Writers like to talk about writing. It’s sublime; it’s a creative struggle; it’s the way to find yourself; it’s the way to change the world; it’s devastating. Shelves are filled with books on writing and the writing life. Writers claim a special place in society, fancying themselves prophets, priests, or possibly just misunderstood.

My outlook is a little different. My “writing life” isn’t full of epiphanies or grand struggles to break through writer’s block (I have come to believe that “writer’s block” is a fancy euphemism for “fear of failure”). I’d like to say I have a quiet desk with pithy quotes hung over it for inspiration. Sometimes I’d like to couple my writerly-ness with corduroy jackets and a pipe and an unusually literary outlook on life.

But no, my writing life is a lot like the rest of my life. When I come home at night, I don’t particularly want to make dinner, wash dishes, and pack my lunch for the next day. But I do, because the next day is coming, whether I like it or not. My lectures have to be written by the time I deliver them. In the same way, when I sit down to write, I have to do it, because the deadline is coming and no amount of fretting will change that.

I have felt kind of bad – or at least inferior – about this for a long time. I’m just not in the class of writers who think about writing very often. Sometimes those people aren’t doing much writing anyhow – “writer” has come to mean anything from “someone who really wants to write, but never puts any words down on paper” to “published and celebrated author.” But I’m a writer for hire, not a writer with a novel going in my spare time.

I wonder, sometimes, how much of what we do is based on what we want other people to think about us, rather than doing what we’re meant to be doing. If my identity is tied up in being a writer – whether or not I’m writing anything – I will always worry about whether other people can perceive that I’m a writer, whether I fit the mold correctly, whether I look like a real writer or just a hack. (Dig a little, and it’s easy to turn up people who won’t write the unglamorous pieces because it’s not creative enough for a “writer.”) And this is hardly an affliction unique to “writers.”

This summer, I was at the Glen Workshop, and heard famed illustrator Barry Moser say something that stuck with me. He phrased it slightly differently, but in essence, he advises his students, when asked the ubiquitous cocktail party question, “What do you do?”, to say “I write poetry,” or “I draw,” or “I make movies.”

“Don’t say, ‘I am an artist,’” Moser advised. If you do that, you put all the cultural expectations of “being an artist” upon yourself, and you might just start acting like the stereotype rather than acting like yourself. “Just do the work,” he said. And then just be a person.

Well, I do write articles. I also edit magazines, and teach students, and administrate the arts and education. I’m a wife. I cook and I clean and I run and I read, and none of those things define who I am, because that unruly combination can’t be defined as a neat category. Those things are what I do. They are all equally important, and right now I am called to all of them.

But what am I, really? I am a woman, created in the image of God, striving to be fully human, glorifying God in my work. That’s what I am. And about that, I need not apologize.