Your Transparent Self

As I write the this, the COVID-imposed mask mandate in home state of Washington will be lifted in less than a week, meaning, I suppose, that life will return to more or less normal. For writers, this hopefully means public events – book signings and workshops and classroom appearances. To be a writer, you have to be quite okay with being alone, and I am certainly that. But there is a pleasure to a live appearance that Zoom, as fantastic as it has been, just cannot replace.

Though I know there are those writers for whom the signing or keynote speech is a terrifying proposition, a fear echoed when a new book is published. The author feels naked in these moments, exposed to the eyes and hearts and opinions of the public. Cocooned in your workroom, it’s easier to forget about those people, since it’s just you there at your desk. But then you show up at the conference or bookstore, and there they are, alive with the hum of human attention. More than anything else, it’s what we really are, and now, as you step behind a podium, that attention is trained right on you.

I think nakedness is a misunderstanding of this moment. I enjoy public speaking, but only if I remember that to do so, I must become transparent. That’s the image I have of myself when all that attention is on me; which is to say, I don’t really think of the one talking as being of me at all, not Bill Kenower, the guy who goes shopping and does the laundry and chooses what to watch on Netflix. I don’t think he has anything to say to anyone. He’s just thinking about the next little thing that needs to be done.

But my other self, the transparent one, he’s the one that wants to share and entertain and inspire. He’s the one that writes and that teaches. He also doesn’t want a name. Too specific. A name is like a suit or a dress, your first identity into which you must step. You need it to get around in the world, but it isn’t all you are. You must take it off if only when you go to sleep, and there you’ll meet your other self, the one who dreams.

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

William KenowerWriting, William Kenower, Speaking, FearComment