Oftentimes, when people ask me what I want to do after I graduate college, I find myself telling them that I want to be a writer. I don't generally say that I want to publish novels, write for magazines, or see my poetry appear in a literary magazine. Instead, I simply say that I want to be a writer, while never realizing that I already am one.

When you're pursuing a creative career in college, whether it be music, art, filmmaking, writing, or anything else, it's very easy to get swept up in the idea of wanting to be these things once you graduate.

But the truth of the matter is if you're creating music, you're already a musician. If you're creating art, you're already an artist. If you're creating films, you're already a filmmaker. If you're creating writing, you're already a writer.

You don't have to be getting paid to be able to label yourself as one of these things; you just have to be making music, art, films, or writing. Even as I write for Odyssey, work on personal creative writing projects, and get ready to apply to Masters' programs for Creative Writing, I still find myself slipping back into telling people that I want to be a writer, while ignoring the fact that in doing these things, I already am one.

When I was 10 years old and carrying around a 5-subject spiral notebook that contained multiple chapters of the first novel I started working on, I was a writer.

When I was 15 years old and writing an entire journal and multiple letters about the life of a woman during the Civil War period for my Honors US History class, I was a writer.

When I was 19 and pouring over the same four pages of a Creative Nonfiction piece for days and weeks on end in order to get it just right before turning it in to my professor, I was a writer.

Anyone who writes is a writer. Your success at doing so isn't measured by whether or not you're being paid, or if you're published. It is measured by whether you write, whether you love it, whether it makes you feel free and understood in a way that nothing else you've ever encountered has.

More than anything else, your desire to write makes you a writer.