I used to be a writer.

Here is a fact that will shock you: I graduated from college ten years ago. I'll wait for your jaws to come back up off the floor. Well, okay, maybe that little known fact doesn't shock you as much as it does me. Today, I was looking at the itinerary for the upcoming Port Townsend Writer's Conference. I've never been, but my current favorite author is teaching one of the clinics so I started rolling the idea around in my head about attending. Not long after reading each syllabus, I was more than intimidated. Oh, I thought, this is for 'real' writers. Yikes, that's not me. This got me thinking. When can you call yourself a writer? Which led me to a Google search on 'when to call yourself a writer'. Isn't it funny how we put so much faith in the opinion of others? Because really, that is what a Google search often is, a consensus of a million other people's opinions on one topic or another. And then I thought, maybe the better question is, when did I stop thinking of myself as a writer? 

When I was in college, I was writing every day. I have pages and pages of my writing saved in a file cabinet from my five (yes, five) years of college. At this time, I couldn't even tell you where my actual framed degree is, but I know exactly where the culmination of works to earn that degree are stashed. Today, I realized that I stopped thinking of myself as a writer the day I stopped having my writing critiqued and validated and have since been solely judged on the simple existence of my degree. And now that I am a stay-at-home mom, I'm not really even judged on that. 

Me, circa 2002.

So after all that, I decided to jump back in time and dig out my English 101 syllabus from my freshman year of college. After smoothing out the creases from a bad filing job and laughing a little at the archaic word processing, I read through the class assignments for that first collegiate writing class from so long ago and decided to start all over again. My first assignment was to look at a picture provided and write the opening sentence to a story based on the photo prompt. I sat down on my couch with my macbook in my lap and crafted a first sentence. Then a second. And a third. And then it came like a flood and the words have been pouring out of me all afternoon. My thoughts and ideas rush in and around my head and I have to stop to switch over to an outline because the story keeps developing out of sorts and without a timeline. And then it hit me, I used to be a writer because someone told me to be a writer. Actually, a lot of someones. Each professor, each assignment, each paper I had to write all told me, 'you are a writer'.

 It has been ten years of writing (and not) to remember why I went to college in the first place. Because I loved writing. And today was the first time I have ever sat down to write without some reason. Not for work, or to send an email, or for an article or a blog post, but just to write. Because I love writing.