I’ve been feeling my creativity hit new levels lately and it’s felt so invigorating. I know that in addition to resting and family time, this weekend will be spent working through a few different creative hustles. The ones I’m focusing on — mapping out a course, a community platform, and prepping for a photoshoot next week — all fall into the category of creative hustle for me.

But whether you’re pursuing a hobby, a side hustle, or a passion project this weekend, I know weekends spent with your creativity can sometimes feel lonely. A big goal for my community member platform is to give us all a space to connect with others who also value creativity in similar ways. But in the meantime, I don’t want you to feel lonely or alone.

I signed up for a writing habits class back in December. My top goal when I signed up was that I wanted to have a more consistent, sustainable relationship with my writing practice. I wanted to rebuild my habit from scratch mostly because by the end of 2020 I felt like I had very little of it to hold onto anyway. While I didn’t talk about this publicly, I spent a better half of last year working on a book proposal that didn’t end up selling.

From a marketing and business perspective, I completely understood the why and the how. On a personal level, I was gutted. The book was memoir personal essays and not selling it felt like the world reflecting back to me that I wasn’t a good writer, that my story had no value, and that I couldn’t write the kind of stories I wanted to spend my time on.

I’d seen The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron on bookshelves for years, but had never picked it up. To be honest, I only picked it up in January because it was the main read of a class I had signed up for through Literary Arts. Sifting through their website a few months ago, I was drawn to the course because it said it was dedicated to helping students cultivate a writing habit, which is something I felt I was missing.

I could have never imagined what the first six weeks of the class - and of working through The Artist’s Way - would actually entail. True to its name, it is a recovery workbook and it weaves into more than just your creative life. I still have six weeks to go in the program, but I have already felt such a shift in my own process.