Morning pages, if you’ve never heard of them, were first suggested by writer Julia Cameron as a fundamental part of her Artist’s Way method. To do them, you sit down first thing every morning and write three longhand pages of whatever comes to mind. Cameron goes so far as to suggest never lifting the pen from the paper and simply repeating the same word or phrase over and over If you happen to get stuck for what to write next. They’re meant to be a sort of brain dump, clearing away the fog and detritus of daily living and shooing away any unhelpful thought patterns before diving into a day’s real creative work. Cameron also suggests ending each day’s writing with an affirmation. When I did them, I chose, “I am a writer” as a simple, powerful reminder to myself that I define my own identity.
That early experience with morning pages was torturous (I spent so much time cursing the professor in them that I still remember her name—Dr. Barron), but it became my model of how to be a writer, so I kept at it, picking up the practice, time and time again, throughout my creative life, sometimes using the whole of the The Artist’s Way program, and sometimes on their own. Most notably, I wrote morning pages religiously throughout the years I lived in Seattle. I had a ritual of ordering an asiago bagel and a cup of coffee and ensconcing myself at the table next to the fireplace at the Panera in Kent, Washington to scrawl my three pages before attacking my short fiction or novel-writing. Those were intensely productive writing years for me. They were also miserable. In fact, throughout my whole life, morning pages have gone hand-in-hand with depression.
I realize there may be a bit of chicken-and-egg scenario going on—it’s possible I turn to morning pages as a way of dealing with depression—but I don’t think that’s the case. In The Artist’s Way, Cameron writes, “…morning pages are often negative, frequently fragmented, often self-pitying, repetitive, styled or babyish, angry or bland—even silly sounding. Good!” She argues that putting those things on the page purges them.
I disagree. I think, especially for those of us prone to depression, writing those thoughts down gives them power.
My mother was a morning pages devotee. She filled thousands of journal pages during her lifetime. It was a rare morning that I didn’t wake up to find her with coffee at her side, rollerball gliding through line after line of her neat, Catholic-school cursive. Morning pages aren’t meant to ever be read—not by friends or family or even by yourself—but my mom left all those journals behind when she died in 2016. A friend of hers warned us, “Those journals weren’t your mom,” she said. “She used them to get everything out on paper so she didn’t take it out into the world.”
They were still all we had left of her, and my brother and I couldn’t resist. We found thousands of pages of misery. All the pain, doubt, anger, and hurt of a lifetime was bound in those volumes, and the thought of her starting every day of her life with such an outpouring was unbearable. We still couldn’t bring ourselves to destroy the journals, but we stopped reading. We split the pile and each took half. Even now, the thought of that Rubbermaid bin full of writing in my attic feels heavy, as if the sheer weight of it might one day come crashing through my ceiling, spilling out all the negativity within.
Cartoonist and author Lynda Barry describes unguided journaling as, “a hampster [sic] wheel of feelings of worry and dissatisfaction about our relationships with other people.”
For me, riding that hamster wheel was treacherous. Instead of purging the negative thoughts and revealing them for the traitors they were, the morning pages amplified them. They promoted the sort of circular thinking in which I would present a thought as truth and then, with the unceasing nature of the writing, invent justification to back up the thought’s reality. As often as not, when I was doing morning pages regularly, I started the exercise feeling all right and ended it in tears.
For a long time, I believed that was simply part of being a writer, that I needed to write out all those thoughts because otherwise, those feelings would remain festering inside me, blocking the flow of creative energy and keeping me from my full potential.
