If You Write, You’re a Writer

If you write, you’re a writer. 

I’ve said these words to myself and to others so often, it’s impossible not to embody them. They might as well be my calling card.  

I whisper this phrase as encouragement to new poets at the local open mic. I impart this phrase from the front of classrooms when I’m invited to facilitate spoken word workshops. I repeat these words to the youth I coach and mentor when they feel uncertain. I hold my gaze in the mirror in moments of rejection and doubt. I write; therefore, I’m a writer.

And yet, from my laptop’s place in this coffee shop on a Sunday afternoon—by all rights, its own cultural indication as to my status as a writer—the flashing cursor taunts me from the page as I wrestle with too-obvious-metaphors and this never-finished-only-abandoned-poem. 

Does this story matter? Flash.

Will anyone resonate with these words? Flash.

Is it enough to just get the words down? Flash.

You might already know my answer. Yes. Yes, it all matters. And creating in itself can be enough.

I’ve been making my way through the cultural phenomenon “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. Several years ago, I thrifted a tattered, almost-as-old-as-me edition from a stuffed nonfiction section and carried it home, saving it from one shelf and dooming it to another. This more-than-second-hand book has two names hand-scratched in different shades of blue on the title page—Jan, crossed out, and Barb—and underneath, in distinct black ink, someone else has written “Care from the core.” The first year it was my turn to own this book, I began practicing morning pages, something I’ve maintained to this day. Every morning, I’d handwrite three stream-of-consciousness pages earnestly as a way to write myself out of depression and grapple with a new ADHD diagnosis, but the burnout I needed to heal from took up too much of my brain to give the rest of the 12-week creative recovery program a chance. Really, this past version of myself was busy planting seeds until I was ready to let them bloom. 

The first basic principle in “The Artist’s Way” is this: 

“Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure creative energy.” 

I won’t get into the finer details of this program right now, besides to encourage you to consider embarking on creative recovery if the voices hindering your own creativity are persistent, but one of the affirmations in this book has unlocked something for me as I repeat it in this morning’s journal pages: 

“My creativity heals myself and others.”

I think of every post-performance conversation when someone has seen themselves reflected and affirmed in my writing. I remind myself of every time my late father and mother celebrated my stories with pride, their sacrifices making space for me to break generational curses. I remember my teenage chapbook with the nail polish cover that my younger sibling cherished. Their early readership was a vote of confidence as much as a permission slip for their own creativity. I reflect on all the versions of my uncertain self that have straddled the shadows of unsettled imagination and rejoice that I dared to believe myself a writer, if only for a moment, if only for a lifetime. 

As I sip the last of the caffeine from my iced coffee, I send a silent message of gratitude to those whose creativity has healed before me. Just as Jan and Barb worked through “The Artist’s Way,” little did they know their creative journey would be part of my story. That’s the beauty of our creativity and especially our words. We can’t own words. They’re free to move through us or to move us, and rarely do we ever know where they land. Just as universal energy can only change form and not be created or destroyed, so is our creativity. We continue to trust that when we do the work—when we put down the doubt and put on our creative identity—it matters. The permission to call yourself what you are gives permission to others to do the same. And writer, it is enough.