I have always wanted to be a writer. A capital W Writer; a name recognised alongside Hemingway, Orwell, Saint-Exupéry and Dostoyevsky. These were my childhood heroes, people who offered me the greatest stories and values. It seemed like the most noble and influential job in the world.

I began writing online in March 2019. I wrote a few posts, mostly on productivity and running, then 100 more, then 200, then 500. This is my 555th post. In that time, I also published three short stories, guest wrote for a few blogs, tutored essay writing to students, and kept up a daily journal. It seemed like a decent resume for becoming a Writer.

Yet in these last few weeks, there are increasingly moments where I stare at the screen for an hour unable to write anything. I have hundreds of drafts, but nothing I like enough to post. And I think a lot of it has to do with this obsession with being a Writer.

For me, writing started out innocent: a random guy throwing his ideas into the world without a care. Somewhere along the way, the pressure of being a “legit writer” took away my juvenile eagerness and replaced it with anxious perfectionism. Now, I endlessly edit sentences, spend hours changing words, and hesitate to start a topic that might be seen as too naive or pompous. All because of this standard I have set for myself: becoming a capital W Writer.

---

I recently listened to a podcast episode between Dr. K and Ali Abdaal. In it, Ali talks about feeling imposter syndrome after publishing his book because he felt like he was “just a random guy”. And after he gave a talk at Google and read comments criticising his lack of academic credentials, he felt stung. Deep down, he felt that they were right. He didn’t deserve the prestige of talking at Google. He was just a random guy.

Dr. K said this one sentence that struck me:

“A lot of the challenges that people face are when they construct identities for themselves to strive towards.”

He goes on to explain that a lot of suffering occurs when people are too attached to abstractions: being rich, a winner, a respected person. Yet these are all constructs; you cannot autopsy a body to find these.

All our lives consist of are individual moments strung together over time. The best thing we can do is to try and make the most of each one. Right now, I am sitting in a plastic chair at a library typing on a Macbook Air with a coffee cup and drink bottle next to me. This is all. Anything further – that I am successful, a winner, a “Writer”, is an abstraction.

All that is left to do is to write – as true and genuinely as possible. And with time, perhaps these individual moments will culminate in a piece of work that rivals my heroes; and perhaps then, will my dream emerge as a reality, and it will not have mattered one bit.