Motivation Mondays: No Crazymakers

 “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 choose yourself, to deter you from your own trajectory.”—Julia Cameron

If there is someone in your life who drives you nuts, get away from him or her, or before too long, you will be the one driving everybody crazy. I’m learning that lesson the hard way at the moment.

Here are the signs that someone is a crazymaker, according to The Artist’s Way:

“Crazymakers break deals and destroy schedules.

Crazymakers discount your reality

Crazymakers spend your time and money.

Crazymakers triangulate those they deal with. (This is the most painful item on the list for me, as the crazy has cost me some friends lately.)

Crazymakers are expert blamers.

Crazymakers create dramas, but seldom where they belong.

Crazymakers hate schedules, except their own.

Crazymakers hate order.

Crazymakers deny that they are crazymakers.”

 For the past three years, I have been working under such a person to run the Philly Poetry Slam. I divorced the group last week and the effects are sad and far-reaching. It seems now that there were a million signs that I should get out, like the first time he sent me a blustery text saying that so and so “is to be taken off the mailing list and never involved in the reading in any way, effective immediately,” because one of the young ladies on the scene wouldn’t date him. Or the time he said that he “really didn’t give a fuck” what the owners of the coffeeshop thought. Or the time that he lied to our slam team for an entire summer about having registered them for competition. Every lie, every time he pulled the rug out from under us, every person we disappointed, I stuck with him because I loved the venue. It was a mistake to stay, because here at the end of the project, I am so angry I barely recognize myself.

I hope what Julia Cameron says is true, that separating from this is really putting me closer to my own trajectory. It’s really hard to see that now, but it’s worth a try. Sanity doesn’t seem too far away, I guess.