But I’m Not a Writer, Right?

At this point I have been writing in some form or fashion for the majority of my life. I’ve dabbled in poetry and short stories, even tried to write a novel or few(all abandoned), and I have been journaling and blogging since 2003. Professionally I’ve written a number of whitepapers and more technical reports than I can remember. Hell I’ve even written scripts and at least part of one screenplay. Yet if someone asked me “are you a writer?” my instinctual response would be no, which would be a factually inaccurate statement.

I’m not entirely sure where that is coming from. I suspect part of it is that professionally my title isn’t “writer.” Even if it’s a decent portion of what I do in my job, it’s not a majority portion. Although I used to share plenty of my blogs publicly, it was something that I did for myself and for the sake of community. I wasn’t doing it for the paycheck or to make a living off from. I didn’t sell any books or newsletters, etc. And yet through this introspection it becomes apparent that I stumbled into one of the classic blunders, that the requirement of being an artist is not to be one who interacts with capitalism with their art, but to be someone who makes art. I guess it’s easy to fall into when the majority of narratives in western media tie the identity of who you are with what it is that you do to make money, not what it is that you do in life to live it.

I could probably spend an uncomfortably long period of time reflecting on all the various ways that I’ve gotten tripped up by these concepts in the past, but I really don’t want to spend the rest of this post on it. Instead I would like to tell you about what brought this about.

I work remotely as part of my job, and so as part of that there are semi-regular meetings set up in order for people who don’t normally meet/interact to have time with one another. These times are highly unstructured and topics can range anywhere from the nuances of a technical project to what someone’s favorite coffee or artist is, etc. In my most recent meeting with someone we ended up in a discussion about our various travels we had in life and experiences we’ve had.

For my piece I started talking about the disturbing awe of the experience I had of traveling through the Texas Panhandle. There was this time(for reasons) I ended up on a bus trip from Phoenix, Arizona to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Over the course of that I traveled through a bunch of states and Texas was one of them. The time through the panhandle was seared into my brain. I remember seeing these unimaginably vast swaths of white sand, expanding in all directions as far as the eye could see, with the painfully blue sky slicing the other half of the world. At times I felt like I had to hold onto my seat because I had the irrational fear that I might fly away from the ground because there was nothing holding me there. The horizon and the road were the only meaningful landmarks. The rest was just flat white, no dunes, no shrubbery, no hills, nothing but just flat empty. It was one of the most awe inspiring and terrifying natural sights I’ve ever seen.

Then my coworker asked me for the most positive awe inspiring sight I ever saw(because admittedly I wouldn’t classify that time in Texas as having been “fun” ^^;;). It didn’t take me too long to think of. Ironically it was part of the same trip, but it was in the Mesa’s of Arizona. I had started off in the desert of Phoenix, and started riding up the road into the mountains to Flagstaff, then kept on going up and up until the mountains leveled off. The time of the year meant that it was during monsoon and so there was significant cloud cover across the sky, with breaks of light that would peek through, gods-rays shining down. The thing is, because of how the elevation worked and the flatness of the Mesas it ended up being this vast expanse of land with the periodic crags of valleys with the sun coming down. It was easily one of the most beautiful natural sights that I have ever seen and genuinely deserving of the title “awe inspiring”, it was quite literally awesome. Even now I struggle to put it to proper words as it defies description. It bordered on the religious, and absolutely was a transcendental experience.

And then my coworker, with metaphorical stars in their eyes, asks me “are you a writer?!” And I got sucked back to the present moment, in my zoom call staring at my laptop. And for all the reasons I was talking about before, I got stuck and stammered for a moment. I was unsure how to answer, and to buy time I just gave a cheeky “depends on who’s asking ;).” There was plenty else in that conversation that we talked about that I’m going to leave out for privacy’s sake, but it was something that stuck with me, and probably will for some time. I imagine there are other reasons beyond just what I talked about that has me hesitant to call myself a writer, but I am also fortunate to have family that are vehement supporters that to create art is to be an artist, to write is to be a writer, and so maybe over time I can internalize that truth.

I hope for more of a world in which we all can make art for the sake of making art, and that can be unbound from society’s expectations of what that should mean.

Thanks for coming along on this musing ^^

– StarChild