Admit it...you're a writer

Finding the confidence to identify as a writer

“So what do you do?”

The dreaded question. Do I talk about the day job, or do I talk about the writing?

A week ago I attended a school reunion. In the early 90s I lived in Rome for three years¹, attending an international school on the city’s outskirts. I hadn’t kept in touch with my classmates and so hadn’t seen any of them for thirty years.

We met up in London and it was a magical experience². I knew these people when we were all 11 years old, so my brain had to do some serious interpolation to connect that visual memory to the 40-somethings I was now meeting. It felt like a kind of temporal slip; a rapid acceleration from then to now. A time hop.³

Inevitably, there was a lot of catching up to do. Everyone wanted to know what everyone had spent those three decades doing, and where we were now in our lives.

“So what do you do?”