What Am I, Then?

To pretend something you are not is no distinction to daydreaming. One doesn’t have to taste the doughnut to know it is sweet – that’s how reality is displayed obviously. And so wearing a mask – soon it will slip no matter how good we are in shamming– for only a true identity lasts.

“When you wake up in the morning and the first thing you think is writing, then you are a writer.” This thought from an unfamiliar author has inspired me to this day. I was already writing poems, songs, and few feature articles when I first heard it. Since then it’s engraved in my heart. 

I’m afraid all these years have been acting like a writer, professing a philosophy someone has made known – now I am living it up like any fanatics. All I thought was one of them.

And how would you feel to find out you’re not really who you think you are?

It actually feels funny and a little awkward at the same time. It is like living from riches-to-rags or having a labeled life of a trying hard writer. It’s like I’m putting my own self in a pigeonhole. 

Truth hurts, but it’s also a wake up call for dreamers. Last night, I asked my friend a question even if it took bruising ego to hear the answer. As he put truth after truth across, I haven’t wrestled believing that I am not a good writer. From the perspective of a very good writer like him, I agree he has the say. But it doesn’t mean I am not a writer – this is what I believe.

As a person who loves writing – not a good one though – no, not yet – this narrows down on how I define my self. I may not be a good writer or the award-winning type or the one who had published tons of books, my understanding of a writer remains the same – a person who simply writes and can tell between from a reader.

I am not trying to disregard a golden rule or a piece of advice for it’s very helpful in fact, but telling what I believe is just another side of the whole thing.  

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Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines writer as “a person who writes books or articles to be published” but it didn’t emphasize whether that person writes well or not. And so I am a writer since I’ve done the criteria being set.

When I inquired few people today if it takes winning an award or publish a book to be called a writer, they said NO – and so I am writer.

If I had to listen to what my teachers and professors had told me or what my friends had affirmed or what my followers in the blog had posted – then I am a writer.   

As long as I know who I am and who I am not as a writer, then I am not fantasizing.    

If I am not a writer, and if I simply write, what am I then?