My Regrets As a Writer

Last week, I wrote about my writing journey and how much it has changed over the last couple of decades. In that post, I wrote about how I let a professor and my battle with finding the right medication for my mental health block my writing for many years. Looking back, I don’t have a lot of regrets as a writer. I am not upset that I have started and stopped many different projects. I’m not upset or regretful that I don’t already have a published book or that I even lost a whole manuscript because I accidentally reformatted my computer in a stressful moment.

For me, the biggest regret I have as a writer is that I spent nearly a decade thinking that I could not be and would not be a writer. I hate that those years were lost to my inability to see how much creativity I really had in me. I know now that being mentally healthy has made me a better writer and creative than when I wasn’t in a good mental health place. In fact, being stable in my mood means that I can continue to be disciplined in my writing. I do regret that, for the longest time, I didn’t consider myself (or others who didn’t write novels) as true writers. I’m not sure where I formed that mentality, but it meant that for years—and until recently—I truly believed that I wasn’t a writer until I finished a full-length novel. In reality, during the decade I considered myself “not a writer,” I was just writing in a different capacity.

Moving forward in my life, I know that what I write doesn’t define me, but the fact that I write is what makes me a writer. Now, I consider myself a writer who is an aspiring author. I guess I need to get cracking on that full-length novel!