Turning Off Radio Station KFKD

As a junior in college, I have been giving some thought to my future. So far, I have not really encountered any answers to the questions, “What should I do with my life?” or “What am I good at?” but in the process, I have realized something important: I must turn off Radio Station KFKD.

What, you might ask, is Radio Station KFKD? To preserve my employability and my parents’ pride in my writing, I will not spell it out, but the upcoming explanation of its function and a simple phonetic reading should illuminate it fairly well.  I first encountered the concept of Radio Station KFKD in Anne Lamott’s insightful and inspiring book Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing And Life, which I have begun to reread in my spare time because, with the encouragement of some friends, I have begun to consider writing fiction. This is something that I have not done since my early teenage years, largely due to Radio Station KFKD, which Lamott describes on page as “the single greatest obstacle” a writer faces in listening to his or her intuition.

“If you are not careful,” Lamott writes, “Station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo”. Made up of “self-aggrandizement” and “self-loathing” in equal measure, feeding on each other in a twisted cycle of unrealistic expectations, distraction, and paralyzing negativity, Radio Station KFKD, I realized, has been playing in my mind for years.

Rosy visions of my future as a brilliant, well-liked professor at the center of an English department at a generic, small liberal arts college and giving interviews for major television and radio programs about the insightful novel I have not begun to write contrast with a constant stream of unconstructive self-doubt and criticism: “What sort of graduate program could you ever get into? Well, maybe you might be able to get into a decent program, but you’d certainly be the silliest person there. And even if you weren’t, what contributions could you even make to the field? And don’t even think about a novel! Who would want to read something you wrote?” This is only the professional, academic, and artistic side of KFKD. I won’t even go into the personal programming.

KFKD needs to go. The first voice distracts me from doing what I need to do and simply sets me up for disappointment, and the second voice has the capability to turn me into a complete wreck. When KFKD was at its loudest last year, it was all I could do to drag myself out of bed and go to class at all – it was a miracle I got all of my work done.

Lamott recommends prayer, a small personal ritual, deep breathing – anything to relax and tune out the negative self-talk. Now that I have identified KFKD as a major (and detrimental) influence in my life, I can start using these strategies, and maybe inventing some of my own, to turn it off, or at least to lower the volume enough that I can hear my own thoughts and start to shape them into something worth sharing, in the form of an academic paper, this blog, a simple conversation, or even that book I’d like to start to work on when I’ve finished my essays.

How do you deal with Radio Station KFKD?

(All quotes taken from Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. 116-121.)