Caught in a Trap

By Carol Woolum Roberts

Taking care of ourselves and giving ourselves some creative solitude on a daily or even weekly basis is not selfish.  It is a good thing.  It is needed.

On Monday, when I discussed Chapter 5 in “The Artist’s Way” book by Julia Cameron with our Sacred Community Garden community, one of the things we talked about was “The Virtue Trap”.  This section starts out with these words:

“An artist must have downtime, time to do nothing.  Defending our right to such time takes courage, conviction, and resiliency.  Such time, space, and quiet will strike our family and friends as a withdrawal from them.  It is.”  --Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way.

This is the third time in the last year I have gone through this chapter.  But this time through, I made some realizations about myself.  As a young mother, I was not myself.  Part of this had to do with falling into “The Virtue Trap”, and not giving myself permission to have some time to myself.

This chapter hit close to home as I remembered my time as a young mother.  Cameron continues these thoughts by writing:

“For an artist, withdrawal is necessary.  Without it, the artist in us feels vexed, angry, out of sorts.  If such deprivation continues, our artist becomes sullen, depressed, hostile. We eventually become like cornered animals, snarling at our family and friends to leave us alone and stop making unreasonable demands.

We are the ones making unreasonable demands.  We expect our artist to be able to function without giving it what it needs to do so.  An artist requires the upkeep of creative solitude.  An artist requires the healing time alone.  Without this period of recharging, our artist becomes depleted.  Over time, it becomes something worse than out of sorts.  Death threats are issued.”

This could be a very accurate description of myself at many times throughout my adult life.

One area I see people fall into “The Virtue Trap” is as a parent, especially when the children are young.  Another way I see people fall into this is as a caregiver for either their aging parent or their spouse. 

“Many of us have made a virtue out of deprivation.  We have embraced a long-suffering artistic anorexia as a martyr’s cross.  We have used it to feed a false sense of spirituality grounded in being good, meaning superior.

I call this seductive, faux spirituality the Virtue Trap.  Spirituality has often been misused as a route to an unloving solitude, a stance where we proclaim ourselves above our human nature.  This spiritual superiority is really only one more form of denial.  For an artist, virtue can be deadly.  The urge toward respectability and maturity can be stultifying, even fatal.”

I think I have been in this trap for most of my adult life.  I would choose to do what I thought I should do.  What I thought was expected of me. Instead of quieting myself and listening, I would do what I “thought” was right.

Being a stay-at-home mom was the right choice for me when my daughters were  young.  There were tools I could have used that I didn’t know I should have in my life.  I needed those times of creative solitude on a regular basis, but that never occurred to me.

I didn’t take the time to serve myself because I was told that was selfish. But if I had taken some time for creative solitude on a regular basis, I would done a much better job parenting my children.  Later I would have been a better employee.  I would have been a more caring daughter for an aging mother.

Does your life serve you or only others?  Are you self-destructive?

If you don’t give yourself time to be alone to “refill your creative well”, figure out a way to do this.

You aren’t being selfish.

You are making yourself better equipped to take care of those who need you in your life. 

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How do you take time in your life to find creative solitude?  Share with us in the comments below so others can learn ways to “refill their creative well”.

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