Welcome back to the Creative Overthinker! Today I’ll be covering the chapter 8 of The Artist’s Way: Recovering a Sense of Strength.

I genuinely enjoyed this week’s material. It was a welcome change from the past few week – I recently expressed my feelings on the “dwelling on the old memories” part of creative recovery. This week was about a more active approach that included envisioning goals, plans and milestones.

This is my jam. Nothing makes me happier than making a good plan than grants me a sense of control and awareness. You see, I like dreaming, but it usually doesn’t get people too far. Writing dreams down on a piece of paper has a magical effect for me. It feels like a contract that is binding now; it feels like an actual commitment.

This experience wasn’t the first for me – I usually try to write out 10 big goals for each calendar year, 3-4 goals and goal steps for each month, and a list of goal activities for each week. This system has helped me to be focused on the goal and end result, especially when some of the individual steps or activities don’t seem that exciting.

Since I’m still only figuring out the message and tone of Creative Overthinker, it was nice to revise the goals I have for this blog. I wrote them mid-January, and quite a few things have changed since then. So I took the opportunity and expressed the newer vision in written form.

Originally I wanted to share my goals and benchmarks here, but I think it’s going to be more helpful to do a separate post about it. I will post my yearly goals, as well as more specific down-to-earth objectives for the month of May. Follow the blog to receive the updates!

Another great exercise was to imagine myself as a color. I see myself as navy.

I imagine myself the color of the night sky. It’s deep blue, but not too dark yet. You can already see the stars, yet you still can see the trees around well enough. It’s a cozy color that feels like a slightly overwhelming embrace. It carries the smell of a wet warm summer night, and it sounds like cicadas’ singing. God, summer can’t come quick enough 🙂

I love these visualizing exercises. They quantify and qualify otherwise abstract words. They put attach a random word to a particular feeling that you have experienced before. They make your life that much more real – you can smell, and touch, and sense the things you were only vaguely aware of before.

What color do you imagine yourself as? Let your imagination run wild!