Doechii and The Artist's Way

On December 29, 2019, Jaylah Ji'mya Hickmon uploaded a video to YouTube titled "The Artist Way | My Creative Recovery Journey." He was 21 years old, with almost no hearing and a book in his hand: The Artist's Path by Julia Cameron. During the following 12 weeks he recorded his process openly. Little did she know that she was documenting the beginning of the journey that would lead her, six years later, to become the third woman in history to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album.

From Tampa to the Grammy: who is Doechii in 2026

Doechii was born in Tampa, Florida, on August 14, 1998, into a working-class family. Her real name is Jaylah Ji'mya Hickmon. As a child she wrote raps in her school notebook, sang in the church choir and dreamed of being an artist. During his adolescence he worked in fast food chains, studied ballet and even entered Howard University — a historically African-American university in Washington D.C. — to study dance. He couldn't finish: there was no money to continue.

He returned to Tampa. Between 2018 and 2020 he was, in his own words rebyted by the press, "broke and unemployed" — broke and without work. She lived in a family home, published songs on SoundCloud, recorded videos with her cell phone, uploaded freestyles to Instagram. One of those songs, Yucky Blucky Fruitcake, went viral on TikTok at the beginning of 2020. From there to the contract with Top Dawg Entertainment — the same record label as Kendrick Lamar and SZA — a little over two years passed.

In February 2025, Doechii won the Grammy for Best Rap Album by Alligator Bites Never Heal, becoming the third woman in history to win that award after Lauryn Hill (1999) and Cardi B (2019). Their performance at the ceremony — complete with choreography, costumes and a live band — became one of the most talked-about cultural moments of the year.

Today he has more than 3 million subscribers on YouTube, millions of monthly listeners on Spotify and one of the tours with the best reviews on the American circuit. But that's not what's interesting. The interesting thing is that even today, if you go to his YouTube channel, you can see the 13 videos he recorded in 2019 when he was still nobody. The playlist is still public. Is called "Doechii Course". And it is the most complete documentation that exists of a famous artist making The Artist's Path from start to finish.

2019: the year an unknown rapper recorded herself reading a book

There is a huge difference between do a creative process and document it in public. Most artists who read The Artist's Path They do it in silence. They read it in bed, do the morning pages alone, write their reflections in a private diary. When the process ends, no trace is left.

Doechii did the opposite. Every week, for three months, he turned on the camera. She recorded herself with a headscarf, in a white room with an undecorated wall, in her bedroom in Tampa. He was speaking to an audience that barely existed. And he explained — with an honesty that has become his trademark today — what he had read, what he was practicing, what blockages he was encountering and what he was feeling.

That gesture of share the process, not just the result, has become a central part of his identity as an artist. If you analyze their most recent songs — Denial Is a River, Nissan Altima, Black Girl Memoir — you will see the same logic: I don't just tell you where I have arrived, I tell you how I got it, what it cost me, what I still don't know. That's not technique. That's a philosophy about how creativity works. And it was born, at least in part, in the 12 weeks of 2019.

Doechii series opening video on YouTube, published on December 29, 2019.

What is The Artist's Path?

The Artist's Path (The Artist's Way in its original title) is a book published in 1992 by the American writer and filmmaker Julia Cameron. The book proposes a program of 12 weeks designed for what Cameron calls "creative recovery"—a way to unlock the artistic potential that, according to her, we all have but that most of us have buried under decades of fear, comparison and self-demand.

The book has sold more than five million copies. It has been publicly recommended by Alicia Keys, Russell Brand, Reese Witherspoon, Elizabeth Gilbert, Martin Scorsese, Tim Ferriss and dozens of other figures from the creative world. And also, as we will see, Doechii.

The program is structured around two fundamental practices which are repeated each week of the course, plus a series of specific weekly exercises:

If you want to understand the content week by week in detail, you can review the 12 pages of the free course that we have structured around the book. But first, let's look at the two daily practices that Doechii — and anyone who follows this path — must do every day without exception.

The two practices that Doechii did religiously

1. The Morning Pages

Cameron defines them like this: three handwritten pages, every morning, as soon as you wake up, without thinking, without correcting, without filtering. They are not a diary. They are not literature. They are not for anyone. They are simply the act of empty your head on paper before the day reaches you.

Doechii woke up at 5 in the morning to do them. She confirmed it herself and it was picked up by several articles about her process after winning the Grammy. The practice is brutally simple and brutally difficult at the same time. Three pages seem like not enough, but when you've been fifteen minutes and you've written "I don't know what to write, I don't know what to write, I don't know what to write" three times in a row, something breaks. And what was underneath begins to come out.

What is underneath, almost always, is: fear. And after fear: desire. And after the wish: an idea. Morning pages are not made for get ideas — are made for clean the channel through which ideas pass. The difference is imbytant.

2. The Appointment with the Artist

Once a week, Cameron asks for something that sounds even weirder: go out, alone, to do something that nourishes you creatively for two hours. Go to a music store without buying anything. Walk through a new neighborhood. Go into a bookstore to browse random books. Visit a small museum. Watch a movie at the cinema, without company.

The imbytant part is not that you do. It's just that you do it alone. No cell phone. No audiobook. Friendless. No distraction. The goal is to give your “inner artist child” — which is what Cameron calls the creative part of you — an experience of aesthetic pleasure without consuming, without producing, without optimizing.

In an industry like rap, where everyone is watching what everyone else is doing, consuming Spotify metrics, checking TikTok views, and making strategic collaborations, the gesture of spend two hours alone window shopping It's subversive. It is an act of protecting the mental space from which the songs will later come. Doechii probably wouldn't have been able to write the extremely honest lyrics of Alligator Bites Never Heal if I hadn't first protected that mental space.

From "broke and unemployed" to Grammy: a timeline

To understand the speed of Doechii's transformation is to understand why his story functions as a testimony to the book. These are the public milestones, year by year:

From the first video on YouTube to the Grammy they went five years and two months. That is the period in which Doechii went from being an anonymous rapper to being one of the most imbytant voices in contembyary rap.

Does that explain The Artist's Path by itself? Of course not. It would be necessary to ignore their talent, their work, their discipline, luck, cultural context and a thousand other factors. But what we can say, without exaggeration, is that Doechii made Cameron's program just before beginning her rise, and that she herself has attributed part of that rise to her commitment to her practices. That connection is worth looking at.

Radical honesty: why he documented it in public

There's something deeply uncomfortable about recording yourself reading a self-help book. Worst: recording yourself doing the exercises in the book. Even worse: upload it to YouTube for anyone to see. Most people would rather die than do that.

Doechii didn't just do it. He did it before he had an audience. Before having a safety net. Before knowing if I was going to be famous or if I was going to continue being just another rapper from Tampa. At the time, any record producer who had seen the videos would have thought she was too vulnerable, too exposed, too "uncool" to sell records.

And as it turned out, it was exactly that vulnerability that made her irresistible when the time came. In an industry saturated with armored characters — artists who never make mistakes, never doubt, never explain — Doechii arrived with a public playlist of his creative recovery process. Her fans did not fall in love with a perfect diva. They fell in love with a woman who had been "broke and unemployed" five years earlier and who had not deleted the evidence.

That connects directly with the fourth week from the book — "Recovering Integrity." Cameron writes that artistic integrity consists of align what you say, what you do and what you believe. Doechii sings about honesty in songs like Denial Is a River. She is honest in her interviews. And she was honest six years ago recording a YouTube channel that barely had any viewers. That consistency isn't a marketing strategy — it's what Cameron calls a practice.

Doechii's complete playlist: its 13 videos

If you want to see it in its entirety, here is the original playlist, still available on Doechii's channel. There are 13 videos, around three hours of material in total. English is his native language and he speaks calmly. It's the most direct way to see how a 21-year-old artist approached a creative recovery program without filters.

Playlist "Doechii Course" — 13 videos published between December 2019 and March 2020.

What stands out the most when you see it is the contrast with the Doechii of 2025. The girl in the videos is introverted, calm, she speaks softly, there is no choreography, there is no production, there is no aesthetics. Just her, a white wall and a book. And yet the essential is already there: an unusually developed emotional intelligence, an ability to observe oneself without judgment and a brutal work discipline for a 21-year-old person who is "ruined and out of work."

What you can learn from Doechii's path

If you have come this far it is because, probably, you have something creative inside that is not coming out at the pace you would like. These are the six concrete lessons we can take away from Doechii's journey — and that you can apply to your own practice starting tomorrow morning:

If Doechii could do it, you can too

The temptation when reading a story like this is to think, "well, she had talent." And yes, I had it. But talent without practice is a promise that is not fulfilled. What separates Doechii from other female rappers with the same talent but without the same track record is not a question of gifts — it's a question of what he did every morning for 12 weeks in December 2019.

This is what The Artist's Path offers anyone serious about it: a proven 12-week protocol to unlock the creativity that's there and can't get out. Does not guarantee Grammys. You don't need them. What it guarantees is that at the end of the twelve weeks you will be a different person — with a different relationship with yourself, with your fear, and with your voice.

We have structured on this site a free version in Spanish of the complete program, with the 12 weeks explained, the main exercises and a tracking system so that you do not give up along the way. It's completely free. You can start today:

Other artists who have taken this path

Rosalia · Billie Eilish · Bad Bunny · Karol G · Tyler, The Creator