Meetup, Morning Pages, and a “Eureka Moment”

I’ve finally started organizing a Meetup here in Florida, for Julia Cameron’s original book The Artist’s Way. We had our first two meetings, and we’re off to a great start, etc. etc.

In the book the author discusses two main tools; one is something called the “morning pages” which are three pages of straight, stream-of-consciousness writing that you empty out of your brain onto the page as soon as you wake up. It takes about half an hour to do. The idea is to clean out all the garbage you carry around in your head, and process over and over, so you can free your brain up for thoughts that propel you forward instead. I’ve done this several times in my numerous rounds of Artist’s Way work, but this pass feels more like maintenance so I’m getting slightly different results so far. After a few days something really interesting happened.

A bit of backstory here: back when Demi and I were getting ready to move back to Seattle from Fort Wayne, and loading our earthly possessions into a U-Haul, we did a lot of culling of random things that we decided we didn’t have room for. Furniture, books, household junk, all kinds of stuff. At one point, a day or two before we left, he decided to give my iron to his brother because it was unnecessary weight, something that we could replace later, taking up a precious 0.25ft³, something. And I was livid! It made no logical sense to me because it was so small a thing but I let him do it, as a compromise, because I picked my battles, all that. Why fight over an iron? I’ll have $50 for one again. But it has seriously bugged the hell out of me for the last… three years now? and I could not figure out why. The answer finally came to me in my pages last week.

I got the iron in question as a Valentine’s Day present from my ex-husband, way back in 2001. (I mentioned it when he asked what I wanted- then he said, “I can’t, you’ll never let me live it down later;” but I’m a practical person. And I enjoy ironing when there isn’t much of it. So he sighed and got me the iron.) And upon reflection that may have been the one thing I still had that he actually gave to me (I don’t count the engagement ring because I picked it out four days before the wedding, just so we could say I had one. I think I wore it three times). I still have some things from the registry list, but other people bought those. I shed things like a snake when I move, for good or bad, and a lot of things go that I don’t even comprehend until later. That iron, oddly, was the last meaningful physical token of my marriage.

So I realized this, and thought, no wonder it bothered me so much. Five years of my life, and now I have not one thing left of it.

Once I wrote it down, on paper, and came to that, the burden was gone. It doesn’t bother me anymore. Just like that. And it drove me crazy for years. I wasted so much energy being pissed about it and I had no idea why. But now it’s over, and I’ve learned something.

I can only hope that I can come to understand the rest of my life well enough to detach all the other baggage I drag around with me.