Call yourself a writer?

I am an international woman of mystery.
Oh alright, I’m not an international woman of mystery at all but I’ve always fancied being one, whatever the job entails. The truth is, I’m a complete blabber mouth in most areas of my life.
Except for one.
I’ve somehow managed to keep the whole writing thing fairly quiet from many people in my personal and professional life. The sharp-eyed may notice that I’m the only person on this blog who doesn’t use their full name. I thought long and hard about this when Samantha was setting it up. My ‘day job’ is as a magazine journalist and it struck me that it might not be a great idea to have all my thoughts and insecurities about the much-more-important-but-thus-far-without-visible-success side of things up here for all to see. Those feature editor types are no strangers to Google when they’re about to commission someone.
Obviously there is a picture with my biography, but it is quite old [and it was taken in the days before the Witness Protection Programme….but that’s another story] and you would only stumble across it by accident unless you were a writerly type too.
Many of my good non-writer friends hear nothing of my highs and lows… the finished projects, the painful rejections, the excitement of that request for a ‘full’. They wouldn’t know even what a ‘full’ was.
It wasn’t always this way. In the early days I blabbed to anyone who would listen that I’d started looking for an agent. But now I keep my cards close to my chest. Unless you’ve ever been truly part of this bizarre world, it’s easy to imagine that six-figure-deals and movie rights are the natural order of things when someone who can string a few words together has a go at writing a novel. So I stand in the school playground waiting to collect my children and when someone asks, ‘What did you do today?’ I’m sometimes dying to reply, ‘I sent off some partial subs and made real progress on my WIP….how about you?’ But I don’t. I talk about the weather and the kids and wonder whether I’ll ever have the courage to stand up and talk about something almost as close to my heart as my kids, and way more important than the weather.

I wonder, however, whether part of all this simply comes down to labels. I can call myself a mother, a wife, a journalist, a sister, a daughter and a friend. No problem. But answering the question, ‘And what do you do?’ with, ‘I’m a writer,’ makes me feel like a little girl clomping about in my mum’s slingbacks again. It’s just pretend. But considering I’ve written for a living for 17 years, this is actually a bit daft.
So how about this: I Write, Therefore I Am A Writer.
Come on, those of you who feel the same. Repeat after me, ‘I Write, Therefore I Am A Writer’.
I’m sure it will get easier if we practice saying it.