Dear Alex,

You’re very funny. You also seem very smart and capable of an emotional depth that feels harder and harder to come by lately.

I watched Just For Us a few times. The first time I was expecting to laugh but not to cry. I did both. The other watches were just for me.

In a 2024 Hollywood Reporter Roundtable interview you said something I’ve been thinking about ever since: “People aren’t happy because they don’t have mastery in their life.”

Hollywood Reporter Roundtable Interview

You said it with a sense of simplicity that stands in direct opposition to the concept itself. A kind of simplicity that struck me as both legitimate advice and impossible to accomplish.

It isn’t the work part of mastery that I don’t understand. You do the work, sacrifice, bomb, bomb again, and so on. Simplicity as layer to complexity makes sense to me.

What I don’t understand is how you manage to collect the emotional agility that arguably matters more than the work. How do you manage to silence the voices that scream so loud you couldn’t possibly hear anything worth writing down? Or do you not have the voices? Does anyone else have the voices?

I’m actively engaged in a gruesome war between The Doubt and The Dream. The Doubt and The Dream fight for my attention with great success. With a fortitude I could write into a self-insert character but never truly embody, they fight for victory with great amusement and greater determination.

Maybe it’s for the best it didn’t get to you cause no one can read this handwriting. Including myself.

The Doubt Holds Court

Intimidated by the fervor with which they play their games, I’m unable to propel pen to paper. I sit on the floor of my kitchen crying to Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. My debut novel is left out to pasture by both the critics and the readers and my worth is precisely what my high school bully suspected: zilch.

An ocean of sadness and unfulfilled potential flood my apartment. Mind and body on opposite sides of the world, calling out to each other like a game of Marco-Polo that never ends. Alone and aware of it, I sink to the depth of my tedious and narcissistic sorrow.

An everything bagel with non-dairy cream cheese is the straw from which I breathe.

Without notice or consent, I swing to the other side.

The Dream Holds Court

Intimidated by the fervor with which they play their games, I’m unable to propel pen to paper. I recite original poetry to a stadium of roaring fans and I give talks at the UN about the importance of the arts. The work that won my the Pulitzer, and the speech I gave to accept it, will both be studied at university literature courses around the world. The speech will be performed as audition monologue by every young actor for two generations.

I’m arrested by my greed and imprisoned by the inevitable swing to my other more gory but equally immobilizing residency. In the meantime, I remain handcuffed to the hope of someday, which I can’t bring myself to stress test.

I beg for the inevitability of victory only offered in hindsight but live firmly in the fog of war.

I have a first draft. Even a second. Sort of. And I look at it every day. I read and reread the parts I like and ignore the parts I don’t. I hide those parts away and pretend they don’t exist like that $500 medical bill that got sent to collections–not because I couldn’t afford it but because it got buried under a pile of papers consisting of other books ideas that haven’t made it past outline.

The plot is thin like a supermodel in the early aughts, her hips bones sharper than the knives I bought in college and never replaced. The dialogue is full of bad exposition and a Google Translate interpretation of the symbolism. And like the giant skeleton that’s been on my neighbor’s lawn since October 1, it’s been left out far past an acceptable amount of time, is getting annoying for everyone, and lacks fascia.

I want a treaty. I want peace. I hereby declare this fake wood desk in my one-bedroom New Jersey apartment henceforth be Versailles.

Do-a-little-bit-every-day, the-magic-happens-in-the-minutia, or make-a-plan-and-stick-to-it kind of enlightenment shimmers in the distance like a lighthouse guiding me home but I still crash on the bank anyway, which looks like an act of war to the locals so the violence starts all over again.

“How’s your book coming along?” Ask the people who love me and wants what’s best for me. They don’t know the Battle at Yorktown wages in my heart and pieces of my soul are currently being melted down as cannon fodder.”

“Great! Thanks for asking! How’s your new boss? Better than the last guy?” I ask hoping I’m not obvious.

“Yes! So much better!” I’m relieved my effort to change the subject worked. I cough, hoping a release of imaginary phlegm will trick my body into thinking it doesn’t need to release liquid through my eyes, at least not in this particular moment.

“Oh! That’s great! Are you still up for that promotion?” Responses to normal conversation drown out like The Peanuts’ schoolteacher while I focus on the attack The Doubt just struck on The Dream from a distance.

What The Doubt doesn’t seem to understand is that it doesn’t exist without The Dream. The Doubt is the price for having The Dream at all. And what The Dream doesn’t understand is that it isn’t everything.

The Dream isn’t brave. It’s a coward. The Dream is the safe place to live. It doesn’t risk exposure. It doesn’t seek to be great, only to imagine what might be.

Doing is the only way to become. Forcing pen to paper like training a dog to obey. But war wages amongst the two parties who are both idiots, distracting me from original purpose–making a mockery of the future I long for.

Alex,

I need you to tell me the truth. Am I one of those people who auditioned for Season 1 of American Idol and had no idea they had no business being there?

Am I making a fool of myself?

If I continue to wage this war, I can at least pretend I could have been. I don’t have to risk exposure.

But if I am somehow, someway, someone who can, and I am somehow, someway, able to sign a treaty between The Doubt and The Dream, how would I even start? How do I step out of the shelter of The Dream? How do I unlock the handcuffs? How do I breath fresh air?

How do I add mastery to my life?

How do I make my life big enough so that mastery knows it’s welcome?

How does pen meet paper less contentiously?

How do I walk away from the fantasy and tether myself back down to earth long enough to carry the banner in the Minutia Militia?

How does a doubting dreamer do?

With hope that the yearning relents,
Allison E. Conway

PEN MEETS PAPER

An enemies-to-lovers romcom starring Zendaya and Michael B. Jordan. Based on the book of the same name by Emily Dickinson, she wrote that one time she managed to go outside.