Who are you?

I am a writer. I have known this for a very long time, known it down in the very core of my soul where my most secret desires lie, but I think I am just starting to understand what it means to live my life as a writer. It doesn't just mean carrying my writing notebook with me everywhere I go, a practice I started as a teenager and have continued with varying degrees of success throughout my adult life. It doesn't just mean identifying myself as a writer either, wearing the title like a jacket that could be shed at my convenience. It means a myriad of things that inspire both fear and exitement--but, hey, isn't fear always a part of exitement anyway? Fear because I loathe rejection, which is an inevitable part of any writer's life. Also, there's fear that I will fail, but, honestly, that's not a true fear--just a leftover remnant of adolescent insecurities. The excitement comes from finally realizing that I can do something that I really have always wanted to do: I can stop hiding behind the excuse instilled in me by parents who were just trying to help...that old falsehood "I can do anything and still be a writer." No. No, I can't...because I am a writer. And there are certain things that writers, like all professionals I imagine, do day in and day out that make it impossible for me to entertain the notion of being anything else. I finally came to this realization when I took up, somewhat reluctantly, another title that I thought I could never embrace: teacher. Teaching in middle school for several years did not allow me time to reflect on my status as a writer...or to contribute to my own wrtiting much at all. But I can't say that the years were unproductive for the writer in me: I gained practice at facilitating writing in a classroom setting; I met some amazing people who appreciated and nurtured my writing; and I got to work with talented young writers who reminded me how I felt as a teenage writer--so full of potential, flailing to find my own voice, wondering if the gift was just a phase that I would outgrow. Teaching in the college setting, however, has brought me back to center on the fact that I am, in fact and above all else, a writer. And, as such, a writer does one key and important thing: a writer writes. So...I am beginning this blog to keep me honest. I can't promise that I will post every day(although I intend to make myself write everyday), but I am hoping that by creating this blog I will be inspired to post fairly often--projects I am working on, things that inspire me, progress as I being the application process to graduate school. I'm thinking of it as an extension of my writing notebook: the public face of my private thoughts. And I hope that you, my readers, (if I can be so arrogant as to think people will read it) will interact, tell me what you are working on, what is inspiring you...who are you at this point in your journey?