Does it Sometimes Feel Like Your Identity as a Creator is a Struggle?

Struggling with identity tends to be a matter of active mindfulness.

Photo by Ari He on Unsplash

I wrote my first 50-page, hand-illustrated sci-fi novel when I was 9.

The next was 36-pages, typed single-spaced, when I was 13 or so.

After that, I wrote on and off, in fits and spurts. But writing was always the focal point of my identity as a creator.

Then, in 2012, I began to blog once a week. Fits and spurts of writing became regular.

In time, weekly blogging became twice-weekly blogging, then ballooned to sometimes 6 days a week. All my blogs tended to hover around 1000 words each.

Over the next few years, I started to apply the act of regular blogging to my fiction. This led to a lot more completed work, the publication of 3 books in 2020 and 6 books in 2021. As of this writing, I’m sitting on 4 completed books, 3 of which are ready to go to the editor (the fourth needs to be edited by me).

Writer became a major element of my identity. But while that’s the largest aspect of my creator self, it’s not the whole story.

This year, I found the label that best covers my creator identity — storyteller. Given that all my creations, writing…