"You're a Writer!" They Proclaim

I remember the first time I was hit by the writing bug. When I was in the sixth grade, an essay I wrote about my grandpa made it through as a winner of a state competition. Just being chosen made me feel like there was something special about me that had suddenly appeared overnight.

As I went through junior high and high school, the "accolades" continued in a quiet spurt. Essays of mine won savings bonds from local contests my school had us enter. I didn't think much of it till high school when my English teacher stood in front of my class and read a creative writing piece she had assigned us. Though I was mortified—of course, it was high school, and who wanted to be the teacher's pet?—I was also secretly pleased. Beyond just good grades, I seemed to have a knack with words.

I also flourished with the school newspaper and the yearbook committee my senior year. Though I was far from a popular kid, it was nice to know that the things I wrote mattered in some realm to a greater crowd of people. My mom and dad didn't read my writing at all unless afterwards it had won an award.

Because my family struggled financially—as well as having a burden with all my mom's health problems—I had no sights set on college. I didn't even look into any because I knew college wasn't an option for my single-income family that could barely afford utilities each month. Plus, my mom needed me with the way her health fluctuated like a pendulum that couldn't decide its stopping point.

For my nineteenth birthday, I bought my first laptop and had the grand aspirations to write my first novel. Over the course of November 2019, I wrote 80,000 words of a young adult urban fantasy novel—that never saw past the hard-drive of that laptop beyond the first chapter to writer friends I met on the site Goodreads.

I dabbled. I joined roleplay groups to try and gain a steady flow of writing in some form. I wrote a lot of bad flash fiction. I tackled a few more novel drafts that were false starts, I believed, with something far better on the horizon.

I think the problem was that my writing suddenly didn't stay mine anymore with rounds of beta-reading and critiques from friends. And, often, I became bored with my ideas and left them unfinished depending on my mood.

"You're a writer," I tried to keep telling myself. "You're a writer. Believe it. You are."

Then my mother suddenly passed away in 2013, and something went off in me like a lightbulb sparking out of life.

I still wrote some things, mainly for friends, and people enjoyed the little nothings I wrote in their birthday cards.

But the pulse—that ambition to become a published writer—seemed to dim as the world around me grayed.

I had more dances with fading novel ideas. I wrote some fan fiction just to keep my writing knife sharp. I tried to keep the little ideas I had in prime condition to be made into something new someday.

I finally enrolled in college in 2015, part-time because I was afraid of being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work needed to get a degree. One of my electives was a creative writing course where I wrote more bad flash fiction. By 2016, I was a part of the college's literary magazine editorial team, and I even won an award through the college as well as an acknowledgment of a one-act play I wrote.

Looking back, I wasn't the stuff of the greats. The creative writing program at my college barely treaded water. As the saying goes, I was just a big fish in a small pond. The same could be said of my junior high and high school experiences with writing.

My writing languished for a while as I continued to pursue my bachelor's degree. Finally, as I counted down to my last semester in 2020, I entered a few online writing contests to see if I did have what it took to break into a world I so admired and coveted.

Three entries. Three submission fees. Three rejections before even a shortlist was compiled.

By the time I found Vocal in February 2021, I was on my last legs. The only creativity I had was the flash fiction I sent to writer friends to brighten their days. Vocal had the challenges, the Top Stories, the communities for all kinds of writing. And then I uncovered a site called Medium that also pays you for your writing. Amazing, right?

Four months later, I'm still in a bit of a rut. I have the quantity when it comes to poems and stories, but the quality? Eh. The jury's out on that one.

"You're a writer" just doesn't have the same magical wonder that "Yer a wizard, Harry" has, you know? Yes, the imagination is a powerful tool, but there are millions using their writing muscles better than I do. I definitely don't feel special anymore.

Such is reality, though, the trappings that all remind us that we're just ghosts in flesh encasings. I may have let the praise get to my head a bit, but now? I see the big picture, yet I still wonder if writing has a place in that overview.

"You're a writer," they said—but they didn't realize I would take the words so deep to heart.