I don't feel like writing. Does that mean I'm not a writer?
from Cary Tennis’s advice column on Slate

I printed this out, because this line in particular really made an impression on me:
“But I have observed that mastery of a craft is personally satisfying, and that failure and frustration are not.”

I have been in a bit of a funk lately, which I mentioned in my last post. Getting advice at third-hand from the Internet seems to have been my only connection to writing recently, and it didn’t feel good. It made me feel like crap.

But I have realized something about myself. Look at my description of myself on my user profile:
“I am a wife, mother, master's student, freelance copyeditor, and aspiring writer.”
I have been doing a shitty job of actually *being* the last three. It is so much easier to just *think* of oneself as something than to actually do it. And I hadn’t exactly realized that was what I was doing. It’s not as simple as it sounds.

Take, for instance, the statement, “I am a master’s student.” Yes, I am enrolled in courses, which I attend. Yes, I think of myself as intelligent. But I must admit that I have not been engaged in my courses. I complained about not knowing what was going on in one of my classes, but that is because I was not putting the necessary work into it. I was doing the bare minimum and expecting to be able to coast on my brains and my ability to read English. I wasn’t actively engaged with the material, and that is why I scraped by. For someone who considers herself to be intelligent, that was a really dumb thing to do.

Same thing with writing. *Thinking* about writing and actually *writing* are two different things. So it will take time. It will take effort. But doing it will be “personally satisfying”, as Mr. Tennis says above.

Now I must work on the paper for my class that I scraped through.