I married young and within eighteen months I happily left my job as a bank teller to assume the role of housewife and stay-at-home mom of a chubby baby boy. Two more children followed and eleven years passed in a blur of diapers, T-ball, and lost teeth. Most days, caring for my family kept me busy from the buzz of my alarm until I dropped into bed exhausted. But one fateful August morning my baby went to kindergarten, and I was left home alone—no noses to wipe, scrapes to mend or children to entertain. I was bored to tears.

I realized this was the perfect time to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’d always loved to write and in recent months I’d felt the urge to sit down and put thoughts to paper. But I needed some training. I enrolled in a writing course at a local college and began working toward my goal of becoming a writer. I wrote short stories, poems and articles on a variety of subjects, but was too afraid to submit my work to editors. I was waiting for that magical moment when I felt like a writer.

One day a friend asked me a question and I answered, “Some day when I’m a writer…” She interrupted and said, “Lisa, you’re a writer now.” We discussed the matter for several minutes and I realized she was right. I was a writer.

Many new or aspiring writers struggle with this identity issue. I know from experience that calling oneself a writer while still in the early stages of a career can be difficult. At parties or gatherings, people would ask what I did for a living. “I’m a writer,” I’d answer. Inevitably, they asked “Are you published?” or “What have you written?” I then proceeded to stammer and stall, trying to come up with an answer that didn’t make me sound like a wordsmith-wanna-be harboring grandiose pipe dreams of publishing fame. After suffering through several embarrassing incidents of this nature, I reverted to claiming stay-at-home mom status—a cop-out but easier than making excuses for my lack of publishing credits.

Situations like these led me to ask myself, “What makes a person a writer?” Does having one’s words published in a magazine or book carry the writer over some unseen threshold and elevate him or her to a writer’s status? Or should a person wear the writer’s label simply for possessing that unexplainable urge to put words on paper? Is being a writer a result of accomplishments or a state of mind?

After much deliberation I decided that I was a writer, bylines or not, because the need to write had become an integral part of my life. A funny thing happened after that. Once I began to think of myself as a writer, I gained the confidence I’d previously lacked. I wrote more and finally found the courage to submit my work to editors. Before long, I had accumulated a list of bylines. By thinking of myself as a writer, I had become one—not because I finally had a list of accomplishments to back up my claim, but because I had come to terms with who I am. I am a writer.