How long after a singer stops singing do they stop calling themselves a singer?

Every other day, I try to remind myself that I am more than just my flailing writing career. I am not a failure; I am everything but. Before this period of writer’s block, I told just about everyone I met that I was a magazine journalist.

“I am in my second year, but I am also a music writer,” “Oh yes, I work for this magazine called -,” but when I no longer felt like I could attach these titles to who I was, I felt colourless. Purposeless. What happens when you’re no longer doing what your title implies? How long after a singer stops singing do they stop calling themselves a singer?


I started writing as early as age 7, enlisting the help of my two friends to illustrate and publish my first-ever story. (My publisher was really the problem there) And for the rest of my schooling career, I kind of fell in and out of love with writing. Once, abandoning the whole idea of becoming a creative director at a magazine to become an investment banker (I failed Maths so many times), but it was when I joined a student organisation and became chief editor/creative director of their annual yearbook that I realised that I may have a future in writing. Like many other journalists and writers, too, I grew up watching many romantic films and dramas that had writers as the main characters, all trying to form a story while falling in love.

It wasn’t until I turned 18 that I fully pursued journalism. I cannot really place what sparked the idea that I could even write about music or fashion because I had no experience and limited knowledge about these types of journalism. I just knew that 12-year-old me wanted to be a creative director of a magazine because I enjoyed The Devil Wears Prada. I started looking up different SA publications with open writer submissions/applications, and also learnt how to write profiles.

Things were fairly successful for me as much as they could be for a young writer until I hit a wall in April. It took me longer than a month to write articles, and everything was lethargic. Opportunities were much less, and I felt less confident as I kept writing. Not to mention that I had submitted pitches to two publications in the same month after weeks of contemplating how the perfect pitch had to be written, only to be met with silence. It was like a punch in the gut ( I don’t take rejection well) because up until then, I had always had opportunities (unpaid) fall into my lap because I was talented. It was after my third rejection of the year that I decided that maybe it wasnt’t that my lucky girl syndrome had run out, but maybe that I was not as good as I initially thought.

My birthday had just passed, and I had yet to achieve five things on my long list of 2023 goals. I had not lost 20kg, nor had I significantly lengthened my portfolio. Many people around me kept telling me I had all the time in the world and that I needed to take a break because I was only 20, but how is lying in bed, unable to write, suffocating from the looming pressure of having not been the Nthatile I wanted to be before March, not resting? I realised that the rest I needed was a vacation from my own thoughts. But I found my unfinished ideas and failed commitments haunting. This interview and that article were never finished or published, so how could I ignore them? How could I take a break from my potential?

Now at the edge of my 23rd year of living, I find myself in the same predicament: unemployed and in between opportunities. I have to move cities again, but I also kind of don’t have a place to stay. I also recently quit the job that inspired my ‘writer’s block’ piece, and while I was worn and worked to the bone and severely (really undervalued) —I cannot help but miss waking up to take care of the loads of work that felt like my own children. A few days ago, I wrote a sort of vision-board type message to my best friend, pledging to just rest and finally enter my ‘peaceful’ era; committing not only to pause content writing and focus on social media management, but to not fall into the trap of working many jobs at once to feed my addiction to being a hamster on a wheel. When I wrote that, I was truly enjoying the luxury of sleeping most of my day away— hell, I even did that on vacation. Late stage capitalism, the never-ending need to prove myself, job insecurity, money, and the invalid concern that I may never have a corner of the world that truly belongs to me, begets the creeping question: where am I going and what is next?

Quite frankly, I still don’t know. I just have to trust myself, and if you couldn’t tell, I still have to learn how to do that.