Writing my way out of the fog

“Catch yourself as close to waking as you can,” said Julia. “Write three pages of longhand about anything and everything that crosses your mind. As you vent on the page, you become intimate with yourself and your real feelings. Not only sorrows but joys become clear to you.”

This is Julia Cameron, talking about the Morning Pages tool she first revealed in her most famous book The Artist’s Way. This daily practice is the foundation of all her creative endeavours, and has guided her towards unexpected forms of expression such as songwriting.

I’ve been following this practice for three weeks now, and it has certainly helped me create more head space as well as the desire to write more, and write more often.

Her guidance is to put the pages aside once you’ve finished writing them and, if you must look at them again, wait for at least a couple of months. They are intended to be private and not for public consumption.

However, I’m going to break her rule – just this once. Because something unexpected emerged during one of my Morning Pages sessions and I can’t get it out of my mind. I was writing about how I was feeling that day, and at the end of a sentence out popped “I feel lost”. This surprised me as it hadn’t been in my conscious awareness. But that’s the beauty of this practice – it allows your subconscious to speak.

I carried on writing. “Lost makes me feel small and childlike. Lost makes me feel helpless and hopeless. Lost makes my heart sink. Lost makes me feel untethered. Lost means drifting at sea. Lost means I’m in the doldrums. Lost means no forward momentum. Lost is in suspended animation. Lost is surrounded by fog. Lost is floating in space. Who knew there was so much territory to explore – even though Lost isn’t on the map. You never know when you’re going to end up feeling lost.”

Ah – OK. I’ve no idea when this “feeling lost” happened, or how I got there. But when I acknowledged it on the page, I immediately felt sad. My pen continued writing: “Lost has come to tell me I’m lost because I’m still grieving.”

Circling back to grief

So here I am again, circling back to grief. I’ve written about it several times over the past few months. Now I have a voice in my head telling me it’s boring, you’ve gone on and on about it – find something else to write about.

But grief IS the fog. It is the doldrums, the drifting, the feeling untethered, the heart-sink. No wonder I feel small and childlike – the reliable adult who had been there for my entire life is no longer there. My rock, my foundation – my mum.

“I’m still grieving.” There’s a mixture of acceptance and frustration in there, plus a little impatience. “What, you’re still grieving? Get on with it then, through it and out the other side.” But grief is like an infinity symbol, there’s no way out – it’s not subject to time or space. You just learn to live with it, and allow it to circle around the loop.

Morning Pages often startle me with their honesty. They are what brought me back around the loop again.

I didn’t quite know how to finish this blog, so I waited for inspiration, or a sign from the universe. I was quickly presented with a TED talk about grief on YouTube, the message of which was to allow grief to simmer, and see what it leads you to do. And it also guided me to a quote I’d saved, from the Elizabeth Lesser book Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow: “To grieve well the loss of anyone or anything – a parent, a love, a child, an era, a home, a job – is a creative act. It takes attention and patience and courage.”

So I hope Julia Cameron won’t mind that I broke her rule. I hope she would be pleased that by writing about feeling lost, I have found hope – hope that I will find my way out of the fog through acts of creativity.