What I Was Doing In My Early 20s

Experience

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing an ‘experience’ piece — these are a bit more memoiristic. At the partner site

Inner Life

, co-founder

Joshua Doležal

reflects on The Chronicles of Narnia.

Best,

Sam

What I Was Doing In My Early 20s

Recently, I have a very pleasant conversation with a 24-year-old, an aspiring writer, about that phase of life. I find that I have more to say about this topic, am more passionate about it, than I am about virtually anything else — exactly because that time of life was so miserable for me. 

I really have astonishingly little to show for it — that whole period between about 22 and 26, or maybe 28. For the most part, I wasn’t working. I tried various freelance projects that went nowhere. I was fixated on writing but for most of the time I was paralyzed — I finished a couple of longer projects that I barely tried to ship around; mostly I wrote in a notebook, fragmented, disjointed thoughts that I meticulously typed up hoping that they would somehow stitch together but for the most part didn’t; eventually got tired of the notebook, tired of my own voice, finally had a solid-enough job and felt that that was it, the writing part of my life had passed, had turned out to be just an extended phase. 

Church bells were very difficult for me during this time — every new hour reminding me of how little I had accomplished in the hour before. The mantra I had in my head was: “this is bottom.” I was curious about if there was a moment when I would really sink and would feel myself start to buoy back up. The worst were the dishwashers from the restaurant next to my girlfriend’s place playing basketball on a backyard hoop during work breaks. I would often sleep in until the afternoon — I was attempting to be nocturnal — and the goal was to be up and out of the apartment before my girlfriend returned home from her teaching job. The dishwashers were an incredible rebuke. They sounded not very good — the ball kept clanking off the rim, they ran laughing and shouting after it. That seemed to me what life was — you do your job and then you enjoy your breaks from it. By contrast, I had no idea the state of existence I was in. 

I smoked cigarettes, I drank — the idea, always, was to tilt myself into some other more productive state; every drink, every smoke felt like that might be the place for inspiration. I tried to stay up all night on the same premise — I was already isolated but I thought that maybe if I went deep enough into myself, really bottomed out, then I would access some truth of myself. Instead, in the pit of the night, I mostly played online games. I streamed TV shows. I found myself being very moved by music videos on YouTube. 

I feel that I’m still paying the price for those wasted years. My dad, in the thick of it, sent me a study about how those who don’t work straight out of college never make up for it. And that turned out to be the case. I’m having difficulty competing against people with master’s degrees or Ph.Ds — something that would have been straightforward enough to have done at that time. I didn’t pick up clear, hard skills — and ended up being behind when I finally got a job in film production. 

But somehow — and this is what I tried to communicate to the 24-year-old — the way that I spent those years was far from a waste. I had a thought, basically, that I’d been in school too long, that I wanted to be deinstitutionalized — and I more than got that wish. After I’d graduated the world had suddenly gotten so quiet — there were no parties to go to, no one wanted anything from me, there was no feedback. I was achingly lonely — I remember, soon after I graduated, staring at my phone for the entirety of a Friday night just not able to believe that it wasn’t ringing at all — but somewhere in there I also started to disconnect from the voices of authority from my schools, from the socially proscribed ways that I was supposed to think. 

When I started to write, it was strange — the voices coming through me seemed to be connected to a very deep isolation; I had no idea really why those voices and why they had anything to do with me. I was up late at night at a friend’s place early in my nocturnal phase and suddenly had an epiphany — a system of thought that drives my worldview to this day. I was sitting in a bus station and suddenly had an idea for a novel about a baseball player. I was on a reporting trip, sleeping in the back of a car to save money, and suddenly heard characters talking to each other — had no idea who they were but realized that I should write a play. I was alone in a hotel room in Utah, reading about a 19th century woman and somehow connected to her very deeply, felt that she was the character I was looking for. 

It wasn’t just a process of hollowing myself out — of having the notebook, of making myself isolated enough that I was able to hear the voices when they came in — it was that somewhere in myself I’d made that the priority. If I’d gone to grad school, I would have felt much more placed in the world and I would have learned to write papers in academic style. If I had gotten a job I would have — and this is exactly what happened to me a little later on — gotten subsumed in the office culture and in the status of it, would have drifted away from chasing my voice. I felt that I’d announced to my system, my spirit, what have you, that this was what I wanted, and if the rewards were not immediately forthcoming, something in my system responded to that and eventually, when I was least expecting it, started sending me voices. 

The 24-year-old thinks — a bit laughably — that I’ve figured it out and peppers me with all kinds of questions. He’s spent the last few years writing ‘an encyclopedic novel.’ I can see how badly he wants to be different, be unique — everything about him really reverberates for me. What I tell him is that he’s basically doing the right things — he’s employed; he’s asking older people questions; he’s working away, by fits and starts, on his own thing. What I try to tell him is that there are a few things he’ll discover. One is how moody people are — and that a person who seems to have a very balanced equilibrium will discover when they’re writing that they’re beset by all sorts of moods, mostly doubts and fluttering anxieties. Another is how rapidly people change, and the rate of change as you’re writing is faster than for just about anything else — so that ideas curdle very quickly and it becomes very difficult not just to maintain inspiration but to maintain any sense of continuity with oneself as one is working on a longer project. And something else he’ll discover is that he has far more time than he thinks he does — he believes he needs to get it all now, and probably that won’t happen and there will be some prolonged period of disappointment, but somewhere in there he’ll find that there is this great expanse of time and that if he is disciplined in sculpting it he can really make it work for him. Discipline is a completely separate topic — for me, that didn’t start until another phase of my life, until my late 20s — but it would have been hard to get there without the self-exploration, without the agonies of the period right after college. 

Nobody exactly tells you miserable that is going to be, I say to the 24-year-old — everything in your life is structured up until that point and when that structure goes away you take it to be your fault. The temptation is overwhelming to take any kind of structure that’s on offer — graduate school, some shitty job, an internship — but if you do resist that temptation, not that it’s necessarily such a great idea to resist it, but  if you do then something very interesting starts to happen: you deal with yourself in very stark isolation, you start to really know yourself. You learn how to be alone.