I hovered over the bio line, typed something, and erased it.
“Is a writer who writes about food, short stories, and…” Delete.
“Is a writer who explores cultural criticism and identity…” Delete.
“Is an essayist, a nonfiction writer who maps the intersection of…” I hit backspace again. Nothing ever fit.
Was I an essayist, a memoirist, a culture critic, food writer, even a Wattpad hobbyist? Each piece I wrote feels like a shirt I couldn’t wear for long.
What if I wanted to tell a story about my neighborhood? Or the work conditions at my job? Would that make me a journalist?
“I’m…uh… an essayist? Maybe a memoirist? What’s the difference, anyway?” I remember mumbling at a co-writing session, as if saying it out loud might trick me into believing it.
Do I really need to nail the title down? Do I need to change my bio every time I send a pitch or submit a piece? Declare myself a nonfiction writer just to prove I belong?
I had this essay saved under three different file names, each time pretending it was something else: notes draft, incomplete, revise later. It sat there for months, unopened but never forgotten. Every time I opened a new document it was like its shadow followed me around the screen.
The problem wasn’t the words. I just couldn’t decide where it belonged. I had recently published an article about my food adventure abroad. If I publish this, then I won’t be a travel writer. It wasn’t food. It wasn’t cultural criticism; it wasn’t How-Tos. It was just… me. And because it didn’t fit any of those, I told myself that it didn’t deserve to exist outside of my hard drive.
But one night, staring at the blinking cursor, I realized that leaving it hidden was worse than risking the awkwardness of having no label for it, or a label for me. The essay just asked to be seen.
When I finally hovered over the “send” button, it wasn’t a relief. It was a question that pressed over my hesitation: what if not fitting in was the whole point?
The irony, of course, was that my first paid piece didn’t come from a neatly packaged pitch about food or a safe travel anecdote, or an adventure, or even “the culture critic.” It came from the very essay I had nearly deleted a dozen times. The one I thought would ruin whatever fragile writer label I was building for myself.
I had convinced myself that the only way forward was to specialize, to niche down, to become the person editors could point to and say, oh yes, he writes about that. But when the acceptance email landed in my inbox, it wasn’t because I had picked a lane, it was because I followed an obsession. A question I couldn’t stop circling.
The part I didn’t expect was how uncomfortable it felt to admit that I hadn’t picked a lane. Writers love to ask each other what we’re “working on.” Some weeks it was a food essay, other weeks a cultural take on dating, and sometimes just a paragraph about a stranger on the bus next to me, or writing short fiction. Every answer felt like it disqualified me from being the other thing. But what no one tells you is that readers don’t care about the category, they care if the writing makes them feel seen.
The first time someone messaged me about that essay that I wanted to ditch, they didn’t ask if I was a memoirist or a critic. They told me it made them feel less boxed—in themselves. The payoff was not a clean label, but a crack in the wall between writer and reader.
The question of what kind of a writer I was trailed me from draft to draft. But what I’ve learned is that writing is a house with many rooms, and I keep wandering between them. Drafting an article about dating tips in the age of red flags showed me how humor can sharpen unease; writing about masculinity in a women’s field taught me that clarity mattered more than flourish.
When I wrote a memoir, I had to strip away the temptation to dramatize until only the raw truth was left. And that carried over into how I wrote about family. Each room had its own rules and demands, but stepping between them is what gave me a voice that felt like mine.
But outside my own drafts, the pressure to choose was clear. Every platform asked for a tagline, “Two lines about yourself,” as if two lines could hold everything. Submission guidelines weren’t much different either: tell us why you are the person to write this, what you write, what you specialize in. And whenever I pitched, I felt the weight of those invisible guardrails, like if I didn’t declare a niche, I was already behind.
Editors, even the generous ones, carried the same language. “Is this more cultural or personal?” As if I couldn’t be both. I knew they meant well; categories make their jobs easier.
Creative lives aren’t linear. They don’t move in a straight line from “aspiring novelist” to “non-fiction writer.” They loop and double back, test new doors, return to old obsessions. The myth of the label says you can only be taken seriously if you name yourself first. But every time I’ve listened to that myth too closely, it shrunk the page before I’d even written on it.
What moved me forward was momentum. Each time I sat down to write, it started with a question. Could I process what happened without slapping on a new identity? Carry the weight of it forever? Could I write about my workplace without pretending I was a journalist?
It turns out the work shaped me more than any label could. Following what I couldn’t stop thinking about gave me a portfolio before I even knew what to call myself.
When a cursor blinks at me now, I don’t bother with backspacing. I just type what fits the piece in front of me. The next one will want a different version anyway, and that’s fine. A name doesn’t have to hold steady forever; only long enough to do its job.
