On Being a Writer

When you are a writer, you are relentlessly drawn into a force beyond yourself.


You work towards a vision no one besides you can see.
You believe in yourself and a story that doesn’t fully exist yet.
You beat yourself into oblivion
to produce something
that you never really know will work out.


So you work.
And you work.
And you WORK.


Oftentimes, your work slips past unnoticed,
as life pulls everyone around you in a million different directions.


But all you can think is,
“Will they like it?"
"Will they live inside this wild world I’ve lived inside my entire life?"
"Will anyone even care?”


Do you know how you know you are truly a writer?
Like honestly,
a true and fiercely committed,
I’ll-do-this-till-I-die writer?


When you do it despite all that.


When two a.m. sprawls across your bedside clock and all you can do is lie awake,
eyes wide open,
writing the next sentence of your novel in your head.
You believe in it.
More than you’ve believed in anything your entire life.


Apparently that’s what they say faith is.
Faith despite evidence.
Faith despite all of life slapping you relentlessly in the face
with the cold hard fact
that you are one among millions.


But you do it anyway.

Because you are.
You are a writer.
You don’t stop.
Don’t stop.
Never stop.

Write on my beloved friends.
Write on.
​

My early morning workspace.