The Artist's Way || Weeks 5-8 Experience

It feels like I just wrote the post on weeks 1-4 and it's already time to talk about weeks 5-8!

In case you're not familiar with it, The Artist's Way is a 12-week course to unlock creativity and "live like an artist." I wrote a post explaining the course in detail, my approach to it, and the first 4 weeks so check that out for those details. You might want to read the initial two sections at least to get context since I won't be mentioning it again.

This post should be shorter than the first one as I'm not setting up context, but knowing me it'll end up being a fairly long post anyway. So, grab a cup of your favourite drink and settle down, let's catch up on The Artist's Way ☕️

week 5: recovering a sense of possibility

This week you are being asked to examine your payoffs in remaining stuck. You will explore how you curtail your own possibilities by placing limits on the good you can receive. You will examine the cost of settling for appearing good instead of being authentic. You may find yourself thinking about radical changes, no longer ruling your growth by making others the cause of your constriction.

Week 5 is a lot about letting yourself want for things without immediately thinking about reasons to not make it happen. There are several exercises to list things that you want to do/buy in different ways. These exercises actually made me think about what I want to do for fun.

Note: Although I say "week", I mean 2 weeks. My friends and I are doing it this way to make it easier on our schedules. I wrote about our approach to The Artist's Way here.

We always talk about serious 5 year plans like buy a house or switch jobs or move somewhere. Dream vacations are mentioned but they're usually an add-on and they're the first ones to be discarded when things come up in life. We're so used to keeping our lists serious and short that the week 5 exercises were honestly a bit of a struggle.

There's one exercise to simply complete the sentence "I wish ________" 20 times. I found it hard! After 10, I had to think a lot and dig up from the recesses of my mind. The "what would I try if it weren't too crazy?" and "what would I do if it weren't too selfish" were also eye-opening. I let myself answer without thinking and was surprised by what I wrote down.

Honestly, after writing these exercises, I kind of forgot my answers in a few days. I'm writing this many weeks later and I can say that I forgot and yet, I remember. I forgot why some things came up but few of the answers I wrote have come up again and again either through exercises, morning pages, or wandering thoughts. Going back and reading my answers now is like an "aha!" moment because a few things have actually stayed on my mind for a long time, even if I haven't done anything about them yet.

I'm not someone who does things immediately. I like mulling over things and taking my time with them. It's sometimes surprising how I keep something on my mind for years before actioning on them. But in a way, it also means that what I take action is are things that I genuinely care about and put a lot of thought into.

It comes through in The Artist's Way as well. Often, exercises impact my choices after weeks. I've noticed quite a few too. For example, there was a prompt a while ago to wear a nice outfit for no reason. I did it weeks later but I still loved it. Week 5 started with a new outfit that I thoughtfully bought in pieces over weeks and it became my favourite outfit! I've worn it many times since and have felt fabulous each time.

I started a new notebook during week 5 too. Writing morning pages easily burns through pages. I finished an entire notebook since I started The Artist's Way. The notebook lasted only 6 weeks! It feels like a long time and no time. I'm still surprised that I have so much to say. I picked a similar notebook (same size and type of pages) to write in next so that I don't have to figure out how long writing 3 pages will take me in a new notebook again.

Speaking of writing, this was the week when I wrote 2 Years Without Social Media, a blog post that was a mini-project. Journalling in the mornings helped me work out how to approach the post, what I wanted to clearly come across, and what I probably don't want to say on the internet. Once, I figured out that I missed writing something while journaling the next morning.

Something that has come up again and again in my morning pages is that I want to get back into running. The main thing holding me back was finding a place to run here and the right time for it in my routine. After weeks of writing about it, I went on my first run in this city! I decided to into the office late one weekday and went to a nearby park with my mom. It turned out to be huge and really cool, with many people walking and running in the early morning. It felt healing to do a slow run after months.

I brush lettered for the first time since college. I randomly did it one night before going to bed and it was such a nice wind down activity. I missed brush lettering. I only did a bit—practiced all the letters once and wrote a couple of lines from a song that was currently playing—but even that bit felt like discovering my old creative self again.

The biggest highlight this week is my artist date. I finally took myself out on a real artist date. I went to a lovely bookstore that I had pinned in my list months ago. I spent about 1.5 hours checking out the place and skimming through books that caught my eye. There was a small selection of stationery too so I went through them. It was such a nice time.

I surprisingly appreciated The Creative Act by Rick Rubin while skimming even though I disliked the book and DNFed it while reading it as an ebook. I still don't see myself buying a copy but I admit that it has good stuff for each aspect in the creative lifecycle.

Later, I went to a café which was next door to the bookstore. It was bustling with crowd and noisy which I wasn't a fan of after hours in the quiet bookstore. While exploring the café I found an exit to the back of the building which led to a recreational area with a tiny field surrounded by stairs. A lot of people were hanging out and kids were playing. There were a few teens making reels using a camera on a big tripod. I sat there to unwind and enjoy the sunset, hoping that the crowd at the café would reduce in a while. It was a great spot, actually.

Finally when I couldn't ignore my thirst (I didn't have water with me), I went back into the café. I ordered by default order—a flat white—even though the iced matcha options looked amazing because the weather was a bit chilly. I snagged a table and tried blogging with headphones but the environment was too distracting. After 10 minutes, I asked for my order to be made to-go and took the coffee back down to the recreational area. I sipped on coffee while people-watching and sky-watching.

After it became fully dark and mosquitoes started annoying me, I left to return home. 10/10 artist date, would do it again alone or with people. I love that I found a great bookstore+café+chill spot in this city. There actually isn't a place like this in my home city.

week 6: recovering a sense of abundance

This week you tackle a major creative block—money. You are asked to really look at your own ideas about God, money, and creative abundance. The essays will explore the ways in which your attitudes limit abundance and luxury in your current life. You will be introduced to counting, a blockbusting tool for clarity and right use of funds. This week may feel volatile.

Week 6 lowkey tackles our ideas of how money should be for necessary things and that creativity is a luxury, and hence we don't allow ourselves to buy things for creativity. The chapter stayed in my mind for days after I read it.

As soon as I completed the reading and initial exercises, I thought about what I'd buy right now if spending money on it wouldn't be considered a waste. Crocheting was brought up previous weeks' exercises and it looks like it stayed in my mind because that's what came up first. I'd buy crochet supplies.

I crochet briefly as a kid and made a very long multi-coloured scarf. I remember loving crocheting. It became a hobby that I forgot about when school picked up pace and intensity. That hobby is something that I always discarded when I thought about it again because it feels wasteful to buy a lot of yarn and supplies unless I'll be doing it a lot.

But you know what, it doesn't have to be wasteful. I looked up beginner crochet kits online and found kits that come with all the tools and the exact amount of yarn required to make something! They even come with patterns and instruction videos. I didn't buy it immediately, though. It wasn't that expensive but the expense was still something that held me back. However, a few days later while journalling, I worked through my issues with money (for this instance, at least) and I bought the kit. It arrived in 2 days and I was so excited to immediately open it and start crocheting. I felt like a kid.

Over the weekend, I spent several hours crocheting. I think I crocheted for at least 7 seven hours in total. It completely absorbed me. I wasn't on my phone, I wasn't worrying about things or thinking about other things. My mind was totally occupied with crocheting and it was a peace that I haven't felt in a long time.

Selecting a challenge and meeting it creates a sense of self-empowerment that becomes the ground for further successful challenges.

Since I hadn't crocheted in over a decade, it took me a while to get the hang of it again. Surprisingly, single stitches came to me like muscle memory but the starting stitches and other stitches weren't easy (makes sense because my mom/grandmom did the starting and ending stitches for me when I was a kid). I undid and redid the first few rounds many times before I squashed my perfectionism and moved on with imperfect stitches.

That's the nice thing about crocheting—you can undo and redo stitches. It's a forgiving process. You don't have to unspool everything or restart if you mess something up. It's a great hobby for beginners.

I bought a kit to make a tiny fox holding a mushroom. The kit comes with a manual with the patterns and instruction videos. The videos were surprisingly harder to follow than I expected. I was annoyed with quite a few things, actually. But I guess dealing with that helped me understand the stitches and patterns more than I would have if everything was directly fed to me. The patterns on the manual which looked like gibberish made sense to me by the end of day 2.

When Sunday ended, I had finished making the fox head, body, and both ears. About halfway through the head (which was the harder one to make overall), I got the hang of it and the rest were much easier. Although I lowkey wished that I could have finished everything in a weekend, I also liked that it was a bigger project because finishing it would feel like more of an accomplishment than the feeling if it was a quick thing.

I didn't do anything else significant in this week because I was also working on writing blog posts that I wanted to publish soon. I didn't do most of the exercises from this week too. Compared to the previous weeks, this week had a lot of activity-based exercises and less writing-based. I honestly forgot about them during the week so I didn't do them.

With the week 6, I'm halfway through The Artist's Way! Wohoo!

week 7: recovering a sense of connection

We turn this week to the practice of right attitudes for creativity. The emphasis is on your receptive as well as acting skills. The essays, exercises, and tasks aim at excavating areas of genuine creative interest as you connect with your personal dreams.

This week is like a continuation of the previous week. It tries to excavate wants and interests that are buried using different methods than what was tried the previous week. I was actually surprised by what I wrote down for some of the prompts so... it looks like I have things to work through and things that I want to do again.

For one of the prompts, I wrote about missing playing games with friends like I used to back in college and the pandemic. The lack of it—connection, playful banter, laughter—has been on my mind for a while and I wasn't surprised by the fact that it came up. But writing it down for The Artist's Way got me to take action on it.

I messaged 3 friends, calling them for games that night, and somehow the group grew to 10 people by the end of the night. It was so fun that I became a bit emotional about it and wrote a newsletter about games night with friends too. It ignited something in my friends too, we did another games night a few weeks later and agreed that we want to do it regularly. I'm not sure how often we'll actually do it but I'm hopeful about it.

I spent a couple of days on crocheting and finished making the fox doll! It turned out SO CUTE. It's not perfect—the stitches in the head are too tight and the ears are too high up—but I love the finished product. I chose to sew everything together instead of glueing some of them together as suggested in the instruction manual—it made the assembling a bit harder but I wanted to push myself and I'm happy with how it turned out.

Overall: it was a great kit. Well worth the money. When I was hesitant about buying the kit, I was only thinking about the kit and product itself, I didn't think about the worth of the experience. The peace of fully being occupied with something fun and having a finished product to show for it at the end is absolutely worth the cost. Honestly, the kit was a steal deal.

I wrote a list of hobbies to try on a sticky note and stuck it on a wall in my room. Crocheting was the first, it's crossed out now. I looked for beginner kits for the other hobbies in the list and am excited to work on them one-by-one. The list had 5 things to start with. While talking about my crocheting on the Blog & Chill Discord, I got to know about diamond painting which looks so cool. I added it to my list. This list might just take me a year to go through 😂

week 8: recovering a sense of strength

This week tackles another major creative block: time. You will explore the ways in which you have used your perception of time to preclude taking creative risks. You will identify immediate and practical changes you can make in your current life. You will excavate the early conditioning that may have encouraged you to settle for far less than you desire creatively.

Time is definitely a problem for me. There are a lot of things that I want to do—workout, play with friends, arts, crafts, read, watch TV, and more. There are all the inescapable things too like work, taxes, health checkups, bill payments, etc. I usually find myself prioritizing the inescapable things over hobbies, even when I don't need to. Like, I'll have to do a task but I'll procrastinate hard by doing random things and in the end I waste time without spending it meaningfully on anything.

A creative life is grounded in many, many small steps and very, very few large leaps.

The point of this week is to take small steps whenever possible instead of thinking and planning about big steps or to-do lists. It's better to spend 15 minutes painting than spending 15 minutes worrying about how we don't have enough time to paint.

I didn't do a lot of the exercises this week. I didn't feel a calling towards them and I was too scrambled with other things to even think about them. The only exercise I did was one that asked me to imagine my dream life—I did it multiple times in morning pages and it was a bit cathartic. I spoke about what I want to do, yes, but it also made me realize how I don't actually want to live some of those lives when I think about the details and how many parts of my dream are doable in my current life.

I could have done a lot this week but I had a busy weekend in Bangalore which zapped most of my free time and energy. In the few days before the trip, I frantically blogged and wrote my newsletter so that it will be scheduled and ready to go while I'm in Bangalore. The few days in Bangalore were amazingly spent with my favourite people—including one day in an Airbnb with a friend whom I met after a whole year. I also fit in a dentist appointment because I've been paranoid about my teeth since my last appointment in January.

The day after I returned, there was a huge themed carnival-like event at the office which was super fun and took almost all day which was followed by a team dinner. The week after that was spent recovering from the tiredness of those few days.

So, I didn't do much this week. I was so busy that I didn't even open my planner till the end of the week. I was busy in work and blogging and other adulting stuff. It's tax declaration season and I've been super stressed about my taxes. I have a couple of travel plans coming up in a few months which I'm stressed about as well. I spent week 8 frazzled.

The only artsy thing I did was draw an illustration for a blog post. This is actually a big thing because I haven't even felt like drawing something for the blog in years and somehow I got the urge to when I wrote my Listen to Music With Me post. The main reason I stopped drawing a couple of years ago was because drawing something for every blog post felt too pressurising and not fun. Surprisingly, returning to it felt easy, like I was coming home. The illustration came out well, too! I'm happy with it.

I spent much longer than I expected on this illustration. It's a simple one that might have taken me only a couple of hours a few years ago. I spent bits of time over three days for this. Instead of rushing to get it done for the post, I was enjoying it and that really made a difference. Doing simple drawings and focusing on shading and the wave of the hair felt calming and peaceful. I realized that I quite like drawing hair even though it intimidates me.

I don't think I'll ever be the person who makes super complicated illustrations that wow everybody, but I want to continue making simple illustrations to enjoy the process and unwind. I want to make more illustrations for blog posts too. I may not do it often since I want to split my time among other hobbies as well but I'll try.

Right as week 8 ended, my notebook finished too. I'm really flying through notebooks. 3 pages a day adds up to a lot, wow. New notebook from next week 🙂

endnotes

Let's do the interview thing again 🙂

• You're 2/3rds through The Artist's Way! Wow, how are you feeling?

It doesn't feel like I'm spending a huge chunk of my time on the course anymore because I'm letting myself take the easy route. I'm doing whatever possible and not beating myself up over not doing everything. Because of that, it feels like the activities have become a part of my life instead of something I'm doing for The Artist's Way.

For example, morning pages are in my routine now. I don't do them religiously right after waking up and sometimes I finish them in the evening. But I don't even think about skipping them. I make sure to carve out 30 minutes in my day, preferably in the morning, to journal. It feels like something that I just do now.

Similarly, the exercises aren't something that I hold myself to. I do whatever I can and keep other interesting ones in mind for an opportunity to do them later. I did multiple activity-based exercises after that week ended depending on my mood and time. I'm considering them more like suggestions than a rulebook.

Mainly, I'm kind of proud of myself for coming this far into the course! The Artist's Way is meant to be 12 weeks i.e. 3 months. However, because of how my friends and I are doing it, it became a total of 6 months. With 8 weeks done, it basically means that I've been doing The Artist's Way for 4 months now. I've grown in these four months, even if it feels like I haven't moved an inch sometimes.

I'm looking forward to the places that the last 4 weeks/2 months take me!

• How is the support group going on? I noticed that you haven't mentioned your friends much.

I'm happy to report that we're all still doing The Artist's Way! We're in different stages and different weeks because of our different schedules and things that delayed it. Two of us are at around the same point while the other two are a few weeks behind. We're not very active on the group anymore and basically message whenever we have the energy for it. But we're still working on it and we're trying. That matters the most.

However, because of us being in different places and not chatting a lot, it feels like I'm doing The Artist's Way alone at this point. There are some check-ins and chats here and there but it's not often. It's a good thing that the initial few weeks embedded the course in my routine so it's easier for me to keep up with it now.

• Have you noticed any shift in how you approach morning pages and the artist dates? Are they still feeling like 'chores,' or have they transformed into something else entirely?

As I mentioned earlier, morning pages has become a part of my routine and feels normal now. I'm still struggling with the artist dates, though. In 8 weeks, I took myself out on a real artist date only once. Despite taking that first time, it's still hard for me to prioritize artist dates over doing chores or resting at home because artist dates feel like an unnecessary luxury. They're fun and amazing. But they don't feel like a must so I most often don't do them or figure out at-home alternatives.

The weather nowadays has been unhelpful as well. It's raining most of the afternoons and evenings. The infrastructure in this city sucks and there is always flooding on the roads due to rains, even if it rains only for an hour. That makes me hesitant to go out because I don't want to be stuck somewhere trying to get a cab home in the pouring rain. I even planned to go out one day but cancelled it at the first sign of rain. I hate going out in the rain, especially when I know that getting back home will be a pain if it rains too much.

In the coming weeks, I want to get over my hesitation and just go out. I should pretend as if I have an unavoidable appointment with someone, that's the only way I'll do it. We'll see.

• Beyond the creative work, what's one surprising thing you've learned about yourself since starting this second third of the book?

If I set my mind to it, I can actually do a lot in a day. Whether I use time-blocking or cram deadlines in one day, or if I have a great night of sleep, I can get a LOT done in a day. A few times, I'd recount what I did the previous day in morning pages and be astonished that I did all of it while managing to read for a while and talk to mom and friends.

16 hours (setting aside 8 for sleep) often feels short. But it can feel like a lot of if it's planned out well or if you have the energy to utilise it. One weekend, I blogged, crocheted, did life admin, worked out, read half a book, and spoke a lot with my friends. It may not be possible every day but it's possible some days. It will not happen if we resign ourselves to doing only 2 things a day too, we have to be open to it with a lot of options to do in a day.

Read my experience of The Artist's Way weeks 9-12 and overall thoughts here.

chat with me!

When was the last time you took up a crafty project? What was it? Is there a hobby that you enjoyed as a kid but didn't pick up again in several years? If you had a whole week clear of responsibilities and chores, what would you do?