Chapter 188: Writing Help from Steven Kwan, MLB All-Star
I suspect it was not Steven Kwan’s intention to offer advice to writers struggling with fear, anxiety, stress – afflictions so many of us endure. But that is just what the Cleveland Guardian’s star outfielder did last week, in a piece in The Athletic.
Kwan performed an act of bravery still rare among elite athletes: he confessed to his vulnerabilities, and put it in writing.
He writes about fear. About the coughing fit that woke him in the middle of the night before his big league debut. About feeling like an imposter, as he puts it, still the undersized kid from Fremont, California “with a collage of Sports Illustrated cutouts still hanging on the bedroom wall of his childhood home.”
“I get nervous. Every game,” Kwan wrote. “The national anthem is my last chance to center myself before first pitch. It’s a constant, a chance to maintain a routine. It’s something I can depend on and something I can control in a game in which there’s so much we cannot.”
Breathing helps.
“I stand on the baseline, I start counting,” he writes.
“Breathe in. One.
“Breathe out. Two.
“As I make my way to 10, it’s funny how many thoughts can flood your mind: What am I gonna do in my first at-bat? What’s the third-base umpire’s name? Do I have time to go to the bathroom?”
Helpful, yes. But what makes Kwan’s account stand out are two insights: the ubiquity of intrusive thoughts; and turning an emotional vulnerability – in his case, imposter syndrome – to his advantage.
Elite athletes are different from you and me, or so it would appear. They live to compete, to test themselves, and most of all to win. Talent will get them just so far; what separates the good ones from the great is a desire, a need, a drive so powerful it can be frightening.
I have interviewed many athletes but reading Kwan’s story brought to mind one conversation in particular. It was with a boxer of immense talent – he was a world champion – who despite his success never achieved the greatness for which he appeared destined. He told me about a fight against a strong but lesser opponent. He was hitting this opponent with every punch in his considerable arsenal. But the opponent would not relent, would not stop coming at him, would not stop trying to beat him. And as the fight wore on this wonderfully gifted boxer began to sense that he was a beaten man, that there was nothing he could do to defeat his opponent. Nothing did. The opponent knocked him out.
So it is that when Kwan writes about imposter syndrome, it is not with self-pity but with the mindset of an athlete who is always searching for an edge, something that will tip the scales to his advantage. Teeth gritted. Eyes focused.
“There’s a level of that impostor syndrome that’s key to my success — never letting myself get complacent, never letting myself think I belong,” he writes. “It’s probably not healthy, but I think it helps in the grand scheme. It motivates me to keep up with my routines — the meditating, the breathing exercises, the journaling, the reading. All the stuff that becomes more and more difficult to stay disciplined with the deeper you get into the 162-game grind.”
It’s probably not healthy, but I think it helps in the grand scheme. Healthy, perhaps not. Essential, yes, given the inherent irrationality of what he has chosen – worked relentlessly – to do for a living: trying to hit with a cylindrical bat a ball that is hurtling toward him at close to 100 miles an hour. He will succeed – if this year’s statistical line is a guide – less than a third of the time. He comes to bat some 600 times a year. He never says this, but I suspect there is no place he’d rather be than in the batter’s box.
Kwan breathes. He meditates. He keeps a journal. He reads. He recognizes that random thoughts swirl around him, useless and potentially harmful in the doubts they sow. He acknowledges them and, in effect, exhales them away.
But it’s the crazy bit I most like about his story, and which I find most useful, even now, going on 50 years of writing for a living. I am long past writing to compete - to position myself for the next job, the plum assignment, the editor’s nod of approval. I have gone professionally as far as I will go, given that in the spring I will retire from teaching after 35 years.
I have, as much as any of us can, exorcised the demons that drove me to compete, to win, to stand out. And while I do not suffer from imposter syndrome – even as I feel so very lucky to be able to do what I love doing – I know that even in my early 70s, I retain some of the crazy in me.
I do not need to write for a living. But I need to write, to wake up and know that my equivalent of a pitcher waiting to throw a fastball past me is a blank page that I am eager to try to fill.
After reading Kwan’s story I sent it to several writer friends to ask what they did to resolve their fears, their anxieties. I assumed they felt as I did. I was wrong. Not all writers are subject to the kind of worries and doubts that I have been lugging around, in one shape or another, for so many years. One wrote that while she is anxious about many things, writing is not among them. She’s been doing this for a long time, and is so familiar with the task that she can perform it unburdened.
Another, however, Besha Rodell, wrote that while “stress is a barrier and in my case a motivator. Stress is a form of energy, and if I’m too relaxed I just don’t have the buzz to bring to my work.”
Then I heard from my colleague Kevin Coyne, who, if you haven’t discovered it yet, writes a terrific newsletter, Your Hometown, Too. Kevin has coached Little League, which allowed him to connect the athletic with the literary.
He wrote: “Blink hard, and hold it for a second. That’s what I used to tell the players I coached in Little League. You’re up at bat or on the mound – close your eyes and leave for just a moment the world that is making you tense, and then open them to start clear and fresh.”
And next:
“I have a longer-range version of blinking that works for writing. I live in the town where I grew up, not in a city full of other writers who are playing on the same field. I leave my desk and go out into my town where – sometimes by chance, sometimes by design – I can find someone I know who knows and cares nothing about what I might be working on, and we just talk for a while, about anything except the work, which then helps me see that work more clearly when I get back to my desk. Clear yourself by filling yourself with something other than yourself and your work.”
And then, having breathed and taken yourself away from what distracts you, you go back to your desk, to your story, because like Steven Kwan facing down a pitcher and himself, it is where we need to be.