Last weekend I was at a celebration of life for one of my great grandmas. Amid the distant cousins and unknown aunts and uncles, I found my own grandmother in conversation with one of the unfamiliar faces.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, urging me to sit next to her. Then she introduced me in that way grandmas do. “This is Jami. You know, Linda’s daughter? She just finished her first novel – she’s a writer.”

I wanted to interject, to put a disclaimer on the title (“only in my free time!”) and on the accomplishment itself (“it’s only the first draft”), but Grandma had already moved on to bragging about my brother’s accomplishments.

What is it about that word that has me on guard? I am a writer, I’ve been a writer my whole life. I am a person who enjoys writing, ergo, a writer. Why do I struggle, after all these years, with owning it?

When I was a kid, I was pretty forthright with my intentions. I was going to be an author and you were going to see my book on the shelf someday.

My dream shifted in college — I’d be a journalist. Still impressive. Stiff lofty. Then it shifted again — you’d see my work in a literary journal and a magazine. I’d be a writer of many things – anything, so long as I was writing.

After I finished school, it wasn’t long until I found myself embarrassed using that term, “I will be.” It’s that “will + verb,” that future tense that’s troubling. When you’re young, still in school, no one questions “when?” The answer is obvious. When I’m out of school, out in the world.

Then I found myself out in that world, and those first three years out of school – the ones that will set you up for the rest of your career – were comprised of any work at all that will get me out of my parents’ house. I found myself, at the end of those three years, working in a totally unrelated field, doing completely unrelated things.

You gotta ask yourself: “So, when does the ‘writer’ thing kick in?”

It’s a fair question.

Writers write. I was blogging, but only updating every week or so, and when the answer to “What are you working on?” is “A blog post about curdled milk,” I started to feel a little like a fraud. Imposter syndrome kicked in, as it will always do, and I realized: “I gotta stop calling myself a writer.”

Years went by. I abdicated the title. I journaled occasionally, I didn’t write because I wasn’t a writer. I went out, I experienced things. I broke up, I fell in love. I traveled, I worked, I worked a lot, and eventually, I was in a good place. I even got paid to write things professionally on occasion.

And then, after a trip to South America, I had an idea.

It was a good idea, or it could have been. I started writing. Before I knew it, I had the very, very beginnings of the novel. Admittedly, the first first draft was exceptionally rough, and progress was unbelievably slow. But I was working on it, slowly, and I had even started journaling again.

But no one knew that I was writing. I didn’t want to tell anyone, sure that it could be a fluke. After all, how many times had I clung to the title, insisting that I would soon have something to show for it, only to end up with nothing but bad blog posts?

Too many.

There’s a fear here, and this fear is a result of lots of things. But the fear is that if I say it enough with nothing to show for it, I won’t be taken seriously.

Through the process of writing this novel, however, I came to realize something pretty important: no one was going to take me seriously until I took myself seriously. So, I said it out loud:

I’m a writer. Seriously.

I started owning it about a year into working on this novel, in February of 2018. Then a funny thing happened: I started writing more. I started writing faster. I started writing better. I started to trust myself, my ideas, and my creativity. All of a sudden, I was approaching the end of that first draft.

It wasn’t until I started believing that I was – or at least that I could be – a writer that I was able to take the most basic step toward becoming one.

I just had to be brave enough to say it — and brave enough to fail.