It’s Week Six of my foray into The Artist’s Way, friends. Things are going swimmingly. Last week—Week Five—I even, for the very first time, took myself out on an artist date.
The Artist Date is a key part of the TAW process. Every week you take yourself out on a solo trip. It can be long or short. It can cost money (maybe you go to a movie solo, maybe you take yourself out for dinner, maybe you go and buy yourself a donut from that cafe you’re always peeking at that popped up down the street), and it can cost no money at all. Maybe you take yourself out for a long walk along the lakefront. Maybe you just go to the flea market area of town and spend a few hours window shopping and dreaming and not spending a cent.
The point is, you have to get yourself into the habit of doing something that feels luxurious, something that sparks the creative impulse deep down inside of you and allows you room to play.
Surprising almost no one, I’m sure—least of all me—it took five weeks of the course before I allowed myself to go on an artist date at all.
The title of the Week 6 chapter of TAW is Recovering a Sense of Abundance. I got excited heading into this chapter because I love talking and thinking about money as it relates to writing and publishing. I love it. But I love it mostly because acquiring money as a writer who publishes books feels, well, impossible.
I love it because the whole journey of writing and money and figuring out what you have to do in order to stay fed and able to continue creating has been a very long, very hard, very circuitous journey for me. I have made a whole bunch of mistakes along the way. But talking about this is so useful. If I’d been able to have some long, candid conversations about money and expectations as a writer when I was in university I wonder how different my life might have been.
I’d probably have made many of the same decisions, including some of the financially precarious ones. Sure. But sometimes I also wonder what that might have done for my sense of abundance in life. I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades thinking like a miser—there’s only so much to go around, there’s only so much money you can expect to have in a creative pursuit. And so many people I’ve met and known through the years have echoed these same words right back to me.
Art isn’t something that you do for the money. You do it because you love it.
Writers throughout history have always had to scrape by. Remember George Orwell? Why would you think you’re any different?
Most of the people in the world live paycheque to paycheque, day by day, Amanda. That’s the large reality for most of the planet.
You create art because you want to reach people, not because you want to get rich! That isn’t what art is about!
If you want to be a writer that’s fine—but what are you going to do to make sure you get fed?
I don’t know—it just seems like you’re working a lot for not a lot of money, is all.
The thing is—I believe in the best parts of a lot of the above. I do believe that we create art because we love it. I do believe that creating art itself is a huge privilege, and though it’s difficult in so many ways, there are so many other professions out there that are harder. I do believe that I create art, that I write stories, to reach people. Not to get rich. I have saved every email and letter from every reader who has ever written me to say how much they loved my books. Each message means the world.
But messages don’t put food on the table.
Neither, when it really comes down to it, does the $1 I get from every copy that’s sold of my books.
What does all of this mean? Well, it means that as a writer under capitalism, someone who doesn’t happen (at this moment, anyway) to be writing a massive bestseller, I have tricked myself into believing that I don’t deserve abundance.
I have made bad choices, I told myself somewhere along the way. And I will have to live a small life because of that. I will not get to experience luxury because of that.
I don’t deserve treats, even ones that don’t cost any money. I don’t have time for abundance, for luxury, for a few hours spent floating around on an artist date just so that I can feel my soul open and my heart expand with the softness of possibility. I must always be working, thinking, planning, scheming, reaching, hoping, etc.
An artist date is an indulgence that I cannot afford.
This has been beating in the back of my mind even as I’ve thrown myself into the rest of this course. (It helped that I already had the book, and that I could do the course without spending any more money on it. Self-improvement FOR FREE? Sign me up!) Artist dates sounded like a good idea, but I couldn’t spare the money or the time. I am a few months away from the end of this grant year now and I need to squeeze every last penny out of my dwindling pot of grant funds. Every cent is accounted for and being spend on regular, boring things like food and utilities and bills. Nope. Nope. Can’t do it, can’t spare it. Won’t.
Then last Wednesday I forced myself out on an artist date anyway.
What did I do for my artist date? I went to the other side of town and visited a New Age gift store called Simply Zen. I bought a beeswax candle and a package (the largest package!) of Nag Champa incense. Then I went across the street, to a candle shop called Wick’d Wax, and bought myself a candle that smells like Douglas Fir.
It was glorious. It was so delightful. I felt so rich, even though I didn’t buy all that much. Just walking down the street with my little paper bag filled with treasures made my heart swell what felt like three sizes.
I was gone from the house for maybe an hour and a half, if even that. But when I came home it felt like I’d been gone for centuries. Like I’d stepped through a door of some sort into a new, brighter, more expansive life. It was amazing.
Maybe you do deserve beauty, Leduc, I heard my small, wry inner voice saying. Maybe you do deserve a world that grows and grows.
I guess there’s something to this Artist Date after all, is what I’m saying.
Of course I knew—intellectually—that an Artist Date would be beneficial. But it’s so easy, isn’t it, to get ourselves into the opposite mindset and stay there. I’ve had bad habits with money in the past—habits where I withheld things from myself and then splurged in one long extravagant rush when the weeks and months of self-imposed miserdom became too much to bear. Those extravagant rushes then became twice as expensive as they’d originally been because in order to justify them, in order to crawl out from underneath them, I had to go into miserdom all over again. And thus the cycle repeats, over and over.
Not all of this is my fault. It is hard to make a living as a writer—it always has been. When I look back over the last decade and a half I can see that it was one long series of desperate decisions, of throwing wants and desires and creative dreams out into the world and waiting to see what would stick. Long periods of being frugal and miserly and going without food because I had no other choice. Long periods of working until I dropped from exhaustion because I had no other choice. Long periods of feeling like I wasn’t worthy of celebrating or treating myself because capitalism says—doesn’t it?—that if you work hard you’ll be rewarded and yet I was working hard every day and most of the time there were no rewards at all.
But it’s also increasingly hard to make a living as, well, anything. Everywhere I turn I see the rising costs of being a human in the world. I spend most of my money at the grocery store these days and almost every time I go I find myself walking down the aisles and thinking, faintly, “What’s the ultimately goal here—that eventually even food will be out of reach?”
It all feels bleak, and undoable, and the dreams of creative freedom and monetary success seem to recede in the distance, farther and farther away. And I say this as someone who is already awash in privilege, lots of it. Not everyone gets to spend a year doing nothing but writing, even if that year is a frugal, every-penny-is-seriously-accounted-for leap of faith. (Remember my monk post? Living like a monk is excellent training for frugality! And also, as it turns out, for being an artist!)
Still, that small voice in my soul keeps whispering, piping up at the quiet moments. This can’t be all there is. Working and writing and writing and working and hoping and denying yourself because you just don’t deserve nice things.
Monks don’t need anything, that little voice would say, even as I also acknowledged that that was true. Monks don’t need anything.
But monks don’t need anything because they understand that the world will provide for them in some way—because they are worthy of that provision. They do that thing. They find beauty in the smallest of things so that the beauty buffet is ongoing, everywhere they look. They find abundance in the small things so that everything around them is a cornucopia of riches.
I didn’t realize until last week that these are two sides of the same coin. You don’t need anything. But just because you don’t need something, doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to have it. That’s where it comes from, my writerly miserliness, my reluctance to take myself out on artist dates: from the deep-seated belief that I don’t deserve beauty—that I’ve made all kinds of bad decisions and must therefore deny myself forever as a form of artistic penance.
This doesn’t mean that I can or should give myself license to spend at will. Of course it doesn’t. But it also doesn’t mean that luxury is confined to gigantic purchases—a golden yacht, a mansion with twelve different doors. Sometimes luxury comes in the form of buying the largest box of Nag Champa on offer. Sometimes it comes in the form of getting yourself a candle that smells like the deepest, most ancient Douglas Fir forest.
Sometimes it comes just in the sense of walking down the street on your own, carrying a purple paper bag holding treats that you bought just for you.
“Is this a gift?” the man at Wick’d Wax asked as he rang up my purchase. “I can put it in a box for you, if you like?”
“It’s a gift for me,” I said, and I felt the smile from my head down to my toes.
He grinned right back. “Well! That sounds perfect.”
And it was.
Here’s something I discovered just after I came back from my artist date: my Substack pot of money. The little bits of love that come every month from my paid subscribers. I have avoided dipping into that little pot because my You Don’t Deserve Nice Things self keeps saying the same refrain over and over: save that for when you really need it. For when you’re short on bills one month and need something to tide you over. Don’t spend a penny of it. People are subscribing and paying for your newsletter because they want you to spend money on food and bills so that you can keep working.
But then I thought: what if these tiny little luxuries are exactly the things that keep me working? And so, I dipped into that little pot. Just a little bit. It covered that box of Nag Champa and that beeswax candle and the Douglas Fir candle that I’m burning right now as I type this. And it was like the Universe sighed and said see, Leduc? See what I’ve been trying to tell you all this time?
You deserve beauty. We all do.
Understand that, and I’ll take care of all the rest.
Thank you, lovelies, for helping to take care of me last week. For your comments and your paid subscriptions and your messages when things strike you deeply. I appreciate it, and you, so much.
Here’s to another week of softness and possibility. May abundance fill your days.
I love your meditation and exploration of abundance, Amanda! It reminds me of one of the vows of the Zen Peacemaker Order: Do not foster a mind of poverty in yourself or others. So much of our sense of sufficiency and abundance depends on our state of mind. Once we get that, we get everything! I'm so glad you gifted yourself with that incense and candle -- enjoy!
Good for you! ❤️❤️ My artist date this week was online. I ordered a notebook I didn't need but it was too beautiful to pass up. It'll be here Thursday. Turns out I did need it - it's going to be the place I gather all my inspirational quotes!