A Sobering Choice

In his memoir Lust and Wonder, Augusten Burroughs describes sinking into a deep depression that eventually spiraled into debilitating alcoholism. He spent most of his days in bed, unwashed, drunk and drinking. He also watched television. Hours of it. He settled on the shopping channel QVC because it was live and so offered a kind of company. He began to wonder what would happen if something truly unexpected happened to the hosts while they hawked their sweaters and blouses – like, for instance, the male host’s penis somehow falling out of his trousers.

This notion so consumed Burroughs that the next thing he knew he had a legal pad and was scratching out the beginnings of a story. He had been a copywriter for years, but he had never written fiction in his life. He barely knew what a paragraph was or how to punctuate dialogue. No matter. He worked on it for hours every day. He worked on it so much, in fact, that he stopped drinking; he was more interested in the novel than booze. By the time he was done with the book, which would become Sellivision, he was, for all intents and purposes, sober.

In his posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “Work solves everything,” which, when I first read it, I thought sounded like a recipe for becoming a workaholic. I’ve since decided he was right in a way. Addiction can come in many forms, but they are all an expression of our attempts to find what we want where it isn’t. Writing, at its best, is the practice of looking for what we want exactly where it is. When you find it, there is no mistaking what comes to rest in you, how you are both satisfied and eager for more. Life does not get better than that.

Meanwhile, life will never be worse than when I believe what I need and want exists somewhere outside of me – or, worse yet, must be given to me by someone else. Why not reach for the bottle? At least in so doing I can make one choice that will leave me feeling a little better for a little while. Until, of course, it doesn’t, and then there I am again, alone with myself and my own freewill. How will I use it? To hope for some authority to pick me up, or to ask myself question, a really interesting question, and then wait with an open heart for the answer.

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