"I Am a Writer"
Imposter syndrome and how I've faced it.
I sat in the conference room with perhaps thirty other educators, all of us with newly minted program booklets and a palpable anticipation. I had joined a table only a few minutes prior to the start of an opening workshop, had introduced myself, made small talk, attempted to bridge the gap of new acquaintanceship territory for one purpose—the Boston Writing Marathon. Writing marathons were not new to me in concept; I had at least heard of them before ticking the box for attendance when signing up for the conference proper. But actually engaging one was a novel experience, which was part of the appeal. To be surrounded by like-minded educators who harbored the same intense love of language, who were willing to be vulnerable in a shared community space was, and still is, revolutionary.
For me, writing has always been a deeply personal and sometimes lonely experience, as I haven’t yet found “my people” so to speak. Like so many others, I often get caught up in this idea of never being “good enough”—or perhaps not feeling enough “like a writer” to actually share the work itself, however terrible, however beautiful.
About a year ago, months prior to the workshop at this conference, I sat in a Zoom meeting with at least seven other educator, or education adjacent, attendees. All of us voluntarily signed up to take a short seminar on flash fiction, a few classes and workshops that put us as writers at the center of it. Some of us hadn’t written a thing in months. Others were full-blown indie authors, with several titles already published. At first, I was intimidated; perhaps it’s because I never was exposed to proper workshopping in a whole group—to take something I poured a good bit of my soul into and watch others assess it like a piece of meat at a butchery.
“There are only three parts of this,” our instructor announced during our first meeting as a group. “A time to share, a time to ask for help, and a time for thanks.”
The sentiment of viewing the workshopping process–the critique process–as a time to ask for help reframed the way I thought about feedback. For a long time, I’ve known, understood, and accepted (sometimes begrudgingly) that critique is an integral part of the writing process, but I’ve always struggled with it. I think that’s an entirely human reaction; when you place your heart on a silver platter to be sliced apart with a sharpened knife, of course the wound still smarts. Even if you ask for it. Especially when you ask for it.
By the end of the orientation for the conference workshop, my little table of six decided to stick together for the duration of the writing marathon, which extended another three hours. Our directive was to find a place to write; to settle in and become a community in a very short amount of time. Several of us were originally from the South or Midwest, and two others still were Northeasterners. One of our companions has lived near the city for long enough she felt at home there, and therefore led the other five of us through the streets of Boston in search of a place to eat breakfast and write about anything that came to mind. After several minutes of walking through the frigid winter air, we eventually settled on a coffee shop just outside of the financial district, where the walls were lined with books and the molasses-thick scent of coffee permeated the air as we made a workshop out of a large wooden table in the center of the first floor.
What struck me about the writing marathon was how easy it was to slip back into drafting, to let the mess flow, to utilize words as a tool, but more importantly an expression. To not focus so heavily on the aspect of sharing very rough, sometimes very vulnerable work with virtual strangers. What helped, though, was the process our workshop organizer outlined before we struck out on our own:
Gather in community (the smaller the better).
Write in sprints.
Share in between. Say nothing except to thank your companions.
Eat food and talk.
Rinse and repeat, easy as that.
But was it? This idea of not saying anything beyond a simple thank you was difficult and sometimes bordered on uncomfortable. I caught myself several times, in that coffee shop in downtown Boston our little group of six sought out, wanting to breathe out a wow or affirmation but stopping myself just short of doing so. I realized then how fickle the ego is. How much it craves validation as much as it disdains criticism. But by the third and fourth writing sprint, I had to let the niggling feeling at the back of my mind go. It was a bit freeing, in that moment, to be able to share a piece of writing with the only intention of speaking it into existence. I am under no impression that every piece of my writing is a work of art; however, I do know that every one of them is a self-expression, no matter how clumsy. It felt much like trying to paint a masterpiece with a crayon.
Even two months after the conference, I keep coming back to this one phrase we were required to write with as a prompt before we left the conference room for the cozy interior of a cafe: “I am a writer.” It didn’t matter how we used it in the following writing sprint, of course, but it sparked something within me. In the five minutes of that introductory exercise, I remembered something. It was like turning on a light in an attic you haven’t climbed up to in years. Of opening a shoe box and finding a treasure trove of old photographs from your childhood. Of fuzzy recognition.
Over the last two decades, I have written nearly a million words of fiction. Of those, several unfinished manuscripts litter my desktop hard drive. I’m sure I’ve lost a few more to the ether in the 2010s, when our family dinosaur of a desktop bit the dust. I have five fully finished novels waiting for their moment to come alive once again at my fingertips, but I sometimes can’t bear the thought of cracking them back open to find the pieces I left behind. Even though I feel I’m no good at poetry, I tried my hand at it more than once, if my deeply morose teenage journal entries have anything to say about it. The short stories, as abstract as some of them are, allowed me to examine the world through a different lens. All of these pieces, no matter how juvenile or polished, have led me to where I am today.
I don’t say this to inflate my own ego, nor to tout my accomplishments (which I admit I struggle to share), but to express the kind of place writing has in my life. I wrote when I didn’t understand the world—didn’t understand myself—often enough it became a lifeline. The journal entries I’ve kept on and off throughout the years are a testament to how much the act, and the choice, of writing is deeply ingrained into my identity even when I didn’t feel I could resonate with the label again until recently.
While reading the essays of John Green and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, whose prose often borders on poetry, I considered how personal the sharing of one’s work is. Of how fiction is a way to understand the world, to explore it, to question it. Nonfiction as a way to connect, to reach out a hand hoping to find someone else’s. To know at the core, that there are others who share your same experiences even with a lifetime and perhaps an ocean between you.
I wondered for a while why it was so easy for some to say, “I am a writer,” while it felt so uncomfortable for me to do the same even when I’ve been writing for as long as I have. I have come to an understanding as of late, which has aided me on my own journey. I do not need to have a published novel, nor do I need to write for anyone else. There is no stamp of legitimacy that you need to declare this simple fact. It is a state of being, a place to come home to when nothing else makes sense. You are a writer, just by picking up that pen, by placing it to paper, to choosing to express yourself.
In the process of accepting and embracing that identity again, I hope to find other writers, like myself, to build a community of our own choosing.