To Be – Hiker, Swimmer, Writer – Just Me

         I am a hiker. Or Am I?

I have hiked for forty years with a hiker—a real one—who likes it, and while I’d like to think that hiking three or four times a year and complaining about it the entire time, grants me bone fides, I suspect that it’s a lot like my skiing. While some people ski off-piste, enjoying the sloosh through the trees. I ski piste-off--angry and fighting the entire time. Reason says that if grumpy skiing doesn’t make me a skiier, then reluctant hiking can’t make me a hiker.

Yet a recent women’s hiking podcast¹ called me out by name and described me as just that! A hiker. So, now I’m reconsidering my status because the internet said so. What happens next? Will my hiking attitude suddenly transform and I will begin to yearn, love, and call myself a hiker?

Again, the internet said yes. A 2003 TeD talk² suggests that attitude and confidence are so important to success that if you learn to fake it, you can become it. I willingly guide groups of hikers on week-long excursions in Southern Utah. The internet has proof—photographs of those hikes. And so it appears that I fake it very convincingly. Ergo, I must be a hiker.

Using that same argument, I am also a swimmer and a really great writer. Well, I don’t actually swim; I never learned how and I hate getting my face wet, but I am getting really good at faking it. I get up every morning to plunge into water aerobics with the over-60 crowd, so according to TeD internet, I am a swimmer. Voila! And I have proof—raw, non-shopped photographs, (ones that really shouldn’t exist,) that prove that I am a swimmer.

Who defines identity? Is it me? Am I as credible as the internet? My mantra has always been a word-play from Shakespeare that suggests that, “I have but a woman’s reason. I think it so, because… I think it so.” And now approaching the age of 60, I find that my assertions are equally as viable as the internet’s. I have, with aplomb, set aside critical thought and reason and I rely heavily on… me.

Who gets to decide anyway? What makes me a hiker, a swimmer or even a writer? I’ve been told over the years that no one is qualified to call themselves a writer. That’s too audacious! It’s up to other people to define someone as a writer—those who are more qualified of knowing what it means to be a writer and who have spent years sinking into the depths of the writing pool. A person cannot just float around, taking upon themselves that title—they don’t have the capacity.

My children know my capacity and the uphill challenge they will have in questioning it. I have purposely been incapable for years: I lose keys, leave saucepans on high heat; I put things in weird places, I leave groceries in the car—for a week and I write crazy stuff. I have perfected diminished capacity.

And yet… here I am. Writing. To prove me capable, that would mean altered or afflicted with an aberrant personality. I’d suddenly have to become polite, keep track of stuff; I’d have to remember where I’ve been and I would have to get to places on time. That’s never going to happen, so waiting to call myself a writer until someone finds me capable is futile. I’m pretty safe continuing to write amok out there in the world, just being me, and leaning into each day’s new identity.

I’m faking it. I was born to embellish, so I write about life ills and try to make them more palatable. I write to laugh now because there may not be a later. I may veer off track and find myself somewhere else entirely, on a whole new adventure. But for now, today, I am a writer.

If only I could find a podcast that would call me one.

1 Hiking Women

2Amy Cuddy’s 2012 TeD talk, “The Shape of Body Language,”

That’s My Reality and Sometimes It Bites. And When it Does, I Write.