Today, I am resisting the specifics of The Artist’s Way tasks for Week Three. I don’t want to do the tasks she’s recommending because nothing is sparking excitement for me. I’ve avoided writing my post all day. But I know that when resistance is present, it just means I need to mine for the gold under the surface. So, I’m exploring myself through an exercise Cameron offers to help us restore the persons we abandon when we are blocked creatives – ourselves.

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100 Liminal Days is an experimental project of embracing my current transitional season after exiting my business by sharing an honest, real-time account of my self-initiation experience in daily posts. I’m sending shorter weekly recaps only via my newsletter. Visit Day 1/100 to learn more and sign up in the footer of this page to get the weekly recaps delivered to your inbox.

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In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes about how so often blocked people are powerful and creative types who have been made to feel guilty for their strengths and gifts. Whether it be that it’s too weird or not practical enough for a vocation, so often those of us feeling blocked are feeling that way because we have abandoned our true selves out of fear of hurting others. In the process, we hurt ourselves instead.

This resonates with me, and I highlighted this part of the book yesterday, but today I’ve read that paragraph multiple times and then tried to think of something else to focus on for my post. Because this is the part that I’m resisting the most, I’m going to make myself focus on this instead of going onto some other topic.

Detective Work, An Exercise

The exercise has a list of “fill-in-the-blank” style prompts. I’ll share the first three with my answers, but the list includes 20 prompts.

1. My favorite childhood toy was…three stuffed dogs – Duke, Homer, and Cutsie.
   
   These three friends became a packaged deal for me for as long as I can remember. Duke and Cutsie were beagles who looked exactly alike, only Cutsie was smaller, softer, and kinda floppy. I had given her a gold fishbone clip-on earring on one ear. She and Duke both had brown collars, and my grandma had given me some of her old dog’s rabies tags that I attached for each of them.
   
   Homer was a white scruffy dog, and I had given him a small plastic Houston Astros baseball helmet. That’s how he got his name.
   
   I played with these dogs all of the time as a kid, and I actually kept them well into my twenties at least. Maybe longer – I might even still have them in my storage shed! I loved these animals and would always set them up neatly on my bed after I made it.
   
   I find it interesting that my favorite toys were so simple – just stuffed animals, not some kind of gadget (which I totally loved those things, too). The fun was in the imagination and making up conversations between all of us.
   
   
2. My favorite childhood game was…Chinese checkers.
   
   I almost said Monopoly on this one because that’s the game I remember playing the most. My sister and my step-sister and I played Monopoly for hours and I don’t remember ever actually finishing a game. One time we had been banished from the house to play outside and we still insisted on playing Monopoly. I just remember the money blowing all over the yard.
   
   But my favorite game was Chinese checkers. The set we had was in a metal tin and I think the board was also metal. Maybe you remember this game – it’s shaped like a big star with different colored marbles in each of the triangle spaces of the star. The object of the game is to move your marbles to the opposite triangle by taking one adjacent spot after another or jumping over other marbles.
   
   I think I liked this game because it stretched my strategic brain a little bit and it was fun to play with all of the marbles. My sister and I played this one at my grandparents’ house. I can’t remember much of the details, but this was definitely one I could play for hours!
   
   
3. The best movie I ever saw as a kid was…The Princess Bride.
   
   This is a classic! I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of things growing up, but this one is very wholesome and entertaining. It’s like a fairy tale with action, adventure, romance, and magic. Lots of memorable one-liners, too. My favorite – “No more rhymes and I mean it!” “Anybody want a peanut?”

And the list goes on, but I’ll stop here for the post. Cameron says that answering these questions and allowing yourself to free associated for a sentence or two might bring up some big emotions as you start retrieving those lost fragments of yourself. As I worked through the list, I was reminded of how much of childhood play is full of imagination and dreaming. That’s definitely something I’ve stifled as I’ve “grown up.”

I’ve written about this before, but I do see how over the years I convinced myself that childish creativity is only for kids and adult creatives must build something practical and purposeful. But there is something else arising out of this exercise that raises the question:

Why am I still worried about what my parents will think of me if I don’t have a practical, purposeful way of earning a living?

A Confession of Fear

As I’ve been working on this project, 100 Liminal Days, I’ve had this thought multiple times. “I don’t want my mom to read this.” And further, I have entertained some ideas for work I might want to do in the future, or art ideas I want to create – and then I notice a twinge of fear. What will my parents think if I do that? How funny it is that I’m thinking like this when I’m nearly 45 years old!

I think this ties to this idea of blocked people feeling like they need to hide their light under a bushel to avoid hurting others, and it makes me wonder how bright my light could be if I were able to let this fear go. Because it’s not just about what my parents might think of me, it’s a fear of what any others will think of me. No one likes to feel embarrassed.

As I’ve allowed this self-initiation project to do its work on me, some clarity on my path has begun to shine down. Ideas about what my calling may be – what might be on the other side of this liminal season – keep tapping me on the shoulder. And my response has been to shudder. To internalize that dreadful phrase, “what will they think of me if I do that?”

I think I’ve always known that I was born to do some weird things in this life. And on one hand, I’m proud to take a path that is not mainstream. But on the other, I’m still afraid of showing what I’m really made of. As much as I’d like to keep writing this and share something less cryptic and tell you that today is the day I’m ready to be weird in all my glory for the world to see, I’m not there yet.

I know these 100 Liminal Days are helping me get there.

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