what do you write?

so somebody asked me if i was a writer. and i didn't know what to say. i write but does that make me a writer? who decides? and then i thought about the conversation this morning and got pissed. well, not pissed but offended. you damn right i'm a writer. i've been writing since the fifth grade, it was the only assignment that wasn't homework. i bleed my craft. i know more words than numbers, more authors than street names. i recognize pages more than friends and memories are chapters in my mind. and journal entries are memoirs. and boyfriends are characters. i live my life in paragraphs, summaries, metaphors, haikus and novels. i am a writer simply because i am nothing else. have i been published? yea. when i was fifteen but that's not why i'm a writer. i'm a writer because i would rather write than speak and if God came down from the darkest skies and exchanged my voice for a pen, i would thank him, in a nod of course. and God could even take away my eyesight because what i write is what i feel, deep down inside. if you split my arms open with a knife, words would come bleeding out of me. and just because i love writing doesn't mean it comes easy to me. it's hard. it's so f.cking hard to put the heart of me on your kitchen table and tell you to feast on my dreams, my hopes, my heartbreaks. every time i put these words together, it's like you've had sex with me. you've gone deep inside where i'm so wet you might drown and i'm so tight, i can't let you go. and even good sex, great sex hurts. so today, it's not about if i'm a writer or not and it's not about if i publish a best seller (although that would be nice). today, like every other day is about finding something or someone that inspires me to bleed out excellence through my fingertips.

so yes i'm a writer, not an accountant, not an event planner, not a student, not even a mother. and though i can become those things and i am some of those things. i'm a writer. first and foremost. i was born for this. and i would die for it. depending on who asks me to.