Writer's Block, Blogging, and Going Sane

Ok, so I've been working through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, not for the first time. And I know that lots of you out there are probably familiar with Cameron's work, but I totally recommend this book, more of a program really, to those of us who write or who are feeling the urge to pursue creative kinds of things.

Last night, I read this, and it seems worth repeating. Cameron explains that "A related thing creatives do to avoid being creative is to involve themselves with crazymakers" (44) Crazymakers, she argues, are those people who suck up all our time, emotions, energy and resources so that we remain blocked. I'm convinced that, whether we call them "crazymakers" or not, we've all been involved with these kinds of people somewhere along the way. If we are lucky, we weren't foolish enough to marry them. But Cameron asks why we tend to involve ourselves with these kinds of people: "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. . . As frightening and abusive as life with a crazymaker is, we find if far less threatening than the challenge of a creative life of our own" (49). And it seems to me that Cameron is so right, and her ideas certainly apply to many of us, not just would-be-creatives.

And so here I sit, blogging again. And I can't remember if the blogging is merely a warm up for my "real" work or if the blogging is part of my "real" work (note the use of real in apostrophes!) or if blogging is the reward. And I like being in the place where the work and the reward get mixed up because it means that the work has become the reward itself and we don't need more. But I'm blogging, in part for the same reasons that I'm reading Cameron; I want a voice and I want to go sane. Cameron says that at first, "going sane feels just like going crazy" (41). But I'm here because I'm trying my hardest to go sane, as difficult as it feels, and I'm working at cutting out the crazymakers and all the other things I sometimes use as excuses for not doing the work that I believe I'm called to be doing. I don't want to have this weird, neurotic sense of identity. I don't want to succumb to being the brooding, lonely, sacrificial-for-her-work type. I want sanity in my life, sanity, order, trust, relaxation.