“List five things you are not allowed to do. Now do that thing on paper. Write it, draw it, paint it, act it out, collage it. Now put some music on and dance it.”
There’s something that feels somewhat poetic about this task. Just reading the instructions make me smile. Usually when Julia Cameron has you make a list, it’s a list of 20-25 +, so this short little list was a no-brainer. Here’s what I came up with:
- Quit my job without an alternate in place.
- Eat a McDonald’s Cheeseburger
- Move to England
- Attend a scene study with Ben Ratner – one of the top coaches in the city.
- Submit a piece of my writing to a prestigious literary magazine
Stepping back and looking at my list, many of these things have to do with fear. Fear that I’m not good enough, or that I’m going to fail. The Cheeseburger one… well, I don’t know where that one came from. I haven’t had a McDonald’s burger in… I want to say 3 years. Maybe that’s why. Well, I’m certainly not going to run down the street and get one. It’s on my list because although it tastes good, I’ve not “allowed” myself to do it because of the way it makes me feel. That’s very different from my reasons for putting down the other 4. Fear.
So the instructions say to chose one, and I chose number 5. I decided to draw a picture:
One of the things I learned in acting school was buffoonery. We would take a scene that we were working on and exaggerate it to get us out of our heads, and to get us thinking outside of the box. I did something similar with this exercise. I took this thing I was afraid of, and I exaggerated it to the point of making it ridiculous. I made a forest with spiky trees, and a never ending road that leads to a mailbox – a daunting task to even reach the precipice. Then I drew a face with pointy teeth, and laughter at my efforts to become a published author. It’s no work of art, but it served its purpose. It showed me how ridiculous my fears really are. In reality, the mailbox is across the street, and there doesn’t have to be anything scary about dropping a manuscript inside of it. It’s only my imagination and my fear that makes it scary.
It’s an interesting exercise. I recommend it.