Eighteen years of making music will teach you a lot of things.

When to push an idea and when to walk away. How to engineer a sound you heard in your head three days ago and finally lay it into existence. How to write around a block, or sometimes straight through it. I have learned that showing up is one of the most important factors in this creative Artist’s Way equation.

What it won’t protect you from is the quiet stretches. The ones where the intention is there but the energy isn’t. Where the ideas exist somewhere but won’t come to the surface. When you open the laptop and nothing moves you. That’s when the “resistance,” as Steven Pressfield puts it, is in your right ear, saying you should quit and get realistic. We all face this.

That’s where I’ve been lately. Hearing the wrong voices, getting distracted, and wondering if I’m in the wrong lane. And three weeks ago, I picked up Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for the second time in 8 years.

A Little Background on Why

Cameron is a bestselling author, director, playwright, and the person behind one of the most quietly impactful creative recovery programs out there. The 12-week course has a long cult following among artists of all disciplines. Musicians, writers, painters, filmmakers, yoga teachers, business owners, teachers, and even your neighbor. People who are used to making things freely, and somewhere along the path, got in their own Artist’s way.

This is my second time through it. The first time, it cracked something open. Asked questions I never thought to. This time feels more like maintenance. How did I forget and “I’m here again.?” It’s like going back to a place you know is good for you, but you’ve let too much time pass. Why did I wait this long?

I know I don’t stand alone on this road. Every producer, dj, painter, engineer, songwriter, photographer I’ve ever come across has had a version of this story. The wheel slows. The resistance shows up. You either keep moving or you don’t.

Where I Actually Am Right Now

Eighteen years in, my process has lived in a lot of different places. Let’s keep it a buck; it still needs lots of attention and tweaking. I don’t do this for a living, but I do generate some income and great joy from the whole process.

Early on it was pure energy. Touring, performing, djing, producing, engineering, and putting sweat equity in. No real intention, just ideas everywhere, staying up too late, opening sessions without a plan, and somehow finishing things. Completing projects, collabs with a whimsical feel. The novelty of it was actually useful. You don’t know enough yet to second-guess yourself.

Then comes the knowledge. You understand arrangement, sound design, mixing, mastering, the architecture of a track. You’ve studied it, worked it, and developed a real taste. That’s the good news.

The flip side is that taste outpaces execution sometimes. This is The Artist’s Way. You know what something should sound like and you can hear the gap between that and what you’re making. The perfection trap. That gap is where a lot of creative energy goes to die if you’re not careful. I’ve seen it right in front of me countless times.

Why don’t you release this? This is so good, people need to hear this! “I just have to get this mix right.” I understand both sides but have learned more from releasing my own creations into the wild than not. You put yourself out there for criticism, judgment, dislike, praise, compliments, and everything in between. The real win is declaring that you are finished and ready for the next thing. Putting those artistic decisions behind you and building a house on fresh land equipped with the skills from the last endeavor. That’s the battle.

Lately I’ve been in the boat of more intention and less energy to execute. The ideas are there. The follow-through feels like friction.

That’s the truth of eighteen years; it’s never fully one thing or the other. But right now the scale is tipped in a way I want to correct. Or at least listen and understand how it came to be.

What The Artist’s Way Is Doing

The core practice is morning pages. Three longhand pages every morning, stream of consciousness, before you do anything else. No editing, no rereading, Just whatever comes out. This is a key to The Artist’s Way.

It sounds deceptively simple. It’s not always easy. With each week, she has questions for you to answer, riff off of, to breathe new life into the monotony.

Alongside this, you are enticed to go on solo adventures, curiosity free diving, which she calls “artist dates.” For me it’s going into new vintage shops, new nature exploration, solo movie, solo show attendance, old record store, and museums.

The point of this is to stir up new/old wonder. Feelings you put aside because life gets in the way. Permitting yourself to explore is an underlying theme of this book.

I’ve come to understand this is a super powerful antidote. Many creatives think inspiration comes in mystical waves, but Cameron’s philosophy is more about input and output. When you’re struggling to output creative work, the lack of other artistic consumption may be the issue. You have to fill the well in order to drink from it.

Interacting with these two concepts weekly is a fun experiment. What it does is clear the drain. All the noise that accumulates, the comparison loops, the self-doubt, the list of things you haven’t finished — you write it out before the day starts. What’s left behind is quieter. More workable. That’s where the actual artist lives.

Four weeks in, the sessions haven’t suddenly transformed. I’m not pumping out finished tracks. But something has shifted in how I’m showing up to the work. The resistance is still there. I’m just less convinced by it. I know it will be around, so I accept it and soldier on.

Rick Rubin speaks to this specifically in his book (The Creative Act),

“Regularly engaging in this practice builds the muscle of focused intention, which you can use in everything you do. Eventually, tuning out the undermining voices and losing yourself in the work will not be an effort of will, but an earned ability. “

The Part That Actually Matters

I’m not Lennon. Not Dylan, not Dre, not Rick Rubin. I can’t put myself on that vision board of creative gods and use it as a measuring stick. That’s a losing game and I’ve played it enough to know.

I am me. Decades in and still on this rocky road, still figuring out the next stretch of it.

The point Cameron keeps pointing me back toward, the piece I keep having to relearn, is that showing up is the work. That IS The Artist’s Way. Not the finished track. Not the perfect session. The consistent presence. However little. However short, uncoordinated, or fleeting the moment is. A musical loop you don’t hate. A lyric fragment. Ten minutes of movement in a direction. It counts, it’s respecting the gift.

That’s the thesis I’m working from right now.

“Don’t read the book, you should read. Read the book you want to read.” ~Ethan Hawke TED

keep creating, continue showing up, and give yourself permission. You never know what’s around the corner.