Julia Cameron is a genius. There’s simply no other way to put it.

After years at a job where my creativity gradually dwindled into a small pocket within my frontal lobe, often forgotten, often developing cobwebs and housing stray homeless creatures who wandered in and marveled at the vacant find, I suddenly found myself wholly dependant on said monochromatic pocket following a rather painful—but relieved, I must admit—layoff.

Diving head-first into finding another way to support my family, I also dove into numerous self-help books, believing that I was lacking something. And I was. I was lacking myself. And Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way helped me find… me.

Cameron maintains that everyone is an artist. It doesn’t matter what you apply your creativity to—your job, your home, fine arts like dance or pottery… it’s all art, and everyone is a creator of his or her own world. Her book provides weekly lessons to help you learn to accept this, followed by many tasks and assignments to delve into your own creative mind. Each lesson is also bordered by a number of inspirational quotes about everything you could ever think of.

These tasks range from the spiritual to the silly, the practical to the feeding of the inner child, or artist. Cameron promotes her now-famous “morning pages,” a set of three daily pages of straight writing—whether it be about your day ahead, your dream, your affirmations, whatever. It can even be “I have no idea what to write” over and over again, as long as it helps drain your brain and clear the way for real creative work.

Another weekly assignment is the artist date, which you keep only with yourself. This is a time during which you can watch an inspiring movie, take a field trip somewhere, go on a walk, whatever—as long as it’s just you dating yourself.

After doing these twelve weeks (which I’d actually condensed a bit, having borrowed it from the library!) I knew I had to add this book to my wish list and redo the whole system again. Over these weeks, I gradually felt myself come back. My creativity was evident in all that I did. Whether it was the program, the absence of criticism or both, I gained the confidence to let my creative self back out to play.

I heartily recommend buying or borrowing this book, grabbing a journal (any blank book will do) and setting forth on a new path that could change your life. I know it did mine.