It took me years and years to finally start regularly calling myself a writer.

I placed in a writing contest out of Amarillo (the big city) in 5th grade and won my family tickets to some sports game I barely remember. But I wasn’t a writer, then.

I once filled up an entire single subject notebook with a story that was eerily similar to the Cats and Dogs movie I’d recently watched.

Nobody had called me a writer yet.

I started writing in a diary and slapping angry rhymes together in junior high when everything fell apart. But I wasn’t a writer, then. Was I?

Some of my peers (and the teachers who stumbled upon my … art …) began to notice.

I moved on to expanded prose in both non-fiction and, more notably, fiction. My freshman English teacher was so delighted with the drama on the pages, she showed off my writing to other teachers.

And then I wrote my first full-length short story, jumping off a prompt one of my friends had asked me to expand on. A friend I’d made who knew how important my writing was to me. I was writing and people knew it, but still, I wasn’t a writer.

The story in question included murder and curse words. My mother was appalled. To my mother, my words were all curses, fiction or not, daggers straight to her heart.

In high school and my first round of college, I came to the page with desperation, but found that without an audience, my pain made no difference at all because, back then, I wasn’t a writer. I was just a fuck up.

I came out of rehab with a poetry book that about 10 people bought and a 300 page printed book (that wasn’t for sale) of the gems I’d curated from my diaries before leaving those notebooks, notebooks spanning nearly a decade, in a dumpster somewhere between Austin and Plano. But I wasn’t a writer, then.

I went an entire marriage, pregnancy, and divorce with minimal writing. Any words I wrote were school essays and the unfiltered grief that came towards the end of the saga. Nobody was supposed to see any of it, and you won’t for a long time because the writing of that era is from when I wasn’t a writer. Not yet.

I graduated with an English degree and a full portfolio of articles I’d written for the school newspaper, blogs published on the Dallas ZooHoo! blog, and even a second place prize for a prose piece in a Sigma Tau Delta journal. But I wasn’t a writer, even then.

I got my first job and in under a year, moved departments and got a role with “writer” in the title. The work, though, was less writing and more editing. You could officially call me a writer, but I didn’t feel like one.

When did I accept the title?

It wasn’t until halfway through my Master’s degree after I’d already published my first novel. A student in one of my former professor’s classes interviewed me about my book and its journey. I texted my professor afterwards that I felt like her student had treated me like a real author. I promised myself then and there that I would always do my best to remember to stretch out my hands and help those I could.

There were so many stops along the way that I could have accepted the identity, even as the people around me watched my writing bring me to life, but it was that little moment, thirty minutes or so on Zoom with somebody who saw what I had done and wanted my advice on how to do the same that hit me in the chest.

I’m a writer.

I’ve been writing for over twenty years now. I’m not the best one out there, but I’m also not nobody. I can write, and I get better and better at it, year after year.

I just wanted to let you know, writer to writer, that whether your writing is plastered all over the internet or lives somewhere more secret, whether you have an audience or just the pretend people cheering in your head, you are a writer if you’re writing, and that’s it.

Share your words. We need them.

Love,

Your writer friend