The Right Choice

I had just gotten off the phone with my long-distance girlfriend. I was twenty-five and I was living in Glendale, CA, and she was living in Seattle. I’d met her when we were high school seniors both living in Providence, and I’d fallen quite in love with her. Or at least I thought I had. I was only seventeen then. In the intervening years, which were filled with much drama and uncertainty, I hung onto the idea of her, that I had loved her, which served as a kind of bright light when so much else could seem rather dark.

Things were changing now. I wasn’t a kid. I was in LA to be a screenwriter, wasn’t I? Isn’t that what I wanted to be now? She and I had just been talking about her upcoming visit, and I could tell it would be a kind of make-or-break trip. There was talk of me moving to Seattle. If you want to be screenwriter, you really needed to be in Hollywood, the way you needed to be in New York or Chicago for theater. What was I doing? Was I just using her to sabotage my career?

I sat beside my phone in Glendale and asked myself a question I had never thought to pose: Was this even real? That is, had I had just invented all this, the way I had daydreamed so much in my life? Had I just clung to that brief love affair from high school – high school, for Christ’s sake – as a kind of life raft? I decided in that moment that when she visited, I wouldn’t make any effort. I wouldn’t try to make things work between us, I wouldn’t try to be funny or charming or lovable. I would just be me; no ornamentation. If the relationship wasn’t real, that had to be okay.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that it was the nicest week I’d ever spent with her. How easy it was to be with her without trying; how natural. More natural than trying to write screenplays. I also wasn’t surprised that she had never told anyone she loved them until that visit. We might as well have been married in that moment. The rest was formality. There was and still is a lot of life for us to live, filled with many decisions and wrong turns, but if anything in my life has ever taught how to make a right choice, it was that moment when I learned what love actually was.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com