What is a Writer?
The other night, a poet asked me if I was a writer, and I stood there and froze at his simple but complicated question. The word hit me with the force of a mass of bricks. I suddenly stopped and thought, am I a writer? The word felt too good for me, like it was insulting of me to call myself that considering all to the great living and lived writers, authors, poets. Am I a writer? Well, to me no, I didn't think I could call myself that, it felt too good for me.
I once read this book, "My Salinger Year" by Joanna Rakoff to be exact, and one of my favourite quotes from it explained that being able to call yourself a writer takes one thing— you must write. It's been a while since I picked up that pen, and I'm sitting here with the question lingering in my head, can I still call myself that? I want to, but life just gets so busy and it takes all the time it can get. So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want to feel like I can be called a writer again.
Time has this funny way of passing in a certain fashion that is completely opposite to what you want. In anticipation, it teases you, dancing with your patient mind and making a second pass in three centuries before the next. When you wish for it to slow down, so you can relish in it's certainties, it runs with the speed of light and sets you five eternities away from that single moment you wished to grasp forever. My relationship with time has been that of the latter. I spent a better chunk of my summer in Italy, and I've now started my second year of my undergraduate degree, and all has me wondering, where did the time go? Did I spend it meaningfully?
I would like to think so.
You see, there is a whole world among us, and in the short time we have here on earth it is a wonder if we can only begin to touch it. It is so incredibly easy to become lost in our own scopes; we need something to wake us up sometimes and remind us that the world is what we make and discover of it. You need to make time for what you want.
You need to get up and just, well, do.
I once read this book, "My Salinger Year" by Joanna Rakoff to be exact, and one of my favourite quotes from it explained that being able to call yourself a writer takes one thing— you must write. It's been a while since I picked up that pen, and I'm sitting here with the question lingering in my head, can I still call myself that? I want to, but life just gets so busy and it takes all the time it can get. So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want to feel like I can be called a writer again.
Time has this funny way of passing in a certain fashion that is completely opposite to what you want. In anticipation, it teases you, dancing with your patient mind and making a second pass in three centuries before the next. When you wish for it to slow down, so you can relish in it's certainties, it runs with the speed of light and sets you five eternities away from that single moment you wished to grasp forever. My relationship with time has been that of the latter. I spent a better chunk of my summer in Italy, and I've now started my second year of my undergraduate degree, and all has me wondering, where did the time go? Did I spend it meaningfully?
I would like to think so.
You see, there is a whole world among us, and in the short time we have here on earth it is a wonder if we can only begin to touch it. It is so incredibly easy to become lost in our own scopes; we need something to wake us up sometimes and remind us that the world is what we make and discover of it. You need to make time for what you want.
You need to get up and just, well, do.
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