I am a writer?

I am a writer?

I quit my job. I quit my job to pursue a creative career, to become a writer. It was an administrative job, one in which I had been stuck for six years. I quit my job and precisely one week later the whole world shut down in the midst of a global pandemic. Three months have passed since then, three months of drifting and some days this all feels like a sort of cosmic joke or as if I finally could not escape whatever bad karma I had been accumulating. I am writer. I repeat, more for myself than those who ask me what I do. I am a writer? The question hovering in my voice, the apprehension I feel saying the word aloud clear to anyone who listens. Unpublished, unemployed – I am writer.

What does it mean to be a writer? Is self-declaration enough? Somehow, I doubt it. I am a writer. I repeat this mantra, day in day out while I wait for the latest rejection email – not enough experience the recruiter will sight. It is true I do not have professional writing experience; I have worked in administration for my entire adult life. I am writer. I say as I apply for yet another job, slowly but surely my search fields finding their way back to an administrative office job. I am a writer.

I had been lucky in life; I had stumbled upon success before. Am I a writer? Who am I? I grapple with these thoughts, spiralling into days filled with self-pity and loathing. I was arrogant when I quit my job, I had no plan beyond becoming a writer; whatever that means. I left my job with nothing waiting for me on the other side but whimsical notions that were thought up during daydreams sitting at my old desk. Am I a writer? It brings me joy, joy above anything else. That must mean something I tell myself as I worry about how much money is in my bank account or what kind of future I will have. Am I a writer? I ask myself in the dead of the night when the thoughts that run through my head are so dark, they shock me, pulling me further and further from sleep. Where do I start?

Am I writer? I type as I sit in my home office, tea going cold next to me as the latest rejection email arrives in my inbox. Am I a writer? I am plagued by this question; it racks my nerves and threatens my very existence; my sense of self. My worth wrapped up in one little word, so fragile and easily undone by the questions of others. “What you do write?” They ask, seeming genuinely interested. Fiction, I reply simply not willing to divulge I am unpublished – that I cannot even find a volunteer writing job and I am not sure a global pandemic has anything to with that. I can feel the pressure mounting, those around me expecting me to find work one way or another – creative industry or not. I am a writer; I tell them when they push a little too hard.

I am a writer.