Posted on Leave a comment

The Writing Diet by Julia Cameron

Originally published at Joely Sue Burkhart. You can comment here or there.

I can’t say enough good things about this book. I also bought The Artist’s Way because I loved the first book so much. I even bought a nice journal at B&N over the weekend and I started using it this week to get my Morning Pages.

I’d heard of Morning Pages before but hadn’t bought into the idea. I get up D&E to write as it is — I wasn’t too excited about the prospect of taking precious time to “brain dump” into a journal. However, as soon as I started doing it, some amazing things have come up, and I have a feeling it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I’m not very good at doing things for myself. I don’t think most Moms are. We’re so busy taking care of kids, working, cooking, folding laundry, homework… Then maybe 1 or 2 hours a day (if we get up at the butt crack of dawn before anyone else in the house is alive) we have a tiny bit of time to pursue our hobbies or dreams. Our families often resent even that much. To do something nice on top of that little bit of personal time seems… selfish. At least it does to me.

Working from home, I hardly ever go anywhere. Rarely by myself. I work. I take and pick up kids from school. I cook dinner and on bad nights, work around the bake time. I do homework with the kids after school and dinner. When the EDJ is really demanding, I work after that or after they go to bed. On a good night, we watch American Idol and I tinker with e-mail and might edit a section or two, but by then, I’m usually too tired to get many new words. (Plus the TV is on, which is really distracting, even when I hate the show That Man is watching.) Since I don’t have to go into the office, I never put on makeup. The only place I do go that I even have to “dress up” for is church, and I really don’t “dress” up either (our church is pretty casual).

When was the last time I did something for ME?

I realized last night that I hadn’t colored my hair since before Christmas. It takes too long. I had too much to do. Nobody really cares anyway, do they? Ah, but I care. I put on about 20 years of age when I don’t color my hair, if not more. So I dumped the dye on my head and then read The Artist’s Way while waiting for it to soak in. Another shocker: I haven’t had a hair cut since Sept of last year. *boggles* That was when I went to the home office. So that’s the next thing on the Taking Care of Me list to accomplish before this weekend.

And I’m going to plan a small outing for just me. No kids. No That Man. I have no idea what I’ll do yet, but I’m going to do SOMETHING.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *