A 'Writer' in Name Only

For Valentine’s Day, I treated myself to a manicure with a new nail tech that I found in my area. She was working out of her dad’s barbershop, younger than me by a few years. She was friendly and welcoming, and she was honest when she told me that she’s still working on building a client base in town.

I don’t get my nails done often, and when she asked about length I showed her something in the range of ‘why-even-bother-paying-for-nail-extensions’ and ‘nail-biter-length’. “I type a lot at work, I’m horribly slow at it if I have anything too long,” I explained, fully aware that the next question would be about my job. It was, and I said “I’m a paralegal by day and a writer by night.” Immediately, I felt like a fraud.

Last night, on the way home from a big outing with friends, my fiancé and I were discussing everything under the sun, as one is prone to do when you’re in the passenger seat on a dark drive home. The conversation, as they do, turned deep and we started getting introspective about our hobbies and motivations. At some point during the conversation, I said “I just feel like I used to have so much fun writing when I was a kid. If I wanted to live in a world where I solved mysteries like Nancy Drew, I spent a whole afternoon writing about a character obviously meant to be me solving a caper that was disjointed and made no sense (I think in one instance, the culprit was a dog), but I had fun doing it. All I do now when I write is overanalyze and spend the whole time dissecting my own work.”

I call my parents and my grandma every Friday. It’s a routine that started when I officially moved out of the house after the pandemic. Despite only being an hour away, I don’t see them as much as I would like to. We spend hours at the end of every week gossiping, narrating our own internal monologues, and complaining about work. I cook dinner with my dad on the line and tell him every step I’m making, even if I don’t think he really cares about the delicate balance of brown sugar to rice wine vinegar in my Spam marinade.

Without fail, every week, my grandma asks how my writing is going. “Are you still working on that story where the ghost of an outlaw goes on a road-trip?” It’s a work-in-progress long forgotten (full disclosure, I typed ‘abandoned’ there in the first draft) in a Scrivener file after I ran into a roadblock while plotting. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I’ve moved on to idea #148274 for my debut novel, so I just tell her it’s still cooking. Because of course, that idea wasn’t good enough. It didn’t have the legs it needed. Neither did the one before that, or the one before that. My grandma has asked about all of them. She laughs when I say I’m still writing.

She means well. She used to love my Nancy Drew self-inserts, even when they were nonsensical and, frankly, crap. Sometimes, she asks me about my mysteries. I chalk it up to my eight-year-old self’s ramblings being the last pieces of my writing that she was allowed to read, before I started taking it seriously and keeping all drafts under lock and key. As far as she knows, everything I write now is still disjointed nonsense. As far as I know, she’s right.

I read craft books so I feel productive while the cursor on my current scene-in-progress blinks at me helplessly from an empty page. Each one waxes poetic about the stories we need to tell. “Everyone has a story,” they tout, “but not everyone finishes theirs.”

I scoff. Those poor saps, my mind seems to pity them, not everyone has what it takes to be a writer. My empty document, my novel only 3% written, says nothing from my computer, but I feel it’s gaze. I imagine walking back over to it to draft and finding that it has left me a message on the page I left blank: YOU HAVEN’T WRITTEN ANYTHING WORTHWHILE SINCE YOU WERE EIGHT.

I think of my nail tech, enterprising and operating her own creative business every day. I think of my fiancé, describing me to his friends when we first started dating as a writer, ‘working on her first novel’ and how he could say the exact same thing about me today. I think of my grandma, asking weekly if I have any good news but never ever expecting any.

I am one of the writers they warn other, more productive and successful cases about. I haven’t published anything. I haven’t polished any drafts to be proud of, I haven’t submitted any query letters. I’ve barely even written.

Why do I even say I’m a writer? Why is that a label I identify so strongly with? Am I allowed to call myself a writer just because I want to be one?

The definition of ‘imposter syndrome’ reads as follows: a psychological phenomenon characterized by persistent feelings of self-doubt, inadequacy, and a fear of being exposed as a fraud, despite evidence of one's accomplishments.

Am I entitled to my claim of falling victim to Imposter Syndrome when I have no accomplishments, or evidence of same, of which to speak? Check, check and check to points one through three of the definition, though. Maybe I’ll be a case study someday, the first record of imposter’s imposter syndrome. That’s a new pathology that I completely just made up where you are a literal imposter who identifies strongly with the symptoms of imposter syndrome, which offers absolutely zero recourse.

What a frustrating conundrum: the desire to fall into the category of justified-imposter-syndrome-sufferer.

Bottom line: I need to write. Bottom-er line: I probably need a therapist, too, but we don’t have to get into that. Writing comes first, both to find the joy that it once gave me, and the despair that it can give me in the future. I deserve to feel both of those emotions unabashedly about a hobby that I claim to love. And while I deserve it, I’m not entitled to it.

So I’m making a resolution (only two months late). By the end of 2025, I will have writing to speak of. I can tell my nail tech proudly that I’m a writer and not feel a pang of guilt, my fiancé can tell his friends I’m on draft number two, and I’ll tell my grandma that I’m not writing Nancy Drew fanfiction anymore. Maybe she’ll even be able to read some of my work.

That’s ten months if you already count February as over with. My draft is sitting pretty at 4k words. It’s two scenes long. I have ten months to get my shit together and finish a draft. Full honesty, this is not the first time I’ve given myself a deadline. But I refuse to continue being a fraud instead of a writer. This is my own kick in the pants, I’m delivering it myself and on a public forum to ensure the humiliation sticks.

By January 1, 2026, I will have good news for my grandma, and hopefully, for anyone reading this. Hold me to that.