Recovering a Sense of Safety

Let's explore The Artist's Way Chapter 1!

Hello Readers!

It’s the last week of the month, which means we’re discussing Chapter 1 of the creative recovery guide The Artist’s Way ¹by Julia Cameron. No worries if you don’t have the book or you don’t consider yourself an artist (spoiler alert: you might be, even if you don’t claim the title!). I’ll simply share a bit of what I learned from this chapter, and hopefully it will help you begin to explore your creativity or rekindle the dormant creativity wanting to awaken inside of you.

Chapter 1: Recovering a Sense of Safety

Cameron begins the chapter by exploring the idea that every artist (or creative being—which is ALL of us) needs to be nurtured and supported. Often the artist becomes malnourished in childhood because their inner artist was starved of the support he or she needed to flourish. This could be because your creativity wasn’t nurtured, supported, or invested in, OR it could be because your art was maligned by others, and it caused you to shrink back and keep your creative work to yourself.

In my case, there are numerous areas where I see the art in me being starved of investment and attention as well as openly maligned. As I read this chapter and worked through the exercise of naming enemies of my creative self-worth, I remembered multiple experiences in middle school when I sensed my creativity beginning to take shape and form and it was immediately squashed by unkind comments by a classmate.

I distinctly remember overhearing a girl in my class say to a friend that a pencil drawing I created in art class couldn’t really be mine because it was too good. Gulp. A year later, a few other classmates grumbled when a friend and I started a school newspaper that we wrote, illustrated, and published on our own. They whispered, “Who do they think they are?!” and I started to question every issue we released afterwards.