Kimberly O'Connor

Hello! It’s time to consider week 10, titled “Recovering a Sense of Self-Protection.” There’s tons of good stuff in this chapter, as always, but to me the biggest, most important takeaway from the chapter is this:

Don’t Clean Your House.

Photo by eleonora on Unsplash

That’s right: don’t clean your house. Chapter 10 delves in to the addictions and distractions we can use to take ourselves away from our art. Cameron describes these distractions as a way to protect ourselves from the fear of creativity that I wrote about last week.

She explores quite a few possibilities for distraction: food, alcohol, relationship drama, work. She calls these distractions “blocks,” because we use them to block our creativity. She says:

We begin to sense our real potential and the wide range of possibilities open to us. That scares us. So we all reach for blocks to slow our growth. If we are honest with ourselves, we all know which blocks are the toxic ones for us. Clue: this is the block we defend as our right.

One of my biggest blocks is tidying up. I tend toward anxiety, and messiness and dirtiness unsettle me. I feel best when my house, my space, is clean and neat and tidy.

I read somewhere once that the secret to a tidy house was a “constant state of low grade tidying.” This is perfect. And true. There’s always something amiss, crumbs on the counter, mud on the floor, dog hair on the couch. Laundry. Toothpaste spots on the mirror. Papers piling up. Mail to sort. Fingerprints on the glass.

One of my biggest battles as a writer has been learning to sit down and write before I clean up. The pandemic lockdown helped, because we were always home and so it was always kind of messy and I had to face the Sisyphean battle for what it was: impossible to win. I learned to sit down and work and be okay with some messiness. Sometimes a lot of messiness.

There’s a terrific workaholism quiz in chapter 10. I think my form of constant tidying was a form of workaholism. If I am busy cleaning up, I don’t have to face the page.

Here is the list of “the uglies” that Cameron says we can use to distract ourselves from our creative work: alcohol, drugs, sex, work, money, food, family, friends.

This week, consider which ones might get in the way of your art!