Evolving Paths

When I was twenty-one, I decided to drop out of college. I didn’t mind the work, and the professors and other students were all nice enough, but I wanted to be left alone to write whatever and however and whenever I wanted. It was a surprising choice for me in a lot of ways. Until then, I assumed I would follow the normal paths a middle-class kid did: get a degree, and with that degree get a job. Knowing others had traveled this way before lent an air of security to it. This, I assumed, is how you took care of yourself as an adult. I didn’t know another way. I would have to find out.

The biggest obstacle in this new path wasn’t my lack of a formal degree, nor a lack of training, but my own need for certainty. Yes, I was on a kind of adventure, which was exciting, but so often I’d lie awake at night tormented by the fear that I had no real idea how I would get where I wanted to go. To assuage this, I’d tell myself that this book or this project would definitely be The One. I could feel it. It had to be so. Until it wasn’t.

I wasn’t wrong to want security, and I also wasn’t wrong to believe that my life shouldn’t feel like one big game of roulette. That wasn’t any fun, and it wasn’t even an adventure. When you’re on an adventure, you’re looking for something. You may not know how or where it is or even where to begin searching, but you’re at the wheel. If everything is random, if everything is luck, what’s the point of doing anything if my choices and actions have no real effect?

I would learn that the only certainty on which I could depend was my own inner aesthetic, what I liked and what I didn’t. This I knew, and this wasn’t chance. In fact, on most days, it’s really all I know. I suffer when I fear that’s not enough. After all, I’ve liked what I’ve liked all my life. It’s as familiar to me as my own reflection. Yet just as my image in the mirror has changed gradually over time, so does my aesthetic, evolving as I do, leading me along a path only I could possibly follow. 

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Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
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