I have never not written.
When I was in first grade, I wrote. I had this little notebook whose binding has since fallen apart; I can still see the blue and green of its cover, and feel the pulpy texture of its pages. I wrote poems in that little blue and green notebook about anything and everything I could think about. Sometimes I would write in pencil, and sometimes I would write with a skinny red Crayola marker.
When I was in fifth grade, I started my tradition of writing during class. I wrote a fantasy story in the back of my two-inch purple plastic binder that I used in class. I never finished the story; I think I was trying to write a book, and I’m not sure how I had planned on it ending.
In eighth grade, I followed the lead of a friend of mine and began writing on legal pads, again, during class. I wrote angsty poems about what I later realized was adjacent to depression, and poems about what I thought love as an adult was like. I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote.
Eventually, I had to stop writing during class. I’m not sure what stopped it. Maybe it’s that I stopped being able to effectively zone in and out of a lesson and still know what was being taught. Maybe it’s that teachers noticed I wasn’t participating. Maybe it’s that I stopped writing whatever came to mind and started discerning between what I deemed good poetry and what I deemed bad poetry.
But I still wrote. I wrote whenever I felt the words clawing up out of my stomach. I wrote when I wanted to console a friend. I wrote when I had an idea for a young adult novel that just wouldn’t go away. I never finished any of the half-baked attempts at a young adult novel, but those characters I never finished creating are still near and dear to my heart, however many months and years later.
This summer, I’m working as a Teaching Assistant in the Creative Writing major of a pre-college arts program. The students with whom I’m working are creative, kooky, and passionate.
They remind me a lot of myself when I was in high school. On the first day, we went around the table in a circle and shared what kind of writing we did. A lot of the students shared that they only wrote in a given genre because they "can’t" or aren't "good at" writing in other genres. And I nodded in empathy.
Since I started writing, I’ve gone through a lot of transformations specific to how I view myself as a writer. I used to think I could only write poetry, but then I wrote a novella as my senior thesis in high school. I used to say that there was no way I’d ever keep a journal, and now I have two Moleskine notebooks on my shelf at home full of two years’ worth of journal entries.
I’ve come to realize that boxing myself into different identities as a writer only hinders my creativity. I can be a poet who writes for the page and the stage. I can write plays and flash fiction and short stories. I can write journal entries that will never see the light of day, and I can write reflective pieces that I post online. I’ve come to realize that as long as I consider myself a writer, I’m a writer, whatever I decide that means on a given day.
