I want to be a writer. I mean, obviously, I already am a writer. I am writing; so therefore, I am a writer. A writer is someone who writes.
What I mean is, I want to be a writer who writes things, and whose audience consists of more than my mother and a couple of other Facebook friends who also love me like my mother does. I want to be a writing badass. I want to publish my writing and get noticed. I want someone to pick up my work (or more realistically, open my pitch email) and think, "this girl gets it." I want to open my email inbox one fine morning and receive a message that says someone, somewhere wants to pay me to write my thoughts and feelings for them; that they could identify with it and that something I said or thought or felt helped them somehow.
I want an audience, because for so long, I have just been incessantly blabbing away to friends and family about things like feminism and Harry Potter and Taylor Swift and they nod their heads in agreement because they already know me. I want a captive and willing audience who chooses to click on my article because the title entices them, because the subject matter seems all too familiar to them in their everyday lives. I want my voice to be heard, even if it is only the way a hundred people imagine it in their heads through the Internet as they read my words on their tablets and iPhones during their busy days.
I want someone to understand that I need to get all this mumbo-jumbo out of my head and down through my fingertips, across my keyboard and into its destination in cyberspace where others will make sense of it all. I have to become a writer because I feel these ideas and opinions bouncing around inside of my heart and my brain and they're threatening to burst out of my seams if I do not unleash them right now. I have questions and answers and random late-night musings that simultaneously inspire and frighten me, and I just need to release them all before they consume me.
I want to be a writer when I grow up. It makes total sense. I have to. Words have always been my solace when I need to figure out my problems. Words have always been the most lethal weapon in my arsenal for fighting battles when I am angry, the most illustrative tool at my disposal for defending my passions. Words have always cropped up in my mind's eye, equally as fast as a Google search, when people ask me for synonyms. Words have never escaped me, even when the moment is just so good; because I always have some obscure vocabulary word, resting in the back of mind, waiting for the appropriate moment.
So I have to be a writer. There is nothing else in the world that comes so easily to me or makes this much sense. Writing is a clear talent of mine, and I have always been confident about it.
I've been aware of my love affair with words since kindergarten when Mrs. McIntosh made me recite the alphabet backwards in front of the class, just because my mother told her I could. I have been flirting with words since I went to the County Spelling Bee in third grade, and when I made Alec Trent runner-up a few years later because I knew better than he did that "mayonnaise" had more than one n. The sweetness of words was clear to me when I started my first journal in middle school, where I could safely unload my puberty-ridden emotions. Words have seduced me since before I enrolled in my first French class as a freshman in high school; already eager to learn more words in a different language, five whole years before I'd travel to the country and speak the Language of Love I'd borrowed with natives. Yes, I have always had a magnetic attraction to words. So, why wouldn't I be a writer?
Words help me feel all kinds of emotion - every single one of them, in fact - but most of all, they bring me joy. I have always loved taking my time to choose the one that fits best, and beaming with pride as I piece together my finished sentence. It is so clear to me now, that I don't quite know why I ever thought I should pursue anything else. I want to be a writer.
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