The Complete Artist's Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice (11 page)

Your own healing is the greatest message of hope for others.

CRAZYMAKERS

A related thing creatives do to avoid being creative is to involve themselves with
crazymakers.
Crazymakers are those personalities that create storm centers. They are often charismatic, frequently charming, highly inventive, and powerfully persuasive. And, for the creative person in their vicinity, they are enormously destructive. You know the type: charismatic but out of control, long on problems and short on solutions.

Crazymakers are the kind of people who can take over your whole life. To fixer-uppers, they are irresistible: so much to change, so many distractions....

If you are involved with a crazymaker, you probably know it already, and you certainly recognize the thumbnail description in the paragraph above. Crazymakers like drama. If they can swing it, they are the star. Everyone around them functions as supporting cast, picking up their cues, their entrances and exits, from the crazymaker’s (crazy) whims.

Some of the most profoundly destructive crazymakers I have ever encountered are themselves famous artists. They are the kind of artists that give the rest of us bad names. Often larger than life, they acquire that status by feeding on the life energies of those around them. For this reason, many of the most crazy artists in America are found surrounded by a cadre of supporters as talented as they are but determined to subvert their own talent in the service of the Crazymaking King.

Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.

ELISABETH
KÜBLER-ROSS

I am thinking of a movie set I visited several years ago. The filmmaker was one of the giants of American cinema. His stature was unmistakable, and so was his identity as a crazymaker. Given that all filmmaking is demanding, his sets are far more so: longer hours; long bouts of paranoia; intrigue and internecine politics. Amid rumors that the set was bugged, this Crazymaker King addressed his actors over a loudspeaker system while he, like the Wizard of Oz, secreted himself away in a large and luxuriously equipped trailer cave.

Over the past two decades, I have watched many directors at work. I was married to a profoundly gifted director, and I have directed a feature myself I have often remarked how closely a film crew resembles an extended family. In the case of this Crazymaker King, the crew resembled nothing so much as an alcoholic family: the alcoholic drinker (thinker) surrounded by his tiptoeing enablers, all pretending that his outsized ego and its concomitant demands were normal.

On that crazymaker’s set, the production lurched off schedule and over budget from king baby’s unreasonable demands. A film crew is essentially a crew of experts, and to watch these estimable experts become disheartened was a strong lesson for me in the poisonous power of crazymaking. Brilliant set designers, costume designers, sound engineers—not to mention actors—became increasingly injured as the production ran its devastating course. It was against the crazymaking director’s personal dramas that they struggled to create the drama that was meant to go onscreen. Like all good movie people, this crew was willing to work long hours for good work. What discouraged them was working those hours in the service of ego instead of art.

The crazymaking dynamic is grounded in power, and so any group of people can function as an energy system to be exploited and drained. Crazymakers can be found in almost any setting, in almost any art form. Fame may help to create them, but since they feed on power, any power source will do. Although quite frequently crazymakers are found among the rich and famous, they are common even among commoners. Right in the nuclear family (there’s a reason we use that word), a resident crazymaker may often be found pitting family member against family member, undercutting anyone’s agenda but his or her own.

I am thinking now of a destructive matriarch of my acquaintance. The titular head of a large and talented clan, she has devoted her extensive energies to destroying the creativity of her children. Always choosing critical moments for her sabotage, she plants her bombs to explode just as her children approach success.

The daughter struggling to finish a belated college degree finds herself saddled with a sudden drama the night before her final exam. The son with a critical job interview is gifted with a visitation just when he needs to focus the most.

“Do you know what the neighbors are saying about you?” the crazymaker will often ask. (And the beleaguered student mother will hear a horrific round of gossip that leaves her battered, facing her exam week beset by feelings of “What’s the use?”)

“Do you realize you’re ruining your own marriage with this possible new job?” (And the son’s hopeful career move is ashes before it begins.)

Whether they appear as your overbearing mother, your manic boss, your needy friend, or your stubborn spouse, the crazymakers in your life share certain destructive patterns that make them poisonous for any sustained creative work.

Crazymakers break deals and destroy schedules.
They show up two days early for your wedding and expect to be waited on hand and foot. They rent a vacation cabin larger and more expensive than the one agreed upon, and then they expect you to foot the bill.

Crazymakers expect special treatment.
They suffer a wide panoply of mysterious ailments that require care and attention whenever you have a deadline looming—or anything else that draws your attention from the crazymaker’s demands. The crazymaker cooks her own special meal in a house full of hungry children—and does nothing to feed the kids. The crazymaker is too upset to drive right after he has vented enormous verbal abuse on the heads of those around him. “I am afraid Daddy will have a heart attack,” the victim starts thinking, instead of, “How do I get this monster out of my house?”

What I am actually saying is that we need to be willing to let our intuition guide us, and then be willing to follow that guidance directly and fearlessly.

SHAKTI GAWAIN

Crazymakers discount your reality.
No matter how important your deadline or how critical your work trajectory at the moment, crazymakers will violate your needs. They may act as though they hear your boundaries and will respect them, but in practice
act
is the operative word. Crazymakers are the people who call you at midnight or 6:00 A.M. saying, “I know you asked me not to call you at this time, but ...” Crazymakers are the people who drop by unexpectedly to borrow something you can’t find or don’t want to lend them. Even better, they call and ask you to locate something they need, then fail to pick it up. “I know you’re on a deadline,” they say, “but this will only take a minute.” Your minute.

Crazymakers spend your time and money.
If they borrow your car, they return it late, with an empty tank. Their travel arrangements always cost you time or money. They demand to be met in the middle of your workday at an airport miles from town. “I didn’t bring taxi money,” they say when confronted with, “But I’m working.”

Crazymakers triangulate those they deal with.
Because crazymakers thrive on energy (your energy), they set people against one another in order to maintain their own power position dead center. (That’s where they can feed most directly on the negative energies they stir up.) “So-and-so was telling me you didn’t get to work on time today,” a crazymaker may relay. You obligingly get mad at so-and-so and miss the fact that the crazymaker has used hearsay to set you off kilter emotionally.

Crazymakers are expert blamers.
Nothing that goes wrong is ever their fault, and to hear them tell it, the fault is usually yours. “If you hadn’t cashed that child-support check it would never have bounced,” one crazymaking ex-husband told his struggling-for-serenity former spouse.

Slow down and enjoy life. It’s not only the scenery you miss by going too fast—you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.

EDDIE CANTOR

Crazymakers create dramas—but seldom where they belong.
Crazymakers are often blocked creatives themselves. Afraid to effectively tap their own creativity, they are loath to allow that same creativity in others. It makes them jealous. It makes them threatened. It makes them dramatic—at your expense. Devoted to their own agendas, crazymakers impose these agendas on others. In dealing with a crazymaker, you are dealing always with the famous issue of figure and ground. In other words, whatever matters to you becomes trivialized into mere backdrop for the crazymaker’s personal plight. “Do you think he/she loves me?” they call you to ask when you are trying to pass the bar exam or get your husband home from the hospital.

Crazymakers hate schedules—except their own.
In the hands of a crazymaker, time is a primary tool for abuse. If you claim a certain block of time as your own, your crazymaker will find a way to fight you for that time, to mysteriously need things (meaning you) just when you need to be alone and focused on the task at hand. “I stayed up until three last night. I can’t drive the kids to school,” the crazymaker will spring on you the morning you yourself must leave early for a business breakfast with your boss.

Crazymakers hate order.
Chaos serves their purposes. When you begin to establish a place that serves you and your creativity, your crazymaker will abruptly invade that space with projects of his/her own. “What are all these papers, all this laundry on top of my work table?” you ask. “I decided to sort my college papers ... to start looking for the matches for my socks...”

Crazymakers deny that they are crazymakers.
They go for the jugular. “I am not what’s making you crazy,” your crazymaker may say when you point out a broken promise or a piece of sabotage. “It’s just that we have such a rotten sex life.”

If crazymakers are that destructive, what are we doing involved with them? The answer, to be brief but brutal, is that we’re that crazy ourselves and we are that self-destructive.

Really?

Whatever God’s dream about man may be, it seems certain it cannot come true unless man cooperates.

STELLA TERRILL MANN

Yes. As blocked creatives, we are willing to go to almost any lengths to remain blocked. As frightening and abusive as life with a crazymaker is, we find it far less threatening than the challenge of a creative life of our own. What would happen then? What would we be like? Very often, we fear that if we let ourselves be creative, we will become crazymakers ourselves and abuse those around us. Using this fear as our excuse, we continue to allow others to abuse us.

If you are involved now with a crazymaker, it is very important that you admit this fact. Admit that you are being used—and admit that you are using your own abuser. Your crazymaker is a block you chose yourself, to deter you from your own trajectory. As much as you are being exploited by your crazymaker, you, too, are using that person to block your creative flow.

If you are involved in a tortured tango with a crazymaker, stop dancing to his/her tune. Pick up a book on codependency or get yourself to a twelve-step program for relationship addiction. (Al-Anon and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous are two excellent programs for stopping the crazymaker’s dance.)

The next time you catch yourself saying or thinking, “He/ she is driving me crazy!” ask yourself what creative work you are trying to block by your involvement.

SKEPTICISM

Now that we have talked about the barrier to recovery others can present, let us take a look at the inner enemy we harbor ourselves. Perhaps the greatest barrier for any of us as we look for an expanded life is our own deeply held skepticism. This might be called
the secret doubt.
It does not seem to matter whether we are officially believers or agnostics. We have our doubts about all of this creator/creativity stuff, and those doubts are very powerful. Unless we air them, they can sabotage us. Many times, in trying to be good sports we stuff our feelings of doubt. We need to stop doing that and explore them instead.

To believe in God or in a guiding
force because someone tells you to
is the height of stupidity. We are
given senses to receive our information
with. With our own eyes
we see, and with our skin we feel.
With our intelligence, it is
intended that we understand. But
each person must puzzle it out
for himself or herself.

SOPHY BURNHAM

Boiled down to their essentials, the doubts go something like this: “Okay, so I started writing the morning pages and I seem more awake and alert in my life. So what? It’s just a coincidence.... Okay, so I have started filling the well and taking my artist on a date and I do notice I am cheering up a little. So what? It’s just coincidental.... Okay, so now I am beginning to notice that the more I let myself explore the possibility of there being some power for good, the more I notice lucky coincidence turning up in my life. So what? I can’t believe I am really being led. That’s just too weird....”