I am a writer.
You know, considering how long I’ve been writing, I’ve never truly considered myself to be a writer. But in truth I've been writing on and off for decades, whether it's blogging from when I was a teenager, drafting campaign outlines for work, or writing my newsletter for my friends. Yet the idea of me as a writer still feels so strange and has never sat right with me.
Part of it may be the bar set by my own insecurity that “I’m simply not good enough”. My grammar sucks and my output is slow, especially when compared to a lot of good writers I do know.
But you know what? If consistently writing for 30+ years doesn’t make me a writer, then what does? Also, I don’t think I have to be particularly prolific or proficient to call myself one. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, and who am I to argue to Shakespeare?
And in today’s AI era where articles on the internet are increasingly not written by humans but by LLM agents, I might as well stake my claim as one of the last, dying breed of human writers — even if I may be a shitty one at that. So I guess what I’m trying to say is... * takes a deep breath *
I am a writer.