As I have come back to writing, I’ve been struggling with calling myself a writer. Recently, I re-read some of my first posts from 16 years ago and realized that I’ve been struggling with this kind of identity crisis my whole adult life. I don’t know if I have any real new thoughts on it, or anything definitive that will forever resolve the conflict within me, but maybe I do.
So let’s get into it.
When I first started writing, I was a teenager with a lot of emotions that I didn’t understand and didn’t feel safe expressing. So I wrote about them. They were angst-filled ramblings that sometimes made sense but often didn’t about what I saw as the unfairness of society, religion, lower middle-class life, being a kid, being a boy who didn’t feel like a typical boy, and so on and so forth. I forget why I started sharing my poetry with people, but when I did, I was pleased that people liked it, so I kept doing it.
I started writing stories soon after that, also showing them to family and friends, who liked them. I’ve written here before about the teacher who praised a story I’d turned in for an assignment, so I won’t rehash that. But when he did, a few of my classmates who I didn’t consider friends asked if they could read it. That’s when I started thinking that maybe I could do this for my career.
Which is the same time the doubt set it.
In my post, “Just Sign an X and Call Yourself Whatever the Hell You Want,” I went through all of my achievements that I had under my belt at the time, none of which made me feel like a real writer. Now it’s a decade and a half later, and I still don’t feel like a real writer.
So what the heck can I do to get past this? It seems like over fifteen years is a long time to struggle with something without a resolution. But if I’ve learned nothing else on the mental health journey I’ve been on these last six years, it’s that thoughts and feelings and doubts don’t just turn off like a switch, as much as we want them to. I still have bad days, which frustrates me. But I have fewer of them and more tools and strategies to deal with them when they happen.
How can I carry those lessons I’ve learned over to my identity crisis as a writer? Well, first I realized that this isn’t a new thing I’ve been dealing with. That somehow makes it easier to take, understanding that it’s not caused by my self-perceived failures, but rather, just a part of my mental wiring. Secondly, since I’m better able to examine my thoughts and feelings to trace them to their origins, I think maybe I do have an insight that I didn’t have before.
I was focused on achievement and external recognition to say that I am a writer. When those things started to come, I felt like I was on the road to success as a writer. When I struggled with those things, when the story rejections kept coming, when the critiques became harsher, I thought I’d failed.
But if I rely on others to tell me what and who I am, then I won’t be true to myself and complete as a person. Who I am–and more importantly, who I want to be–is worth fighting for.
