Category: morning

If you have followed me for some time, you will know that I have an on-again-off-again relationship with Morning Pages, a la Julia Cameron.

Well, I have started my Morning Pages journey back up, albeit, not in the morning. I don’t do mornings.

Julia says to write your morning pages first thing in the morning when you get up. Get up an hour before the rest of your household if you have to to achieve this.

This woman must not have cats.

I mean no insult to Julia Cameron in any way.

I am simply relating my experience.

Although I do not have to let my dogs outside to pee, usually, because my husband handles the first thing in the morning dog runs, they still have expectations of me the second I roll out of bed.

No matter what time I get up, no matter if my husband is here or not, I am allowed to get a shower and get dressed. Period.

After that, I am required to feed every animal in this house before I do anything for myself. Cats, dogs, guinea pig, fish…and sometimes our youngest child, but usually he sleeps longer than the rest of us.

I cannot feed the cats and make the dogs wait. The dogs would take it out on me and the cats. Now, truly, I am sure that the guinea pig and the fish could wait, but why when they take so little time to feed?

There is no way to get up before my cats get up. If I move, the cats are awake. If the wind blows, the cats are awake. If nothing is going on, the cats are awake. If I am asleep, they know. If I am almost awake, they know. If I open one eye, there is a cat there to meow at me, regardless of time or circumstance.

So, if I write my morning pages, I do it when I do it, after I feed all the critters, and typically after I feed myself.

I no longer multi-task.

I work to concentrate on doing a single task at a time, although for breakfast since it is typically just me and my dog, I will read or listen to a podcast.

This time around forget spiral notebooks. Forget composition books. I pulled up a dot grid A5 journal that I had planned to use as a Bullet Journal or something along those lines.

I am working my way through Julia Cameron’s book, The Writing Diet, so I also track my food in this book. Three pages for morning pages. One page for food tracking. In my case, about eight to ten lines, which I use double spaced by meal since I don’t have a lot to write there.

Now, let me say, for the first few days of this new habit, it was all well and good, especially since I have reclaimed my office desk and can easily work there from now on.

Years ago, for those who don’t know, morning pages were a godsend for me. I would write, sometimes pages and pages. I would let myself write whatever I needed to write out, for as long as I needed to write. I didn’t confine myself to three pages unless I didn’t have a lot to say. Two decades ago, I had so much to work through and too many things eating away at me.

Now, in hindsight, I understand. I understand not only why I had so much to write, but why for so many years nothing changed about what I wrote down, for the most part, even though the circumstances of my life changed.

I wrote until I healed through many things. I wrote until I left that path behind and started a new path. Oddly enough, even after all of these years, I will still say that the path itself may shift and alter, but the destination has never wavered.

These days, I am not working towards such hard-pressed goals. These days, I have done a great deal of healing work on myself. These days, I am in a much more secure and happier place.

My morning page writing reflects this.

Except when, like a few days ago, I started my day busy and kept busy doing things all day until my husband came home from the office. I wanted to get several things done that day before he got home…and I had a limited amount of spoons for the day. I ran out of those spoons before I sat down to do my morning pages.

You see, I am ok doing evening pages, or Midnight Pages (written by Diane Riis), or whenever the heck I feel like writing them pages.

Until that day, I hadn’t had an issue with the writing of them. But that day, after everything I had done, all I had accomplished, as much as I had completed and still had left to do but no longer had the strength nor energy to do another thing, I got angry. Both at myself and at my journal.

So, other than writing the date down that day, and tracking my food, the only thing I did towards morning pages was gripe and moan about how much I didn’t want to do them, how the three-page rule was forcing me to write long after I had gotten out what I needed to get out, how I didn’t need this practice, and yada yada yada.

The next day, after feeding the greedy hoard, I sat down, after I too ate, and began to write morning pages again as if nothing had happened.

I changed one thing. I no longer keep track of my food intact after my three pages of writing, in case I don’t write three pages. But other than that, I’m good.

I do have to admit, up until that one day, morning pages had not only been going great, but they had actually been helpful to and for me, in ways they had not been before.

I have finally gotten through and metamorphosed the belligerencies in my head so that I can write clearly and openly. I can now write one to exorcise demons when they pop up (hello, children), as well as being able to hear the intuition coming through to me and write that out in ways I can see and understand (boot to the head, only gently now).

Sometimes a teacher teaches something that works, especially when it works for that person. Sometimes that lesson works for others, but it doesn’t always work as the teacher intended nor does it work for every person every time. NO lesson ever affects every person the same way.

This is all right. This is life. This is how people are. Each and everyone is different, no matter how much the same they may be.

If you try morning pages and it doesn’t work for you, try doing it at a different time. Try doing it in a different format. If you need to write fewer or more pages, let yourself do it. If the entire thing is not for you, move on and try something else.

Allow yourself to have the space you need to be you and to do you.

For me, right now, the morning pages thing is working, as long as I allow it to do so.

At other times, on rough days, it is a travesty I can forget about until another time.

I am not about to guilt-trip myself for skipping a day here or there when I need to because this is supposed to be a helpful and healing process. Guilt-tripping myself for not doing it, or for not doing it right, will not help me in any way. So why do it to myself?

In case you are wondering, yeah, this book, The Writing Diet, and I, we are not having a good time together at the moment. I am giving myself a week to integrate each practice Julia Cameron suggests.

So far, two of the first three are doable for me. The third one, obviously she feels safe in her neighborhoods where she walks, in the areas in which she walks. Apparently, she fails to realize that that feeling of safety is a luxury not everyone else has.

In short, I am working to find…a workaround for that third practice. We’ll see how it goes. I will keep you updated if you are interested.