being a writer

I've known for a while that writing is something I enjoy, and am relatively good at (and I say that without any sense of superiority--it's just been reinforced over many years), and would possibly be interested in as a career. But I still have a hard time calling myself a writer. In fact, whenever someone tells me they are a writer I am a little skeptical. I want to say--prove it. Show me something you've written and I will decide whether or not you can legitimately call yourself a writer.

I have come to the realization that writers come in all shapes in sizes and just as you can't judge a book by its cover, you can't judge a writer by their appearance. I started a writing workshop class last night that will last for the next ten weeks--and is full of people who I would never assume to be writers, yet there they are, in my writing class, all claiming that if they could do anything in their non-existent free time it would be to write.

Which just goes to show me.

I'm really excited about this class because it is going to give me a real chance to be critiqued by other writers. But it's also a little intimidating. I've always felt confident about writing, but I also fall into the trap of comparison far too often, and I judge myself too harshly against other people's standards. So it should be interesting.

I have found that being a writer is a strange fate, one that I would never have anticipated in my high school years being a viable career option. On my better days I have lofty aspirations of being published, of actually making money by writing, of being respected as a writer. The rest of the time I satisfy myself with blogging and journaling and keeping a file on my computer full of poetry and unfinished stories and short essays on my life that I never show anyone yet value as much as everything on my hard drive.

It is a strange and terrifying journey, this discovery that one can be a writer, and that writers are all around us, hiding in our midst, waiting to take our everyday experiences and turn them into novels and poems and short stories and essays, waiting to breathe life into the everyday mundane. We are the keepers of the English language if we are functioning correctly--we strive to expose the enormity of a language full of powerful and beautiful and absurd words...these little things that fall off our tongues like water, without thought, with the greatest power anyone can have.

The weight of this has prevented me from taking upon my shoulders the title of "writer."

But the weight of anything important is never as heavy as we believe it will be.