I’ll start out with this — I have thought of myself as creatively blocked for a long, long time. Over the last month, I’ve told a few people I have been feeling this way, but before that, the only person who actually knew was my boss. In the middle of one of our weekly, standard 1:1’s, I surprisingly blurted it out when I wasn’t expecting to. It’s hard to admit you aren’t feeling creative when your job is to BE creative and I guess I’d naively hoped that just saying the words out loud to the person who is in charge of me would cause all my ideas to float their way back into my head.
This did not work.
So, on a whim, I purchased “The Artist’s Way.” Multiple people in my life who I respect as creatives had recently been exploring the workbook and, while I’d always been hesitant to the concept for literally no good reason (joke’s on me, it’s discussed in the intro), I decided I was willing to try anything to get my spark back.
“The Artist’s Way” is broken up as a weekly workbook — you read the chapter, you do the exercises, you recap your feelings about it all. With the caveat that I am still early-on in the process, I would consider the most significant parts of the program being the Weekly Artist Date and the Daily Morning Pages. Both are as straight-forward as you’d think — every week, you’re required to take yourself on a solo artist date in whatever capacity that means to you (mine thus far: seeing “Killers of the Flower Moon,” going to a lecture at Cooper Union, viewing the Spike Lee exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, attending a mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral) and every morning, no matter what, you must handwrite three pages. These pages are not meant to be written. They aren’t even meant to be read again. It’s supposed to be considered more of a brain dump, a way to get you into a routine and clear your mind of distractions to make room for the creative energy that’s been hidden underneath. I was skeptical, but by week two, I was shocked that it was working. In the middle of dutifully writing about something completely unrelated, I got an idea for a personal project, the first in many years that came to me fully formed and just immediately felt right.
This is the beginning of that project.
When I was a kid, I remember asking my mom when it was going to be this date again. She explained the concept of days, of months, of years, but I kept pushing — when was it going to be this day, this month, this year again? She told me that it wouldn’t. When she said that time is linear, that this specific day, this exact moment will never be repeated, I... have never been the same. In the course of a single afternoon when I was six, my entire worldview changed. Knowing it couldn’t be repeated, I became obsessed with wanting to track everything about my life to make sure it was saved for posterity, saved so that I could revisit the present as the past when I was in the future. I struggled with how to properly do this throughout my childhood — I have many, many journals from my elementary school-aged years filled with nothing but lists of my daily top five favorite things — but in 2011, I found the perfect tool.
On one of my first trips to Boston the summer our family moved to Massachusetts, I stumbled across a book called One Line A Day. It’s a lined journal, with each page dedicated to a specific day and, under that, the lines are broken up into five distinct sections. Every day, you write a sentence or two about what you did or how you felt. Eventually, when the book is filled up, it’s five years later and, look! You now have a written personal history of everything you did over the course of the last 1,825 days. I can acknowledge that it’s an obsessive and kind of unhinged habit, but that being said — I am now on my third diary and the 13th year of documenting my existence.
As you could imagine, I have changed a lot over the course of 13 years. As I’ve collected more datapoints on myself and my experiences, I’ve tried to revisit entries to look for patterns or coincidences. While I did this privately, I haven’t felt confident enough to share this piece of my life artistically, but something the other day over my morning pages and coffee clicked and I, now, finally feel ready to tackle the project that is, I guess, my life.
So, here it is — each month, I’ll use a random date generator to pick a day (this month’s is November 10th), then go back to each journal entry I wrote on that date. Making sure to retract some names to protect the privacy of anyone I’ve interacted with in the past 13 years, I’ll string the posts together to piece together the pattern of my life. (On top of this, I’d like to create a physical art piece that relates to the entries as I think I have been really missing creating something with my hands, but that is only for me and my gallery wall). Of course, there may not be a pattern — this is just my life, not a story! — but for someone who has been feeling so creatively unsound and unsure, I’m eager to go back through the archives of my life with a different perspective to explore who I used to be and find a little more of myself again.
November 10, 2011—2022
2011: Anna, Alix and I dominated Zumba, then Anna, Erin and I went to Concannon’s for dinner. Chels, Liz, Alberto and I watched “Elf,” and [a guy I’d be involved with for many more years] told me he can’t be nice to me, ever.
I don’t remember if this was the first time he told me he couldn’t ever be nice to me, but it definitely wasn’t the last. (That was five years later, the last time I saw him, early in the morning after staying up all night, after finally realizing it would never, ever work). We’d get in fights — huge fights, screaming matches — all throughout college, fights that pretty consistently ended with being together, but never us being together. I used him as the blueprint for what type of love I should accept from men and it took me far too many years later to realize it was a very, very flawed plan.
2012: Dayglow was so fun! We got all the way to the front and it was so hot and messy. [A friend] kissed me and we went to SigNu. After, [my roommate] and I came home and took a clothed shower together drunk.
2013: I spent the entire day typing in History cards and eating leftover Fazoli’s while listening to One Direction. I went to chapter and Allie and I went food shopping at Walmart to buy apples and stuff.
College friendships were so easy and they were so easy because we were all always together. Behavior that would be concerning if we did now or alone (we showered in our clothes! we stole a months supply of free breadstick coupons from a chain restaurant and lived off solely that for days! we spent hours in Walmart even though we bought nothing but apples because we had no other obligations!) became hilarious moments because they were memories we were making as a unit, stories for us to call back to in the future. I live alone now in my adulthood and, while I love my apartment and the peacefulness of knowing everything inside is a decision I have made by myself, there are times I think back to how nice it used to be to walk out of a room, hungover and young, to four other people lounging on top of each other on the couch — comfortable enough in ourselves and each other to always be touching — ready to figure out what we were going to do, together, that day.
2014: [My boss] assigned me to both Travel and Capital, so I am really busy this week. I had a really fun time working on Travel — I think it looks pretty neat and I am glad I got to have this opportunity.
2015: I had a lot of anxiety at work because [the illustrator] sent me the illo really late, but luckily, [the editor] liked it. When I finally got off work, I had to go over edits with [my freelance boss] which is just exhausting.
2016: People were less sad at work today, but it was still very somber and weird. [The editor] called a staff meeting to discuss how we are going to do our jobs and it was emotional.
Maybe I was glad when I was writing that entry in 2014, when the newspaper was done and put to press, but that is not cohesive with my memory of that full week, when my boss at The Boston Globe looked at me and said “You should design this extra section.” I remember feeling so afraid I was going to fuck it up, that I’d be seen as a fraud, that I was not actually creatively deserving of this job I’d worked so hard to get. Unfamiliar with the commonness of imposter syndrome, I remember thinking maybe I had picked the wrong career if this low level of artistic anxiety was how I was going to feel all the time.
A year later, I had the same job at a different publication and with it, a whole new set of responsibilities to feel unqualified at. By then, I’d gotten a little more comfortable pushing myself creatively, but until I started at TIME, I’d never had to hire an illustrator. While I was at the Globe and all throughout college, I was the illustrator, so learning to depend on someone else to adhere to a deadline instead of just relying on myself was an acquired taste my anxiety did not love. In my early years of living in New York, I was also still freelancing for an editorial spot in Boston and, while the extra money was nice, doing copy and design edits for hours over the phone with an old-school newspaper man was not. I’d hang up the phone on days like this, stressed and exhausted, and, even though I loved my job, I’d still wonder if I’d picked the right path.
November 10, 2016 was a couple days after the presidential election, but also a day I knew, with absolute certainty, that I had chosen the right career. When I think about all the experiences I had over my almost 8 years at TIME, being in that newsroom for the 2016 election is the first moment that always comes to mind. The energy of election nights at a news organization is indescribable; the energy of that election night was historic. Looking back on this entry, I wish I hadn’t used the phrase “how we are going to do our jobs” because a few nights earlier, I’d watched in real time as my colleagues recalibrated the vision for the future of America we’d thought was coming and did just that. It was emotional and our jobs were going to be different, and maybe much harder, than we’d initially envisioned, but on that day — just like every single day I walked into that office — I was so proud to work at TIME.
2017: Chels and I were so hungover at work, but we had to pull it together to go to Abby’s birthday party at Bar 169 at night. It’s incredible we made it.
I have no real memories from this night. I don’t even remember going to this bar, though I’m glad to see we made it to celebrate our good friend. My only selective experience of being at Bar 169 is less than a year later on a night in August when I was with a group of friends and my ex and then, suddenly, just my ex. He’d told me he was casually seeing someone and that hurt to hear, but still, even as he said it, even as I was processing the information with a smile plastered on my face, we were recognizing that we were going to end the evening together anyway.
It was quiet between us in the taxi once when we’d made that decision, less electric than it had been when we’d been at the bar dancing around it, and as we drove with my head pressed against the cold window instead of his shoulder, I wasn’t thinking about him — I was thinking about the man from 2011, the man who’d taught me this was the kind of love I wanted, the kind of love I deserved.
2018: I spent the day biking the West Side Highway with Mom, Denise and Uncle Tom. From there, I went straight to Serria’s standup show where she killed it and then we went to Billy’s to celebrate.
2019: I spent the day at Grandpa’s with Mom and Dad just having a very chill day. Mom and I set up the Christmas tree and then they dropped me off for the train — it was a nice day.
2020: Charlie was at daycare again and it was nice, so I worked outside and got a lot done on the Best Books package. I feel pretty good about it and Mom and I had a nice and early dinner.
Potentially the greatest gift of my twenties was that I moved closer to my family. In college, when I was halfway across the country, we were still close, but there is something intimately special about wanting to — and being privileged enough to get to — spend time with your parents as an adult. In the same way that I relied on my friends in school, my adulthood was shaped by me spending large amounts of time with my family and I’m grateful for the strong relationships and important memories I’ve made.
2021: [The guy I was dating] and I went on a very fun date where it was bingo night and then we just went back to his place to cuddle on the couch. I really love spending time with him even though it’s a casual thing.
2022: I woke up still upset about last night, but have decided to just move through it — I am sad and upset, but I will be fine. At night, I went to the AI-AP party which is always fun if a little exhausting.
I did love spending time with the guy I was dating in 2021, but I did not love that it was a casual thing. I pretended that I did and, for a minute, I pretended so hard that I actually believed it. If you’d asked me, I’d have told you I loved the flexibility, the fun, the freedom. But, after every date night, after every cuddle on the couch, he would fall asleep with his arm draped on my stomach and I’d stay awake all night, staring at his ceiling, wondering how I’d once again let myself get into this situation.
In 2022, it was the same scenario, different man. I was upset because the night before, the man I’d been seeing — who I’d told I was fine with our casual relationship even though, really, I wanted him to be my boyfriend, had wanted him to be my boyfriend for almost as many years as I had known him — said he was going to give things another try with his ex. I was furious with him for not wanting to try with me, but even more upset with myself for not expressing my real feelings, for being too numb or too scared or too cool or too nervous to tell him how much I’d really wanted him to want me.
On November 10th of this year, I woke up in my bed with my head on the chest of the man I’d just started dating exclusively. The night before had been the AI-AP party. It had been so difficult to get in that our team bailed on the hour-long line and went to grab a drink instead. For me, an outgoing introvert who used to heavily rely on an alcoholic buzz to get through these types of events (I do believe this party is the reason Chelsea and I were so hungover in 2017) and now kind of just flounders through them sober, this was much more fun, way less exhausting and allowed me to get home early to spend time with the man I’d been able to have open, honest and intentional conversations about what we both wanted out of our relationship. For the first time in too many years, I was able to directly express how I was feeling — we hadn’t been seeing each other for very long, but I didn’t feel too numb or too scared or too cool or too nervous to tell him how excited I was that we were together.
A big part of the Artist’s Way has to do with accepting synchronicity, to learn how to lean into the occurrence of meaningful coincidences. Weeks earlier, on our first date, this man was the first person I told about the project — I hadn’t started writing yet, but a day before, the generator had already chosen the date of November 10th.
“It should be interesting to explore the patterns of my life,” I’d told him that night with my knees draped over his legs, comfortable enough with each other already to try to cuddle on a park bench even though we’d had our first conversation only a few hours earlier. “I’m sure there are similarities, but you know — it’d also be nice to see if I can get some clarity on how I have grown.“
It’s early, but I’d like to think that it’s working already.