I’m a Writer………..Apparently

 

Until recently, I never considered myself a writer.

Snoopy, who never doubted his true calling, is one of my heroes.

In fact, the realization that I was technically a writer didn’t present itself until this summer while working at Estergard Farms.

“Are you going to be a journalist after you get out of college?” my boss, Cole, asked one day during lunch.

“Well…” I started.

“He’s probably going to write books,” my other boss, Dustin, interjected. “And you know at least one going to be about us.” They laughed and joked about about all of the terrible stuff I might write about them and who all would read it (they both graciously said they would).” Then, it was back to business as usual.

From that day on, the question “Am I a writer?” began to bump around inside my head.

As the name implies, a writer is someone who writes. But for some reason, I was always under the impression that one could only call himself or herself a writer if he or she was getting paid to do so.  And then I remembered,

I do get paid to write.

I have been on the staff of The Crescent since my freshman year in 2011.

The first issue of The Crescent that I worked on

I have been getting paid to write and edit articles for almost four years and I didn’t consider myself a writer. Granted, I’m not getting paid a lot, but some money is better than no money.

Even though I defined a writer as someone who got paid to write and I was getting paid to write articles, I refused to call myself a writer. In the world of psychology, we call this cognitive dissonance.

So there I was, doing all this writing under the pretense that I was not a real writer. I could be a writer someday, I’d think. But right now, I’m just a guy who writes.

But I’ve had to come to terms with the truth.

One day I was eating lunch between classes with some friends. We started to talk about writing and the different projects we were working on.

And then someone referred to me as a good writer.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said.

“What do you mean?” someone asked.

“I’m not really a writer and I wouldn’t call myself good,” I replied “I just write stuff and people seem to like it.”

“Sounds like you’re a writer to me,” someone else said.

I didn’t know how to reply.  Everyone took my silence to mean the conversation was over and moved on to other subjects.

And that’s when the coffin was nailed shut on my denial of being a writer.  No matter what I do, whether I enter the world of being a professional writer or not, I will always be a writer.

So long as I keep writing anyways.