I’m a Writer

For anyone else afraid to say it out loud

Photo by emre keshavarz from Pexels — NO I don’t own a typewriter, but I am old enough to have used one!

For as long as I can remember I have shied away from calling myself a writer. I always wrote in journals growing up, then graduated to poetry and other teenage angst in high school.

One day, my favorite English teacher published one of my poems in a literary magazine he had put together. He didn’t tell me he was doing this ahead of time, and I was completely mortified and furious with him. I felt like he had betrayed my trust.

It was, unsurprisingly, a terrifically bad love poem about a boy I had an unrequited crush on (not “Todd”, for any readers with a memory!” 😂). Had he asked me to contribute something, I don’t recall, but if he had I would never have chosen that particularly soul-baring teenage confessional!

I think I skipped school the next day and kept my head down the rest of the week. On top of the complete social humiliation I felt, I was already comparing my writing negatively to everyone else in the magazine. A friend of mine has a brilliant mind, was the class valedictorian and already writing stuff bordering on magical realism (to be fair this was probably because she read a lot of Gabriel Garcia Marquez!).

I was just some ditz who did plays and wanted to be an actress. I wasn’t a real writer, and I was embarrassed to be included with some of my more talented…