Ken Dryden admitted in his book The Game, that he could never quite connect with the fact that he was the goalie for the Montreal Canadiens during their glory years of the 1970s – the goalie, the one whose name was engraved on the Stanley Cup six times, and Vezina trophies, who shared a dressing room with legends and stood in goal during some of the most memorable moments in hockey history. He knew it was true, but it felt almost as if it had happened to someone else.
Even though I’m not as good a writer as he was a goalie, I understand that feeling completely.
Over the years, I’ve seen my name in magazines, online features, company websites, and press releases. I’ve interviewed prominent figures in sports, business, and technology, written for organizations I once only read about, and helped shape stories that reached audiences in ways I’ll never fully know. Yet every time I see my name attached to something, there’s this strange moment of distance, like I’m looking at a parallel version of myself, living in a different reality.
It’s not disbelief or false modesty. It’s more like an inability to feel that the person behind the byline is me. I know I wrote the words. I can remember the research, the interviews, and the editing process. But the moment something goes live, it almost ceases to belong to me. It becomes the work of “the writer” or “John Berkovich” but not myself.
That disconnect is real, surreal, and humbling.
I’ve been pondering this and similar thoughts a lot lately, as readers of this blog likely noticed. And it’s not just what I do now, but the span of the last two decades or so. The countless projects, ghostwritten pieces, daily reporting on golf tours, campaigns, case studies, features, and more that shaped careers or captured stories, often without my name attached, except as a “For more information contact John Berkovich” at the bottom of a press release. For years, my voice existed publicly but invisibly. I wrote under other people’s bylines, watched their names appear where mine would have been, and took pride in the craft, even without the credit.
Now, when I see my own name again in an article on a regular – even daily basis – both consistent and visible, part of me still hasn’t recalibrated. My brain, more than ever, hasn’t caught up to the reality that the person people are reading is me.
Writers inhabit a peculiar space between visibility and invisibility. We pour hours into something in isolation for the most part, with early mornings, late nights, and weekends sometimes, quiet rooms, noisy rooms, rewrites – then send it out into a world we never truly see. We know people read it, but we rarely, if ever, witness that moment. And at the same time, we don’t think anyone reads it. We don’t see the expression on their faces, the pause in their thoughts, or the quiet nod when something resonates. So even when someone comments, shares, or emails about a piece, it feels abstract, as if feedback from another world to another person, an alternate reality and version of me. That’s what makes it surreal.
A reader’s connection is real, but the writer’s experience of it is distant.
I think that’s why confidence can be such a fragile thing in creative work. You can have a long, successful track record and still feel like an imposter. You can look at your own portfolio and think, Who wrote all this? You know what the answer is, but for me at least, it doesn’t connect. Because in a way, the act of writing pulls something from you that exists beyond daily consciousness. The best work feels almost channeled, not constructed.
When I wrote recently about confidence, I realized it’s not just about believing in your abilities; it’s about reuniting with your own accomplishments. It’s recognizing that the person behind the laptop keyboard deserves to feel the weight of what they’ve done.
For years, I brushed off compliments or milestones as “just part of the job,” and I moved from assignment to assignment without stopping to acknowledge the path I was building. But looking back now, I see a body of work that’s been consistent, resilient, and honest even through burnout, self-doubt, and reinvention.
Maybe that surreal distance isn’t something to fix, but something to understand; it’s just the natural consequence of doing work that lives in the world longer than the moment it was created.
Ken Dryden may never have fully connected with the idea of being that goalie, and that’s okay. Perhaps that kind of disbelief keeps us grounded and is a quiet reminder that it is not the ego, but the work, that endures.
After more than two decades, I’m still learning to live with the strangeness of it: to see my work and (almost) accept, with a slight smile, that yes, it’s really me. And that even if it still feels like a parellel universe I move in and out of, and probably always will, it’s one I’m grateful to inhabit.
johnberkovich.com 