Fourth Week of The Artist's Way

I've been working through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way 12-week course. I've been doing really well with it, writing the morning pages and going for the Artist Dates.


I definitely feel an improvement with my creativity and flow, and I love doing the morning pages, but...

I'm on the fourth week of the course now, and there's this "Reading Deprivation" exercise that I have to do. Reading deprivation as in, no reading. For a week. As in, I might as well die.

Okay, I know I'm being a little bit melodramatic, but I feel like this is going to be really difficult for me to do.

Honestly, I actually think it's a great exercise. For a long time now, I've realized that I'm addicted to reading. I read to shut out the world. I don't observe the things around me, preferring instead to ignore everything and focus on words on pages. I read so I won't have to think. I read so I don't have time to reflect or make plans or focus on what's real.

I've known for a while that my reading *is* in fact, an addiction. It causes me to neglect my other duties and responsibilities. It causes me to be busy without actually accomplishing anything. I've known that I need to cut down on my reading. Cut down, but not completely deprive myself!

I always believe that reading too much is better than not reading at all, so there's no way I could deprive myself of this "addiction". It's not like alcohol or smoking, where the goal is to quit completely. I don't think quitting reading is a good thing at all, so even though it is an addiction, it's not one I would give up completely.

So I always thought that I would just discipline myself to get my other responsibilities done, and I can read as much as I want after that. Of course, that hasn't been working for me so far...
Anyway... the fourth week of the course says I have to give up reading for an entire week! Just one week. Seven days. OMG.

We still have to write our morning pages, of course, and I guess we can read a little, like newspapers, articles and stuff... I mean, obviously, we are still allowed to read billboards and signboards and those kind of stuff, right? It's not like we can close our eyes to all the alphabets in our environment.

So ok, I'm going to deprive myself of reading for one week. Hopefully, when the week is over, I won't have turned mad. *fingers crossed*