I am a writer.
You cannot imagine how it feels to say those words.
My daughter rolled her eyes at me yesterday when I said I had “been working”. Pretty sure her thought process was, “It’s not really ‘work’ if nobody is paying you, Mom”. But I spent 18 years working for her and SHE never paid me, so I’d have to disagree.
I am a writer.
And I’ve been waiting my whole life to claim it.
Admittedly, there is this looming fear of claiming to be something no one else is validating. I mean, I can kick a dryer ball across the bathroom floor and call myself Alex Morgan, but that doesn’t really make me a forward on the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, does it?
And I can wear my tiara and call myself a Pretty Pretty Princess, but unless somebody outside my realm of influence holds a coronation ceremony for me, my regality is seriously in question.
So if I type a few paragraphs and call myself a writer, won’t you people just call me a fraud?
I don’t care. I’ve been called worse.
I am a writer.
I don’t care if you read what I write. I don’t care if get published. I don’t care if I go broke in the process. Well, I care a little. I do like to eat. And buy sparkly things. But truly, not as much as I like to write. NEED to write. Somewhere amidst the busyness of being a responsible adult, that need got buried like a Cheerio in the couch cushions. But after several long years that lone little Cheerio was pulled out of the darkness and thrown onto the compost pile…and it was in that decaying pile it found enough sunlight to germinate. (Yes, I realize Cheerios can’t sprout. It’s a metaphor. Stay with me.)
So now I find myself with this freedom to put myself out there…and this fear that when I do, you’ll judge me. Or decide you don’t like me. Or, as has happened on the most destructive level, decide I’m not worth the trouble.
Writing, in a weird way, is like riding Space Mountain. I’ve been waiting a long time to get on this ride. And now I’m strapped in. Completely in the dark. I can’t see what’s beside me or above me or under me. I have no idea where I’m going and it makes my head hurt. Sometimes climbing and sometimes falling. I feel scared and exhilarated and liberated and very vulnerable. All I can see is what’s right in front of my face, but that’s enough for now.
I haven’t been this happy since I was a 17-year-old declaring “someday I’m going to be a writer.”
For most people, “what they do” is not “who they are”, but for me, I have planted a flag in the ground and staked a claim on my identity.
I am a writer.
she said 