Fantasy and Reality

In my mid-twenties a friend of mine with an interest in astrology did a thorough reading based on my exact day of birth. I wasn’t interested in astrology, but I let her go ahead with it because she seemed so intent on doing so. It was all strangely scientific in her hands, with a number charts and different books to cross-reference. When she was done, she told me that my primary struggle in life would be learning the difference between fantasy and reality.

I had to admit that, hearing this, I felt she was right, though I couldn’t say exactly what I thought those two words meant. I had been a big fan of fantasy literature as a kid, but that was different. I had always been an incessant day-dreamer, which I felt was probably more on point, dwelling as I often did for hours a day in a life of my invention. Still, I was a writer, and dwelling in lives of my invention was a skill of the trade. As for reality – I had not much good to say about that. It seemed like something you had to begrudgingly, unavoidably, finally accept, an inevitability I was putting off as long as possible.

It took me about thirty years, but I’m done putting it off. Writing, in many ways, taught me how to do so. I have lived in fantasy any time I believed my happiness, well-being, or contentment were the consequence of some result or condition, whether a book deal, a new house, a lover, or the weather. In reality, my well-being, happiness and contentment have always been unconditional. That is what I have to accept. It should be easy, but doing so renders those results for which I have so often striven oddly meaningless.

This is why writing is such a useful practice. I can’t begin writing until my mind is still, until I feel content and safe and interested. Everything I create, all the results I call a sentence or a story, flows from that state of mind. It is never the other way around, no matter how much it seems so. I always disliked astrology not because I thought it was voodoo but because the stars were out there, outside of my mind and beyond my influence. I’m grateful for their light and beauty, but the moment I think they or anything can really guide me I am lost.

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