Stop calling yourself an ‘aspiring writer’

Sometimes I stumble across writers on Instagram — I’m talking really good poets with loads of potential — and then I look at their bios and they describe themselves as an ‘aspiring poet’ or ‘aspiring writer’ and that makes me sad.

It is as if they are accepting themselves as unbloomed, as ‘other’ from the writer. But they cannot be other, can they? I can see their writing. It is there, posted and published online, for me, the audience, to consume.

How can one aspire to write when they are already writing? This baffles me. What defines a writer? What makes me a writer and someone else not one yet? Why are we even bothering with a definition beyond ‘a person who writes beyond the confines of necessary everyday writing?’ What distinguishes someone who likes to write from someone who writes by default?

Is it because they are still writing students? I was a writer while I was a student — and an unpublished one at that. I didn’t undersell myself because I was still learning and experimenting — all writers are always still learning and experimenting. It’s part of the gig.