“I’ve always wanted to write a book, but I’m not a writer.”

I hear this a lot. Maybe you’ve said it before.

Hearing that always makes me smile because it reminds me of an inside joke my best friend and I have. Whenever we’re grocery shopping together, and one of us is pushing a cart, one of us will say, “I’m a cart-pusher now. Someday I’ll be other things – a book reader, a climber of mountains. A payer-for-groceries. But right now, I’m a cart-pusher.”

This is hilarious to us and maybe mildly amusing, or not, to other people in the store. But I noticed recently that it has deeper merit – because it highlights just how limiting it is to confuse “being” with “doing.”

To mistake our identity for our actions.

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There are dozens of ways you can take this.

You can look at how absurd it sounds with other actions: while eating lunch, “I’m an eater now.” While not eating lunch: “I’m not an eater. Later I will be, but not now.”

“I’m not a writer” is only slightly less bizarre than “I’m a cart pusher,” because at its core, it’s literally just describing something you’re doing (or not doing), with the needless and possibly dangerous swap of identity with action.

What if you stopped describing yourself in terms of identity, and instead described your actions?

What if you didn’t have beliefs like “I’m not a [writer, business owner, author, creative person]”?

Would you do anything differently?

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So maybe you don’t feel like a writer.

Maybe you’ve been TOLD you’re not a writer.

Maybe you have certain beliefs about what and who writers are.

(“A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.” —Oscar Wilde. “Typists type. Writers stare out windows.” —unknown. )

If you want to write, but “I’m not a writer” is what’s stopping you, it’s worth poking at it a bit.

What would happen if you wrote a few words?

Then what would you be?

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As Katherine, the aforementioned BFF, put it, “How we see ourselves is such a huge portion of what we’re willing to even try. Never let a right-now label limit your forward progress!”

On the other hand, maybe you’re onto something. Maybe “being a writer” IS an identity. When someone tells me they’re a writer, I think of them as a person who sees the world in a different way: curious, interested in other people, able to see patterns beneath human behavior, sensitive to the nuances and rhythms of language.

If you want a book but have no interest in being a writer, you might be in the market for a ghostwriter. Send me a message below to start the conversation about your project later this year; I have two ghostwriting openings in June 2025.