History Part Two

My first attempts at doing "The Artist's Way" were solo and failed.  I tried it three or four times and got stopped at Chapter 4.  Repeatedly. This is the chapter where you give up reading for a week.  Tough one. I am a big reader and even though I know I use reading to escape, I could not give it up completely. Later on I also thought on some level that I really didn't want to complete the book. I wanted it to go on and on.  At some point, even though I found the appendix with the list of books for further reading, I didn't believe that I would find a book as cool as TAW.  Also I had the idea that I needed to do the book perfectly. If I didn't do each chapter perfectly then I needed to start over.
"The Artist's Way" touched me and I knew deep down that I was on the right path to be attempting the program in the book.  I cried reading the first chapter when there was a quote that said that the worst thing - I'm paraphrasing here- that one could visit upon one's children was the unlived life of the parent.  And then the part about shadow artists killed me.  I was always going to friends' art openings and never even thinking I was even close to being an artist.  I was thrilled by the possibility of TAW, but I was very apprehensive of telling anyone that I had the audacity to be doing it.  It was my secret while I grappled with the idea that maybe just maybe, I was an artist. The other really funny thing I did was buy the smallest notebook EVER to do the morning pages.  It was about the size of a Moleskine and it took me about an hour or two to fill up three pages.  Now that's funny. I can write three pages in no time nowadays.  Back then I would find myself staring off into space for large swathes of time while trying to get those pages written.