The Only Way Out

When I heard the news, it felt like all was lost. I’d been telling myself for months – for years really – that the unthinkable mustn’t happen, and now it had. When I was a teen in the 80’s, I’d watched the TV drama The Day After, about life in America following a nuclear war. The point of the film was to portray this possibility as realistically as possible. It was the most depressing thing I’d ever seen. Everyone who survived carried on, but that’s all they were doing, even as one then another died from radiation poisoning. Where was the value in all of this? Where was the joy?

This is how it felt the day after the news, like a little nuclear bomb had been set off in my mind, and now there was nothing to do but survive. It was intolerable to me within a few hours. The creative mind cannot just carry on. It exists entirely to dream the possible. It will starve if it believes the future is a shallow pool providing only the barest necessities for the body to endure. This is not actually life, not as we have known it, not as we require it.

I’d received plenty of bad news in my life. Sometimes the news came from my agent, sometimes from a doctor, sometimes from a girlfriend. If I was honest, this did not feel so different. I had in fact visited this desert before, had called the endless contours of its parched landscape reality, and then commenced the grieving because there’s nothing else left to do. This was not original. This was as old as humanity itself, the worst story we have ever told and cannot apparently resist telling again.

Fortunately, then, I knew my way out. It’s always the same path, though when you start traveling it, it seems unreal to you. After all, you’re training your mind’s eye upon not what you can see before you, but, as you have done a thousand times before while sitting in front of a thousand blank pages, upon the dream of what can be. That flower will grow only with your persistent attention, attention you might call belief, might call faith, and what others might call naivete, but what is actually the source of life itself.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

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