my journaling experience.
It’s a book I had read post-college and dismissed for a number of reasons — I believed I already knew everything she was saying, it was just too “woo-woo spiritual” for me, etc. In all truth, I didn’t know what I didn’t know (which was a lot), and in all honesty, I simply wasn’t ready for it yet.
Fifteen years later, I’m approaching the book again, this time with a more humble student mindset — and this time it’s exactly what I need. The book takes a sort of “12-step program” approach to creative recovery, with each step guiding you toward restoring a sense of creative safety, identity, integrity, and more.
I’m currently on Chapter 7 — “Recovering A Sense Of Connection” — and surprisingly, it is here that she addresses the topic of perfectionism. I knew it would crop up somewhere! I was kind of excited to encounter it because of all of the work I’ve been doing to counter my inner perfectionist lately. I was so excited to show myself how much of my previous perfectionism I had conquered.
And then I read:
“Getting it right, you may call it, or fixing things before I go any further. You may call it having standards. What you should be calling it is perfectionism. …Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop — an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.” — Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
That’s right — Julia Cameron called me out IMMEDIATELY. Then she did so several more times in quick succession:
“Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results.” — Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
And:
“Midway through a project, the perfectionist decides to read it all over, outline it, see where it’s going. And where is it going? Nowhere, very fast.” — Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
At that last one, I stopped and just stared at the wall for a while, mentally digesting. Deciding “to read it all over, outline it, see where it’s going” is EXACTLY WHAT I HAVE SPENT MOST OF 2020 AND 2021 DOING. This has literally been my creative life for the last two years.
I started writing Season 2 of Girl In Space in early 2020, paused halfway through the year to reread and restructure (and reel from the pandemic).
“I need to regain my bearings,” I told myself at the time. “Maybe structure an outline over it, see where it’s going and where I want it to go.”
I have been going exactly nowhere ever since.
The pandemic, anxiety, depression, and other LIFE STUFF have also kept me going nowhere fast, feeling safe in feeling stuck, but even without all of that, I think that I have been unconsciously stuck in a deep, dark loop of perfectionism.
And as Julia Cameron reminds us, “Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves.”
What loops are you mired in? What writing issues keep creeping back into your brain/heart/life?
And how can we begin to move forward?
Words & warmth,
Sarah