On Being an Unpublished Poet

I am a poet

This is something I always knew about myself,

but infrequently said out loud.

I thought someone else had to grant me the title—

an editor, a book deal, a stranger with authority,

some imagined jury of literary adults

who would someday tap me on the shoulder

and deem me legitimate.

For years, I kept writing in private

like it was something I needed to hide

or something I hadn’t earned yet.

I treated poems like secrets

instead of evidence.

But lately, something shifted.

Not out of confidence, really—

more out of exhaustion

from pretending I was anything else.

I’ve spent most of my life trying on identities

that felt safer, more acceptable...like novelist for example,

it was more explainable at dinner parties.

I traded my instinct for something practical.

I tried roles that came with clearer job descriptions

and steadier handshakes.

But nothing holds me the way writing does.

Nothing empties me and fills me in the same breath.

Nothing else makes the world tilt just enough

to feel alive again.

And the truth is:

I don’t disappear when I write—I arrive.

So I stopped waiting for permission.

I stopped waiting for publication to make me real.

I’m a poet because this is the only thing

I can’t stop doing.

I’m a poet because my mind writes even when my hands don’t.

I’m a poet because the world hits me sideways

and I need to put it somewhere...trust me!

Publication will come, or it won’t.

People will understand, or they won’t.

But the work is already here.

The life is already happening.

The poems are already choosing me.

So yes—I’m calling myself a poet.

Not because I’ve earned it

but because it's time to finally say

the quiet part out loud.

Are you ready to stop whispering, too?