Words don’t come easily to me now, like they once did. Somewhere among puberty and high school and suicide attempts, all the words got trapped inside me, hiding in some forsaken corner of my mind among cobwebs and gray-speckled moths. I find myself not being able to write, cramped by this incessant fear that anything that I produce will not be good enough. Two, three years ago, this would never have happened to me. Back then, at twelve, thirteen years old, I was still naive enough to believe I could be a writer.

In my mind, being a writer was the perfect antidote to my problems. Instead of defining myself by the things I couldn’t change--my South Asian heritage, or my stammering problem, or my twiggy, curveless body--, I decided to define myself as a writer. I used to carry around little notebooks, with a pen wedged inside the wire spiral. Whenever I found myself lonely, I would write, write, write because it was my passion, my unique, idiosyncratic thing-that-I-do. My friends were constantly updated on the status of my stories: who was making out with whom, which suspect turned out to be the murderer, what the thief spent his stolen money on. When I had to introduce myself to a youth group during an icebreaker I held my chin up and said, “I’m a writer.”

And why shouldn’t I have identified as a writer? A writer, in my middle-school mind, was an artist of sorts, a person who can make beauty out of nothing, who can turn the simple act of putting words on paper into something elegant, something precious.

A writer can take ordinary letters, these plain curves and angles, and light them up with message, with meaning.

A writer is spontaneous. A writer will have thoughts that no one on Earth has ever had before, and transcribe them perfectly, translating the tune of an inner voice into notes on a sheet of music.

A writer understands the power of little details. A writer can strike a comma to give pause, or hold the words in midair with a hyphen and then -- ever so carefully-- drop them, like an orchestrator conducting a symphony, all the instruments working in poised perfection.
A writer is a mentor. A writer shines a light on life and shows you the way snow sparkles, the way the shadows across the floor form a pattern. A writer’s insights are lovely, useful things--you can keep them forever, tucked away on the mental shelf where you keep beautiful objects.

A writer is coherent. A writer is the master of emotions, the piano player on our hearts, evoking excitement or longing or a deep stirring from some dark unknown corners down inside. A writer is someone who can convince you of something, through the power of passion which leaks through their words.

A writer, most importantly, can never be lonely. Why would anyone be lonely when they have words to keep them company, words that can act as channels to distant worlds? Dialogue is ephemeral. Conversations sputter and die. Friendships fade. People you love become people you once loved. Words spoken between two people can never be reclaimed, no matter how much you strain to remember them years later. But the written word? It is forever.

I am not a writer.

Because when have I ever written anything that makes people’s hearts beat a little faster, or breathe a little easier? The words that I put on paper have never ever been more coherent than the words that stumble out of my mouth. My mouth that stutters for no reason, choked by the tight, full-body rushes of panic that come along with having social anxiety disorder. The anxiety wraps round my bones, cramping my movement, so that I am stiff, unreal. It’s as if I’ve been trapped in a glass box, maybe a coffin, a cage that is real to me but to no one else. I cannot speak, can hardly move. The words come out so soft and weak they are almost non-existent, like the beating of butterfly wings.
But on paper, I come alive. My classmates tell me reading my writing is the only way they know I have emotions. Writing, for my middle-school self, was the path to end my self-consciousness. I could not speak like the other kids my age, but I could write like them-- better than them, even. So I convinced myself of this fact and immersed myself in the written word.

Now I see it is all for nothing. I gather prompts, advice books, notebooks full of wide-ruled paper, but I don’t create. I have nothing to show, not one essay or story or poem that I can show as a proof of my writerliness. All I have are bits and pieces. Things I wrote once, scenes about girls in blue dresses fighting demons and wizards all the while rocking a pair of six inch heels, and poems about how fast time passes when you’re excited. I have a sentence here, a snippet of dialogue there--saved on my laptop, in old Chemistry notebooks and in the July pages of my school planner. It is all a kind of mental word vomit, taking out my emotions on the world through bad prose.

Calling myself a writer would be like calling a person who has never made a single necklace or bracelet a jewelry-maker. This person may own a tub full of cracked, discolored, glass beads, the kind that costs only $5 at Michaels because the beads are such bad quality. The holes are sometimes closed up with glass, and sometimes a few beads are fused together in weird lumps. Once or twice this wannabe-jeweler strung together a few mismatched beads on a fraying thread and called it a necklace. The knots were too weak and the necklace broke, sending the beads clattering one after another, clacking against the wood floor, rolling behind the bed and under the dresser.

Metaphors aside, the fact of the matter is that I cannot be someone I’m not. I won’t ever reach the standard which I wish to achieve. The writing life is not for me. I have whole lists of contests coming up in the next few weeks or months, and I can’t do it. The page always looms in front of me, blank and white, like the walls of an asylum cell. The words come out garbled, awkward, horrible--not the way I want them to, not the way a writer is supposed to sound.

And I’m thinking maybe it’s best if I stop hoping. Maybe it’s best if I grow up, squelch my childhood dreams, and forget I ever wanted to do this.

I’ll burn my notebooks. And ignore the way my fingers twitch in the middle of the night to the tk-tk-tk of keys on an invisible keyboard.
I am not a writer.

This is my mantra. I will repeat it until I believe it.