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I love the work I do, which is to write and talk to people about how to make something on purpose. These days I mostly talk to people who are writing or who want to write because a blank page will tell you all you need to know about how responsible we really are for the world we live in. And for writers, the single greatest obstacle to an effortless, pleasurable, profitable writing experience is this thought: What will other people think of it?
I know this because I spent about twenty years writing into the headwind of that unanswerable question. To write without that question is heaven and to write with it is hell. I was reminded of this the other day when I slipped and found myself asking it again. Soon I was feeling the hopeless, life-draining vertigo that comes every time I try to create something to meet other people’s expectations. I knew this feeling intimately. For twenty years, it was what I called normal. On that day, I did the only thing I knew to do, which was to quit writing and let the feeling pass. As I began returning to myself and life seemed worth living again, it was easy to view my little slip as a narrow escape from Hell. But for my awareness I’d be there still, trapped in a world without happiness. One must be vigilant, tend the fires our heart, lest the world go dark again. Except here’s the truth: though I would not want to go back to that Hellish place, I do not know how I would be able to do the work I’m doing now without the twenty years I spent there. The experience of trying and trying and trying to create something that will please other people has been invaluable as I write and talk about creating things without thinking about other people. It is the source of my authority. It is easy for me to believe this same vigilance must be applied to my son Sawyer. But for my attention our world could become a science fiction dystopia, a hellish place where he never thrives because he never learns and changes. This vigilance is unnecessary for two reasons. First, everyone learns and grows. It doesn’t matter what label you have or haven’t received in your life, you will learn and grow. It’s what humans do, whether they want to or not. Second, somewhere in the future a flower I cannot at the moment perceive will bloom for Sawyer, a flower whose roots were sown in all the turbulence and uncertainty of the present I can perceive. That I wish to see and hold that flower now has been the suffering of my life. Let me see the prize so that I might know the game was worth playing. The game is always worth playing once I allow myself to play it. All the prizes I’ve received in my life have been lost or forgotten, and the still the game goes on. The game does not recognize victory or defeat, it just goes on and on, with no boundaries, and no clock, just the field and all the equal players.
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I was having coffee the other day with a writer I’d recently met at a conference. We were having a great conversation, as often happens when two people who share so many interests and beliefs get to really know one another for the first time. I was feeling particularly bouncy that day, and I found I was talking quickly, trying to keep up with the ideas that came as fast as she or I finished the last one. In the middle of one particularly rapid back and forth she stopped me and asked, “Are you ADHD?”
“What?” “ADHD. You’re zipping from one idea to the next. I can keep up, but you move really fast. I was wondering if you have ADHD. I have ADHD.” “Not that I know of.” I am fifty years old, and this was the first time anyone had ever suggested I had something. I knew her question was more commiserative than diagnostic, but I found it disorienting. For a moment I began picturing myself not just as Bill, but as Bill plus this thing that, by no will of my own, could control my behavior. By this understanding, no matter how we parse it, to have this thing meant I was a little less free. Which is why I have never said my son Sawyer is autistic. I sometimes find myself needing to quickly explain to someone why we homeschool him or the particular nature of his challenges, and I’ll say he was, “diagnosed on the autism spectrum,” but even this feels dishonest. It places him in a special category that I don’t believe exists, a category that doesn’t serve him or me or the person asking about him. If a special category exists for Sawyer, then such categories conceivably exist for us all. Last year a young man approached me after I’d delivered a keynote speech that included a brief story about Sawyer. He wanted to ask me about writer’s block and his concerns over rejection. As we talked about the nature of thought, and how difficult it is to write while worrying what other people think of us, he mentioned that he had once been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. “Is that right?” I said. “Yes. But I don’t deal with that any more.” He waved his hand as if dismissing it. “I’m done with that.” This seemed exactly right to me. I know labels and diagnosis are supposed to be useful. Someone is doing something we don’t understand; sometimes that someone is us. We give that someone a label and now we can say they are doing this thing because of what of they have. Yet I decline any explanation for what I do other than the exercise of my own free will. That I am not always in command of those choices, that I am not even always aware that I have made a choice is irrelevant. What might look like dysfunction is only someone practicing how to live their life on purpose. |
William Kenower
I am the author of Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write with Confidence, and Write Within Yourself: An Author's Companion. Learn more here. Archives
July 2016
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