Now that 2021 is nearly halfway through, accountability might just become the word of the year. It pops up in all kinds of commentary about policing and the behavior of our elected officials. “There is no ‘healing’ from this without accountability,” tweeted Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the days following the Capitol riot.

I myself bristle at the word accountability in less urgent contexts. Growing up, youth group leaders would recommend accountability partners, peers you could meet with to discuss your moral and spiritual upkeep. Number of quiet times per week, new Bible passages memorized, sinful patterns kept in check. 

The thinking is that teens, with their inherent unruliness, will drift from their best intentions without check-ins. So with adults. So with institutions. 

But I’ll tell you, accountability and creativity combined speak anathema to me. In my experience, creative accountability, like spiritual accountability, has doubled down on a bad habit of mine: transforming a sacred practice into yet another line item on a lifelong performance review (delivered, complete with pyrotechnics, on Judgment Day). 

Of course, this idea wouldn’t frighten me so much if I believed in a wholeheartedly merciful reviewer. Compliance and mercy remain hard to square for me, locked in an age-old paradox.

As time has gone on, though, I’ve taken extraordinary measures to get my groove back, even if it meant dabbling in anathema. 

As I began The Artist’s Way a few months ago, a flourish of synchronicity—a phenomenon Julia Cameron would train me to notice over successive weeks—confirmed I was on the right path to renewal. My friend Nina and I began an accountability partnership around writing. 

For the past 20 weeks, Nina and I have emailed each other every Wednesday, according to a loose format of our design. 

Part 1 is Status Update, in which we translate our current writing lives into pieces of other media: GIFS, songs, emojis, film stills, videos, etc. My updates have included a tornado emoji, a photo of a cat gazing at a lit candle, a clip from Castle in the Sky, and a MUNA song. We usually furnish some explanation beneath our Status Updates, which often drift into thoughts about more than just writing. 

Part 2 is the Excerpt: something we’ve written in the past week. (Journaling, mercifully, counts.) If we’ve written nothing, we excerpt something we’ve read in the past week that stood out to us. 

That’s it. Fun, low-stakes, sustainable. No pressure, no posturing. The no-writing contingency (Nina’s idea) helps a ton. If nothing else, the emails keep our friendship clicking along, documenting the changes in our lives, minute and mammoth, during this extraordinary time. 

For the first 12 weeks, deep in The Artist’s Way, I was constantly citing author Julia Cameron—gracious, those mentions could’ve constituted their own drinking game—and agonizing over the dripping faucet of my writing life. 

On Week 6, instead of sharing a piece of writing I hadn’t done, I cited Cameron (take a shot), who defines the “artistically anorectic: yearning to be creative and refusing to feed that hunger in ourselves so that we become more and more focused on our deprivation.”

I followed that quote by asking, “[W]hat is comforting about deprivation?”

This isn’t the only accountability measure I’ve taken that has failed to spur a more active writing life. This blog was supposed to be one in 2019, for example, but I got too busy. Which is and is not an excuse, depending on who you ask. 

Around the same time, I joined a writer’s group: a read-your-first-draft affair meant more for accountability than showmanship. More often than not, I’d show up with nary a poem to present. 

For the first time in my life, other people’s expectations didn’t work me into a lather. I didn’t play the star student, didn’t even offer excuses for my crummy output. I felt not so much a fraud as a lazy writer, sitting in the literary equivalent of a small group with a weak smile and a doubting heart. 

As our friend Julia Cameron writes (shot), “Blocked artists are not lazy. They are blocked.” The very fact that I attended the group, the existence of my emails to Nina, speak to many things, but I’m less convinced now that laziness is one of them. 

Between the two of us, I consider Nina far more prolific (and now I have the emails to prove it). She doesn’t seem to possess the same exhausting existential angst that slows my creativity to a crawl. She thinks of a line of poetry or song or an essay or blog post, and she writes it. Simple as that. 

One of our most notable exchanges, though, involved the mutual recognition that we tend to clam up creatively amidst pervasive turbulence. 

It got me thinking about a Whitman quote I first learned from watching Dead Poets Society as an impressionable high-schooler: 

       “The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
                                              Answer.
       That you are here—that life exists and identity,
       That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” 

I don’t always love Whitman (as I’ve previously written), but these words stick to my bones. They’re taped to a picture frame beside my head as I write this. Whitman, too, holds me accountable when silence—my own resistance—feels easier. He encourages the silent to speak, fetch their instruments, join the band.

In the same email as I shared this passage with Nina I wrote, “I want to unblock that creative urge I’ve always had and allow myself to WANT to write about this moment. Or not.” 

To contribute my verse, however meager, I often negotiate with legions of fears, resentments, and doubts. Listed out in all their wicked splendor, as The Artist’s Way required me to do (shot), revealed a battery of blockages I’d never named, certainly not all in a row. That exercise revealed that I’m still mired in the lines preceding Whitman’s famous charge, in which the speaker complains about “the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,” and “myself ever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)…”

He languishes in disillusionment. Misanthropy seems to tug at his coattails, following him from the public sphere into the privacy of his conscience. Humanity seems doomed, but he can’t look down his nose at them too long. He’s one of them, after all. 

This era provokes copious disillusionment, misanthropy, and doom-filled dread. Grief, too. One week, Nina shared a Mary Oliver poem about grief called “Heavy.” In it, the speaker’s friend tells her: 

       “‘It is not the weight you carry

       but how you carry it—
       books, bricks, grief—
       it’s all in the way
       you embrace it, balance it, carry it

       when you cannot, and would not,
       put it down.’” 

Resisting grief—or disillusionment, misanthropy, dread, any difficult emotion—is resisting the inevitable. Some people resist with words, some without. 

Both poets remind us (Whitman, explicitly), “you are here…” Whitman is ebullient, Oliver soft and solemn, but both set aside denial and despair in favor of presentness. Sometimes we’re present with words. Sometimes without. 

Maybe the best accountability is just that, too. Witnessing a friend, acknowledging her. No judgment, no expectations. Just vision, benevolent, honest.

Does God give us that gift too? Does the mirror?   

In The War of Art (a fascinating companion to The Artist’s Way takeashot), Steven Pressfield uses the word self-sovereignty to describe the tricky confluence of art and obedience. He asks, “… what better way of healing than to find our center of self-sovereignty?” 

Self-sovereignty means I am my own mandate. From the truest part of my being, the one unhindered by fear or rage, I compel myself to create, selve myself. 

I think self-sovereignty defines my accountability with Nina too. I do not need her to email me, and she doesn’t need me to email her. We don’t ask each other questions modeled after accountability partners from our youth group days: “You say you’ve been struggling with writer’s block. How’s that going for you? Any progress?” 

We share whatever we like, whether a lot or a little. We’ve written, or not. We express our thoughts about writing, even when we can’t spare a thought for it amidst other concerns. 

When no one is waiting to give you a performance review, do you act? Can we create—obey—non-performatively? To what are we being held accountable? From what are we healing?  

Answer: O me! O life!