I used to be a writer.
That’s not me being dramatic. It’s just a fact from another lifetime, like saying I used to have a Nokia brick phone or I used to rewind movies before returning them to Blockbuster. Back when the internet still hummed and screamed before it connected, and my biggest audience was a spiral notebook with a bent wire spine.
It’s February 1st, 2004. I’m sitting at a desk that wobbles if I lean too hard on the left side. There’s a composition book open in front of me, black-and-white marbled, the kind you buy in a three-pack before school starts. The page is dated in blue ink. I always date the page. Like it matters. Like someone, someday, will need to know exactly when the words were born.
I used to believe that being a writer meant you had to suffer beautifully. So I practiced. I stayed up too late. I fell in love too quickly. I let silence stretch in rooms just to feel what it did to my chest. I wrote about girls who never knew I was writing about them. I wrote about God like He was a pen pal who took too long to answer.
In 2004, I am certain of two things:
- I am not famous.
- I will be.
I write like someone is already reading.
The house is quiet except for the television in the living room leaking canned laughter through the hallway. My mother thinks I’m doing homework. In a way, I am. I’m studying ache. I’m studying longing. I’m studying how to turn a feeling into a sentence that makes it stay still long enough to examine.
Back then, I didn’t call it “content.” I didn’t call it “posting.” I called it writing.
I wrote letters I never sent. I wrote manifestos about becoming something. I wrote poems that were 70% metaphors and 30% lies. I wrote because I didn’t know how to speak without stuttering over my own heart.
There was no algorithm. No likes. No performance metrics. Just me and the page and the small terror that maybe I wasn’t good enough, which secretly was fuel.
I used to be a writer in the way boys used to start bands in garages. Loud. Hopeful. Slightly delusional.
February 1st, 2004 feels cold. Not the weather. The air inside the room. That thin winter stillness where everything feels paused. I remember pressing my palm flat against the notebook page after finishing something I thought was brilliant. As if the words needed warmth to set.
I believed writing would save me.
Save me from what? I couldn’t have told you then. Small-town gravity. Ordinary adulthood. Becoming someone who says, “I used to…” about their dreams.
The truth is, I didn’t stop writing all at once. It wasn’t a dramatic quitting. It was erosion. A missed day. Then a missed week. Then a job. Then responsibility. Then the quiet whisper that maybe writing was just a phase.
But on this day, February 1st, 2004, I don’t know any of that yet.
On this day, I am invincible.
I underline sentences twice. I circle words I think are profound. I imagine interviews where I explain what inspired me. I imagine someone quoting me back to myself.
I used to be a writer.
Or maybe I was just a kid who discovered that language could hold what his hands couldn’t. That ink could carry what his voice was too afraid to.
If I could step back into that room, I wouldn’t tell him whether he makes it. I wouldn’t warn him about distraction or doubt or how easy it is to trade creation for consumption.
I would just sit beside him.
And watch him date the page.
And remind him, quietly,
you are already what you’re trying to become.