If you’re like me, you’ve wanted to be a writer since you were a little kid.

Back then, you were a voracious reader, and you couldn’t wait to put your own ideas onto the page. You took a book to school every day — maybe two because who knows? — and you read in between classes. Sometimes during class, which made your teacher angry. You loved the feeling of a book in your hands because your life made sense when you read. Maybe your parents had split up and maybe you were ostracized growing up and maybe people just didn’t seem to get you. So you read. And then a little impulse took hold of you one day—why don’t you try to write something? This idea captivated you. You cautiously try to write. You find you’re quite good. You decide to make your life about writing and you go to writing camps, do the student newspaper, the whole nine yards. Then you go to college for a degree in creative writing. And you love that you love your major. I’m a writer, you think, and that’s what you were meant to be.

Any of that sound familiar? That was my life, until six months ago. Six months ago, I stopped caring about writing. My creativity started to dry up, and I became uninterested in writing of any sort. I don’t know what happened. One day, I was working studiously on my play. The next day, I was stuck. I didn’t know how to make myself care about it. And because I’d centered my identity around writing, I’ve spent the last six months as a ghost. I used to be Chloe: Writer; who is Just Chloe?

I enrolled in more English classes to combat this disinterest. I took an independent study in poetry, and realized I didn’t care about poetry anymore. I took a workshop class where we were required to have goals about writing and reading. I rarely met my goal. I signed up to write for the Odyssey. Finally, after my writing professor asked why I had not completed an assignment, I confessed that I didn’t care about my dream anymore—I didn’t care about writing.

“First off, we go way back, so I appreciate you being honest with me. Now, it’s okay if you’ve stopped writing. Maybe you’re done with writing. Maybe this is it for you. And maybe you stop for a while and come back to it. But you can survive without writing,” he told me.

For all you millennials whose life is a constant rush to get to Point B — maybe you haven’t stopped to think about what happens when your dream becomes your burden, when the thing you love isn’t what you love anymore. Maybe you’re half-way through pharmacy school and you realize you hate pharmacy. Maybe it’s cooking. Maybe it’s politics. The point is, it’s okay to take a break. It’s okay to put your dream aside and try another dream. But your identity is not a job or a hobby. It’s how you do that job, it’s what you create. It’s how you treat your coworkers, it’s what goals you set for yourself. Be whoever you want to be, but be honest, be excited, and have a dream. Any dream.