I am a writer.
That’s a dangerous phrase if your goal is to be one.
Being does not demand action. If you are something, you get the credit and the feeling associated with that thing, whether or not it’s warranted.
This is why going to college can end up for many an unproductive time not gaining skills or progressing towards professional goals. You reach the age where pressure mounts to do something with your life. But once you get to tell people that you already are something – a college student – they give you a pass.
People treat statements of being as if they are the result of doing. They can be, but ontological labels aren’t the same as proof of progress.
Aspirational language can be useful, but it can lull you to sleep. I am a writer may at first challenge you to level up to the label, but once you’re comfortable using it, it quickly dulls you to the necessary task at hand – writing and publishing what you write.
Ontological status is a shield. Telling people you are a writer gives you a free pass. You and they get to assume you’re spending your time in a writing cave, working through plots or revising. Lack of visible product is excused. Labels that let you get away with no progress are a trap.
When you replace being statements with doing statements, it’s harder to cheat yourself.
You are not a writer. You wrote some stories yesterday.
You are not a writer. You are writing two pages today.
You are not a writer. You have a goal to publish something tomorrow.
If you don’t get to say I am, you are forced to say, I did, am doing, will do. Those demand proof. Those demand accountability.
Those will make you a writer.
Writer isn’t a state of being.
Writer should be a description others give you, earned by what they read that you produced.
Same goes for any other label.