Five Years and 33 Morning Pages Later
Five years ago, I sat down at my computer every morning for a month trying to complete Morning Pages. Loads of creative folks swear by Julia Cameron’s daily creative process to get ideas flowing, first thing. The idea is to handwrite three pages of free-flowing thought — or, whatever you want. I started and stopped several times before concluding perhaps it wasn’t right for me.
But five years ago, I typed them as emails and saved them as Drafts — which means I now have a view into who I was five years ago, a few months away from 30 when it mattered to be on the cusp of something. “Culturally,” writes Jeanna Kadlec in her essay, I Didn’t Manage to Publish a Book by 30, and That’s Okay, “30 marks the end of adulthood as discovery, as a kind of prolonged exploratory youth: hence, young adults. Thirty isn’t young. Thirty is the mystical age by which things have to have happened for you — personally, professionally — or they won’t.”
Here are a few things I wrote during that time:
April 15, 2014
I’m uncomfortably Type-A at times and though I have a great affinity for organization and office supplies, I would never say that I have a passion for these things. Passion is one of those overused words like love and literally. It’s been applied haphazardly to so many inappropriate feelings and phrases that none of it makes sense anymore.
