“I am not who I used to be, and I am not yet who I will become.”

Rifling through old freewriting Google docs and looseleaf notes, I realize I’ve been doing this same damn thing for a long, long time. Writing notes to myself: of encouragement, of disparagement, of song lyrics from Josh Groban songs. I wrote “I am not who I used to be, and I am not yet who I will become” in the summer of 2017. It’s the only non-garbage line from a 5,000 word Google doc titled, simply, “Old” (other than, of course, the lines that are Josh Groban lyrics).

Those words were so obvious, but I wrote them during a transitional time when I desperately needed them. I still desperately need them, in different ways. I wanted so badly to be who I was going to be already; to have some of those pesky answers I felt that the world was keeping from me. I forced and forced it, labeling myself, critiquing myself, writing, writing, and writing some more the same line: “If I do not write anything of substance, then can I call myself a writer?”

The irony hits like a tsunami. Some years later, I would write something on the back of a scrap sheet of paper, maybe as an admonishment to this old self: “You’re so worried about starting, you don’t realize you’re already in the middle of it.”

1. Those were the distracted days I picked at the skin on my neck so deeply I had to slather Vaseline all over my jawline, like a petroleum-based beard, to keep my fingers off of it. Just like that, I picked at the same idea until it was raw; the idea that I could never be a writer unless I was writing something good and I was writing all the time. But writing is not an antidepressant, and good writing requires more of myself than I had to give back then. I am not who I used to be.

Still I feel impatient for “the final result”—the proof that I’ve known what I was doing all along. I think that, perhaps, this is the place I will always stay for the rest of my entire life. At this desk, with this same mug of tea, during a pandemic, forever.

I am not yet who I will become.

Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, write that reminder on a sticky note somewhere you can see it, and remember: nothing bad lasts forever, and nothing good lasts forever, either.

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