The Artist Date is another tool alongside Morning Pages (both from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way), where you set aside a block of time to take yourself out for some quality time.

I know, right? Quality time with yourself. No one else. No tag-alongs or interruptors allowed.

Like morning pages, you’re hold space for yourself, and you can kind of do anything you want during that time as long as it’s self-nurturing. Could be a long walk in nature, a treat day at the shops, go to the movies, go bowling, sit and read a book you want to read for leisure rather than obligation. Stuff like that.

The analogy is that our free, creative self is a child. And your sensible self is the parent. And the Artist Date is the parent and child having a nice, uninterrupted, un-interfered-with time together. Special time. As the child, you’ll get annoyed when someone or something encroaches on your special time. As the parent, you owe it to your inner creative “child” not to let anything encroach.

All right, so this thing that resembles an indulgence and it should be easy right? EHHHH. Wrong. Well, for me anyway. I thought I had a handle on slacking off, having left my workaholic days behind. But life and normality encroaches in such sneaky ways. Week 1 was easy – I caught a bus to bought myself a notebook and some stickers, and literally walked a couple of roads I’d never been down before. Fun and straightforward.

The following weeks, not so much. I started those weeks with no idea of what to do, sparking a storm-in-a-teacup about my life being over if I failed to think of something before time ran out, followed by berating myself for worrying so much about needing to follow this course to the letter. (When perhaps the whole point of the exercise is to just do what you can and not get so locked up in stress over it! 😵‍💫)

And because you can’t just shift one element of your perspective without other elements shifting too, it set off a ripple that challenged a bunch of underlying assumptions and beliefs in ways I wouldn’t have guessed if I wasn’t the chump going through it. It was weird and unexpected, and mildly confronting, but feels oddly good. Like I’ve let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

Like with morning pages, you can just do the Artist Date in the name of mental and emotional recovery. Even physical recovery, unless your idea of a fun date is a 10km run (gross). Nurture yourself. Treat yourself. Re-centre yourself. Do you have it in you to do this once a week? Do you have it in you not to?