An Old Friend

I was twenty-six and had been living in Seattle with my soon-to-be wife for about a year. I was writing my first novel, and I had gotten a job waiting tables at a restaurant downtown. I worked the lunch shifts, which left my weekends free to be with Jen and run errands. One Saturday, we headed out to Bellevue to explore their giant mall. It was a nice enough way to spend an afternoon, driving around talking and joking and then wandering from store to store, but hanging above it all was the awareness that the job was waiting for me on Monday. The day was just an oasis from the greater reality in which I wasn’t yet free.

As we drove back to Seattle, I began to wonder what my life would be like if I were writing for a living. I thought it was mostly a question of time; that freedom, in this way, was essentially mathematical. Reclaim those thirty or so hours a week I spent working, and every day, whether a Sunday or Thursday, would begin as clean as a blank page. I looked out the window at the city’s skyline, and tried to imagine that there was no job waiting or me Monday, to summon in my writer’s mind an unburdened version of myself. For a moment, I could sense my own freedom, like a glimpse of an old friend through a store window – but then it was gone.

I’d spend the next few decades chasing what I glimpsed that afternoon, including when I finally left restaurant work for good. For a few months, my days were absolutely open. It was unnerving. I craved structure and a sense of purpose. Time, I quickly understood, was not the problem at all. By and by, I would move from writing fiction to creative non-fiction, a shift that, when I at last allowed it, felt like the first breath after a prolonged submergence. I’d been writing the wrong thing; perhaps that was the problem.

Except it wasn’t. The blank page is a great teacher. Every day it reminds me what freedom actually looks like and feels like. Some mornings it frightens me a little, this cruel canvas made to reveal my failure. Most, however, I’m glad for it. After all, I have to be able to write absolutely anything, just as I have to be able to live absolutely anything and love absolutely anyone. I don’t always know what those will be, but I want to find out – and there it is, what I glimpsed, what I craved, that old friend in whose company I felt most like me.

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