Wait...why did I do this?

 I'm working through The Arist's Way by Julia Cameron. I'm finding it helpful, though dated. It was published in 1992, so I'm not really surprised that it's a bit lacking. But so far, while the exercises may be difficult in that "I have to examine myself and I don't waaaaaant tooooo" sort of way they have worked in generally the way she said they should, there's been slow progress, I feel accomplished, all that.

But last week, Week 4: Recovering a Sense of Integrity, required a Reading Deprivation. It made me more than slightly annoyed, both in how it should be done and the reasons why and the reasons people have given her for why they couldn't do it. This lady, bless her successful, encouraging heart, has a lotta upper-middle class privilege going on with her.

I won't go in to all the reasons I didn't want to do this particular thing, they were not the reasons other people had given, I just did the week of reading deprivation, which threw off my fragile, newly formed routine set up to help me maintain healthy productive work habits. So I'm a wee bit cranky 'bout dat. And the Reading Deprivation didn't even do what it was supposed to, I think because the problem it's supposed to fix isn't a problem I had. So now I'm playing catch up and that's taking time away from my writing course work. Also, I had to take time off the writing course work, because even though it's an online video course, there's still reading and exercises involved, so I have to catch up on that too.

Listen to the Inner Voice when it rawrs. It knows things.

MY POINT IS....just because a smart person says a thing will do a thing for you, it may not and the voice in my head that said, "We don't have this problem. In fact, we have the opposite of this problem so we should skip this, it's just going to throw us off and we worked really hard to get here." I should have listened to that voice.