Last night I came across a video by Flanzella called Can You Write Yourself Into a Better Life? I clicked on it because the question itself fascinated me. Can you? Can the simple act of writing about your life somehow change the way you live it?

While watching the video, Flanzella started talking about The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I knew the book by reputation — it is one of those books I have heard about many times over the years — but I have never actually read it. I knew it had something to do with creativity and the artistic process, but not much more than that.

Then she started talking about what writing had meant in her own life, about documenting her thoughts and experiences over time, and something suddenly felt very familiar. I found myself thinking: wait… this sounds strangely similar to what I have been doing.

I started my Artist Diary without The Artist’s Way. I wasn’t following Julia Cameron’s method and I wasn’t consciously reproducing somebody else’s creative practice. I simply wanted to write something every day for a year. Not necessarily about the work I was producing, but about what was happening while I was producing it — or sometimes while I wasn’t producing anything at all.

And that distinction has become more important than I expected.

When I started, I think I imagined an Artist Diary would naturally be about art: projects, photography, music, clothes, ideas, things I was making. But look at what has actually ended up here. A book I found at the library because I was trying to understand fear. Picking up my camera again after years. A morning when a Massive Attack song unexpectedly gave me a moment of catharsis. Questions about relationships, boundaries and the strange ways we learn to measure our own value. Days when I feel overwhelmed. Days when I can’t concentrate. Even a day when I did absolutely nothing.

And somehow all of it belongs here.

Watching that video made me realise that perhaps the interesting part of keeping a diary for a year isn’t simply having a record of what happened. Writing forces me to stop long enough to notice what happened. Something can pass through my life as just another moment, but when I sit down and try to put it into words, I have to look at it. I have to ask myself why it affected me, what I felt, what I thought, what it connects to. Sometimes I begin writing about one thing and realise halfway through that the thing I am actually writing about is something completely different.

Maybe that is one of the ways writing can change a life. Not through some magical process where writing the right words makes everything better, but because paying attention changes things. You begin noticing patterns. You catch yourself repeating the same thoughts. You see what keeps hurting, what keeps exciting you, what you keep returning to and what you seem to be trying to leave behind.

And there is another thing I hadn’t really considered when I started this project: I don’t know yet who the person reading all of this at the end of the year will be.

Maybe a year from now I will go back to the beginning and recognise things I couldn’t see while I was living them. Maybe I will notice where something started changing before I even knew it was changing. Maybe I’ll laugh at some of it. Maybe some pages will be difficult to read. Maybe I’ll discover that the things I thought were enormously important disappeared completely, while tiny moments I almost ignored ended up changing the direction of my life.

I don’t know.

But perhaps that uncertainty is exactly why I want to keep writing.

I thought I was creating a diary about the life of an artist. Now I’m starting to wonder whether the distinction between the artist and the life was artificial in the first place.

Maybe the Artist Diary isn’t a diary about my art. Maybe my life is part of the art.

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Video credit: Flanzella — Can You Write Yourself Into a Better Life?