Michelle K

This post originally appeared on The Faster Times

Today is National Writing Day, and it comes at an oddly prescient moment for me.

I’ve been grappling a lot lately with the question of what it means to be a writer, maybe because this past year and a half I’ve found to be a difficult one for writing, consisting mostly as it has of all that post-academic real-life drudgery can entail: the shitty part time jobs, mounting student loans, the endless shuffle between the suburban bedroom I never really expected to return to, and my boyfriend’s apartment which we haphazardly share.

A few essays have been written in this time, a new writing community found, but for the most part: creative stagnancy. And the constant battling against thoughts like can you really call yourself a writer if you don’t write the way you used to? Why do you write in the first place? How do you move on to the next phase? How do you redefine yourself now? Ultimately, I suppose, how do you become brave enough (you were once!) to do this maddening, difficult, provocative—and yet, at the very end of it all, joyful, compulsive, oh-so-necessary act? Perhaps as you get older, certain truths get harder to confront, not easier, and for me, writing has always been about truth.

So. Why do I write? Because I’ve come to feel that if you have a gift, it’s your responsibility to use it, to do ...