Maybe I’m not a writer

For many years, well at least some very formative ones, I identified as a writer. Writing at that time felt like a touchstone, a way for me to better understand myself and the world around me, and quite frankly if you are consistently told that you are good at something you will probably keep doing it.

But I don’t feel that way anymore.

A hard pill to swallow as an adult was that I’m not really a good writer. Sure, I’m maybe marginally above average with a decent vocabulary borne from being a voracious reader for approximately 22 years – but I’m not *good*. I’m good enough to know just how far from good I really am. For someone who had “writer” as part of their identity, that realization felt destabilizing.

But that alone doesn’t keep me from writing. The other reason I wrote, especially in my teens and early 20s, was to process and feel my feelings. Sometimes it felt like writing bad poetry was the only way to exorcise them. If we’re using that metaphor – I think I just became a non-believer. Somewhere in my mid-20s, writing about my feelings, even if no one ever read it, felt deeply embarrassing. Even journaling felt tawdry. The proverbial equivalent of walking around all day with lipstick on your teeth, or maybe dropping your purse on the sidwalk and everything spilling out and you’re desperately trying to shove stuff back in as people walk around you and maybe even someone stops to help but you don’t even know what’s in the depths of your purse and god forbid a stranger sees it strewn on the gum stained pavement on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.

Mortifying.

Maybe there was also a part of me that didn’t want to feel my sadness like that anymore. I used to be the person who constantly pressed on a bruise while it healed, until one day I was almost missed the ache. Maybe it’s that I don’t think these feelings (or let’s be real, the people who caused them) deserved my shitty poetry. Writing about them would both mythologize and legitimize them. I’d be giving them evidence that they hurt me. Which of course, they would never know about, because none of them read this blog or would have ever thought to Google me (thank god for small mercies).

Part of it is also social media and influencer culture. Trying to say anything on the internet in 2023 feels like screaming into an empty void and as a Genzennial I’ve been screaming for years. I don’t have anything new to contribute to the internet other than my silence.