Already There

When I was a boy growing up in the 70s, I’d sometimes hear people talking about “finding themselves,” not just as if it was something they had to do but as something everyone would eventually have to do. This bugged me. I did not need to find who I was. I was who I was and I knew who I was because that was all I’d ever been. Who I was was right with me all the time. How hard could it be to find something that couldn’t leave you if it wanted to?

I was correct, in a way, but I was also young. I could not anticipate how easy it is to mistake yourself for something you are not, particularly as you begin making the kind of decisions adults have to make about the course our life will take. Those courses are like the books we read and write. There is no universally right answer for which books we should all read and write. In fact, the book that is right for you to write might sound entirely different than the books that are right for me. One might follow Elmore Leanord’s 10 Rules of Writing from beginning to end, and one might break those rules on the first page.

There have been so many times in my life, just as there are so many times in a book I’m writing, where I haven’t known where to go or what to do next. I cannot see my own path, and this feeling of not knowing, of doubting such a path even exists, leads me to look to other people who seem certain of their life, or writers who seem certain about their books. Every time I look to other people in this way, notions of what I should do, of who I should be, flutter into my thoughts and stick to my mind, eventually acquiring the kind of faux reality borne of nothing but familiarity.

This is what I have come to understand as finding myself: sifting through and discarding all the accumulated ideas about how I should write or how I should live that were never mine but which I tried to make mine in a moment of insecurity. I am surprised by how many of these there are, and how, when tested against the passions that have been with me for as long as I can remember, these ideas have no weight or value. They were nothing more than a sentence that could be deleted from a story, discarded without anything being lost, only making room for the expression of what was already there.

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

Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence.
You can find William at: williamkenower.com