…Like Something Holy

They say third time’s the charm. This happened to be the case for me and The Artist’s Way. Once I finally committed to – and almost (almost, almost) completed – the damn thang a little over a year ago, I found myself sitting in a café one morning, reading through an old notebook. There it was, and entry going way back to 2012, when I had started Julia Cameron’s program the first time around. And consequently, abandoned it when talk of God came up a little more often than I was comfortable with. I’ve settled my beef with the guy since then, and whenever someone or something asks of me to humor (the concept of) him, I have found my own silent substitute to work with. Which is what I did when I dove into a strict routine of daily morning pages, weekly artist’s dates and assignments upon our return from a road trip around Europe in the spring of 2023. I was excited, focused, proud to do the work my greatest muse, Patti Smith, refers to; to stay immersed in it, the way the boys did when they worked on the record. I was not prepared to meet with a whole other definition of God.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

See, I got in deep. It took a week or two to get into the grind, but once I did, it really did become a built-in habit. Like brushing my teeth – leaving the house or going to bed without having tended to this little, enormous act of self-care, made me feel guilty, filthy even. I was up at 5am almost every morning to write my three pages – A4, may I add, and only because it didn’t dawn on me until after the fact, that I could have chosen a smaller format. It was a thing that was respected and encouraged by the entire household, toddler included. Even when she did swing by to invade my writing space, she never interrupted the flow. She knew the ritual by name – “mama, are you doing your pages?” – and knew it required me to sit still, so she tried to do the same. Grabbing her crayons to join in or organizing her books at my feet. I tended to my pages religiously, followed through on almost every assignment and by the time I made it through to the second month, I was a convert. A Jehovah in not-so-preppy clothes, knocking down phonelines to spread the gospel to my friends; one of those reborn ayahuasca tourists swearing by the creative healing powers of this way, the only way, to get your [INSERT ART FORM HERE] back on track.

I started dating myself. Quite vanilla at first, pretty hardcore by the end of it all.

The fact that I decided to flat-out ignore one of Cameron’s most essential rules played a big role in my evolution from creative wallflower to domme in disguise – at the writing desk and in the boudoir. Half-way through the program, The Artist’s Way calls for reading deprivation. A tactic I totally understand and, on some level, wholeheartedly agree with. Reading others’ work, as inspiring and motivating as it might be, can also really mess with your own pacing, your language, shit – your entire direction. If you’re in the right space though – walking your plotline strong and steadily without having to force your way back from the beaten path of deviations – reading is an act of both escapism and fuel. I wasn’t working on any long-form project at the time, nor was I reading anything in particular, so I took no issue with the call for depriving myself of the words of others. Until I did. Because it would have gotten in the way of my artist dates which, as a busy, tired-ass mom, often consisted of leisurely bubble baths, accompanied by, you guessed it – a slew of random authors who have taken up residency on my bathroom bookshelf. Yes. I’ve gots one of those.

Trust Erica Jong to have smutted her way into it.

The first page of a book I had been resisting for as long as The Artist’s Way – one I’d picked up for €2.50 just because it was written by the queen of aerophobia and the zipless fuck, but the title of which I hated – ended with the lines:

‘Whenever my life seems most unmanageable, I take a bath. I leaned back in the tub and let the water fill my ears. My hair flowed out around me. What the hell did I want, anyway?’

Woah – this bitch was talking straight at me here. Was I really going to deprive myself of such comradery? Nope. I kept on reading the tattered and torn copy of How to Save Your Own Life, laughing, every now and then, at the tragedy of its title – the letters bright yellow against a starkly black background. Imagining getting “caught” with it, then remembering the contradiction, the intrigue of the blurb, “more dazzling, more erotic than Fear of Flying”. And quickly realized, that there was really nothing erotic nor dazzling about it. It’s protagonist the antithesis of who I thought she was when I first met her, on a plane full of psychoanalysts, to Vienna. Everything I didn’t want to be (as a woman) or become (as a writer), which, strangely enough, set me off on a journey of discovery as self-involved and obsessive as Isadora Wing’s – only quietly, humbly, privately and lovingly so. In a dreamily, adolescent sort of way, minus the self-destruction. With my pen penetrating my pages with words I needed to assign myself. In the mirror, studying something that had gotten lost on the way, reflecting right back at me.

Confused by it all, yet somehow seeing it clear as gay.

Week two of The Artist’s Way is all about “Recovering a Sense of Identity” – something that really resonated with me. I’ve never felt like the type of mother who has lost herself completely to mothering, but all the cracks to my former self and, in particular, a 9-inch-deep incision in my lower abdomen, did do its damage and no matter how hard I tried to Cohen it, the light wouldn’t get in. One of the tasks to complete at the end of that week, is to “list ten changes you’d like to make for yourself, from the significant to the small or vice versa.” Most of the examples Cameron lists here, made sense to me. Under significant, “go to China” – right on, dream big; under tiny, “paint my kitchen” – let’s do this (I actually did paint my dining room). There was one example though, that I couldn’t help but ridicule, that tripped me up as some tired-ol’-lady problem every time I thought about it, and that was to “get new sheets so I have another set.” I mean, why bring the household into this exercise? Why bog myself down with something as unstimulating as sheets? And what the hell does that have to do with my identity?

Unless – it tended to my own, corporeal household?

That feeling of entering my bedroom at night, my bed all made up in a fresh pair of bedsheets, the smell of detergent still lingering in the room. The sheets still crisp and cold from hanging out to dry in the cold morning air. A feeling of comfort, joy, geborgenheit, with so much history. Like the blank page to a writer or hobby philosopher, not just to the mind but the skin. A moment to have my body, dirtied by the day, touched by the cleanliness of something soft and pristine. A space that is all mine. In which to be nurtured, by said sheets and covers warming my pajama clad body, mothering me after a whole day of mothering. In which to find autonomy, pure selflove when it’s nothing but my naked skin sandwiched between two layers of cotton counts, and I allow myself to truly feel myself for the first time that day. My back unravelling from a slouched or lopsided, toddler-wrangling position; my tits uncaged, untouched, nothing but the butterfly-kiss of my bedsheets resting against nipples springing to cold attention.

Refocusing on the small details. Rekindling a spark.

Yeah, I got it then. How quickly something that should be a given or, at the very least, easy to attain, became a luxury. Like taking the time to moisturize my thirsty skin when I’d already gone through the foreplay of having a bath – you really gonna take those five extra minutes to finish yourself off? Well yes, ma’am, I am. If I can’t find the mental space and privacy to do so literally, I figure I may as well stimulate the surface. Massaging the Lord of Misrule into my décolleté, my neck, my butt, my thighs. Slipping into my coziest, sexiest clothes before letting my fingers dance across the keyboard and edging my way to the brink of creative climax, until the weight of my eyelids win out over the pulsing persistence of Miss Gräfenberg’s hottest spot glowing red and ready like the X on Google maps. Screaming out to be heard under the noise of all the questions and longings, the musts and must-nots, knowing all along that, all we needed was to come together.

Get to know each other all over again.

To answer to all those urges I suppress throughout the day, let go of the mental load of…everything. When that moment came, when I started to answer to the call of the cunt – usually over the strangest incentives – I began to realize that, it was not really about sex, as in the act. It was about my sex – as in my desires in all spheres: all the new erogenous zones that seemed to have grown along with my belly during pregnancy, all those that were rendered insignificant; the new versions of myself I birthed and all they longed for in their newly improved and flawed iterations. Another way of giving in to the truth, my truth, of who I am, have always been and am growing into, in a completely new phase of my life, a new body and mindset, and an entirely new understanding of it. As something holy. As Goddess. As something to be loved and respected, explored and studied. Worshipped, primarily by myself, far from any mirror image or exterior contemplations. As for others, a new condition – you best bow down to this magic and earn all this vessel – and all that fuels it – has to offer. In each earthen Hex code. Or I’ll deem you unworthy of it.

It’s the one stimulus I can control. The one that invites me to lose control.

With a small pocket mirror, a tattered notebook and an eager index and middle finger. Watching for the swell, buckling under the ebb. Laying back in those brand-spanking new sheets and painting their blankness with my fantasies; imprinting on them, staining them. Bunching them up in fists I keep clenched throughout the uninterrupted noise of the day and the politics of a diseased system. Scratching at them with my nails, as an expression, an output of pleasure, rather than a frustrated dreamscape clawing at things I don’t understand and cannot change. This, now, is understood. This, now, is fact. I’ve come to save my own life by running toward rather than from my messiness – my wonderfully warped sexual identity, the chaos in and through which I have learned to write. Sometimes in the calm of those darned sheets, sometimes before the cluttered vanity table that holds none.

Either way, I am breathing a little hallelujah.

And the spirit – of the Artist, the Mother, the Father, the Rainbow – bitch, it is moving in me. Around the lovebud, across the page, past my lips and out into this world. Catch me if you can.