The Artist's Way

Posted by Annalytica


A couple of years ago someone recommended I should read "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron, a book about unblocking creativity. It sounded interesting, so I borrowed it - and then it sat on my shelf unread for an embarrassingly long time.

Then, a few months ago, I found out about a course running in Oxford. Course participants work through the exercises in "The Artist's Way" and meet weekly to discuss their progress. In theory, this was something I could arrange to do without paying for a course - except by this point I had had the book for two years and done nothing, and I thought the structure of weekly classes might be what I needed to motivate myself.

I had several reasons for thinking that unblocking creativity was something I should work on. For one thing, when we started this blog I was overflowing with ideas for posts and seriously considering professional freelance writing. Recently it seems to be getting harder and harder to come up with ideas, which is why you haven't seen much of me on here lately. When rehearsing Lashings acts, I often freeze up, feeling self-conscious and unsure what to do with my body, and needing quite precise directions from other Lashers. Sometimes this direction helps, and other times trying to perform movements recommended by someone else only feels even more awkward. If I were more in touch with myself and my own feelings, and less concerned with consciously thinking all my movements through, perhaps I could express myself and my characters in a more spontaneous and natural way.

CBT and me (TW: discussion of depression)

Posted by Annalytica
As I may have mentioned, I suffer from depression. Like many people with depression (and increasingly, like many people with any kind of mental health problem), I have at various points been recommended cognitive behavioural therapy. CBT is extremely helpful for a lot of people, but it isn't the magical panacea that many mental health professionals and policy-makers seem to think. In this post I want to explain why it has been particularly unhelpful for me.

To begin with I'll briefly explain what CBT is, for the uninitiated.

The little things

Posted by Annalytica

Feminists like to make a fuss over the little things. Throwaway remarks about apparently minor incidents are dissected for all their offensive implications, and as we pick them apart we get angry. Often people observing the dissection and the anger get the impression that the thing responsible for making us so upset is the feminism. It seems that we’ve invented new ways of getting offended and taught ourselves to get worked up and upset over things which never would have bothered us before we discovered feminism.