Not Exactly

A Writers Confession

“You write. What do you write about?”

I froze.

I may as well have been asked to juggle chainsaws. There’s a precision I bring to diagnosing a necrotic pulp in the upper primary molar of a screaming child.

Yet here, in a warm Braddon café on a bone-chilling Canberra morning, I scrambled for an answer.

“Not exactly,” I mumbled.

Allow me to back up.

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It was a bone-chilling Canberra morning. The kind where the wind doesn’t just get under your coat. It settles there, making you question every life choice that led you outside.

I like winter, though! I like Canberra too. In fact moving away from Canberra was a life choice that my wife and I continue to question.

Like most winter weekends at 7:00 a.m., the streets of Braddon lay deserted. The devout were strolling into cafes, breathing much-needed life into these early morning starts.

The continual hiss of espresso machines, the warm murmur of early conversations, puffer jackets starting to get hung on chairs and benches everywhere.

I ordered my usual double-shot oat piccolo and settled in to wait for an annual catch-up with a colleague and friend.

We covered the usual territories. Family updates, professional challenges, wins, setbacks. As per ritual we ordered a second round of coffees just as our conversation was meandering towards a deeper place.

We had reached that inevitable pivot in catch-up conversations:

“So mate, what else is happening? What are you up to outside of dentistry and the practice”?

“I like to read, and I enjoy writing,” I said.

A pause. A silence. I am spiraling in my discomfort.

The easiest way to get out of discomfort in conversation is to follow up after the last sentence. Generally this tends to be not well-thought out in the moment.

So I continued. “Well, sort of”.

He pressed gently:

“You write. What do you write about?”

“Not exactly,” I mumbled, then rushed to fill the silence, “but I write about anything really. Stoicism, life, the human condition.”

The words tumbled out with all the conviction of someone pretending to understand bitcoin.

The conversation drifted away, as conversations do. But those two words haunted me like the tune of an annoying song.

November Rain & Bridges

I think there is a strange thing about identity. Perhaps if songs had an ability to, they would understand us better than ourselves.

There’s a particular kind of melancholy that only music can evoke. A sadness that is equal parts longing and hope.

For me, November Rain by Guns N’ Roses holds that power. It’s a song that takes me back to 1999, my first year as an immigrant in Australia, a time when my dreams of the future stood in stark contrast to the reality of my then present.

I was 19, working as a kitchen hand to make ends meet during university. Most nights, I finished my shift at 1 a.m., my clothes reeking of grease and my body exhausted from scrubbing endless pots and pans. The streets were empty as I walked home in the dark, the cold biting at my fingers in winter.

But in my headphones, Axl Rose’s chords blared, creating a soundtrack that made those lonely walks unique.

That period of my life was shaped by contrasts. The stench of a kitchen corner with two commercial dishwashers keeping me company most nights from Wednesday to Sunday. Yet in my mind, I was imagining a different version of myself. A future where I owned a car, owned a home, and didn’t work until the early hours of the morning.

Those dreams felt distant, almost unreachable, but they were what propelled me forward.

Music has a way of framing memories in sepia.

The chords of that song don’t just remind me of 1999; they bring back the sensory details of that life.

The constantly wrinkled creases of my hands from being immersed in soapy water. The smell of grease that stuck to my clothes. The constant aroma of the salsa clinging to every pore of my skin (I worked at a Mexican diner). The calls of chimichurri and extra habanero and plates on the pass. The busyness of Randwick when I walked into work and eerieness of the street when I walked back home.

But alongside those memories is the dreamer I was, a 19-year-old navigating a new country, uncertain but determined.

This is the migrant life. A journey of contrasts.

You leave behind the familiar for the unknown. You trade stability for opportunity. Comfort for uncertainty.

November Rain became a bridge between those worlds. A reminder of where I was and where I wanted to be.

And here is what I’m realising now, sitting in that Braddon café decades later: I have been building bridges like that my whole life. Between countries. Between identities. Between the person who scrubbed pans and the person who fixes teeth.

Between someone who writes and someone who can’t quite say they’re a writer.

That Line Between Work and Not Exactly

I know I’m good at what I do as a dentist. I can manage a fearful, screaming child and their equally anxious parent with the ease of someone who’s done it a thousand times. My confidence in that role comes from years of training and experience. There are x-rays to confirm success, follow-up appointments to review the work, grateful parents who thank you on the way out and mostly write beautiful prose in the form of google reviews. The validation is fantastic.

Writing, though? Writing feels like an entirely different terrain.

My skills as a writer don’t compare to my skills as a dentist, yet I love writing just as much as I love the challenge of calming a nervous child. But dentistry gives me something writing doesn’t: certainty. When I look at a an x-ray, I know what I’m seeing. When I extract a tooth, I can measure the outcome. The child does not have pain and the parents get a restful night.

Writing doesn’t come with those reassurances.

There are no x-rays to confirm a perfect narrative. No local anaesthetic to numb the sting of self-doubt or the embarrassment of critique.

Put your words out there and you’re standing naked—metaphorically, at least.

The act of writing demands confidence, yet writing itself often feels like a confession of doubt. Every sentence carries an unspoken disclaimer: This might not be good. Please don’t judge me too harshly. It’s that inner voice that sits on your shoulder and feeds you insecurity while you’re trying to work.

For me, that voice is loudest when the word “writer” comes up. It feels like a title reserved for someone else—someone who is more prolific, more deserving. Someone with books on shelves or essays published in the London Review of Books.

Someone I know is a well-known writer. The thought of them reading my work makes me want to hide.

But here is what I’ve been learning: writing isn’t really about titles or certainty. It’s about something else entirely.

Opening Drawers

There’s a chest of drawers in my house. On the outside: a beautiful console, a support stand for two lovely lamps. Open a drawer and the clutter reveals itself. Medals tangled with charging cables, academic excellence awards stuck to yellow slips for being late. Pull one thing and three others come with it.

Writing works the same way. I reach in for one memory and something deeper comes along with it.

On the surface, I might write about a song or a conversation. Underneath, I’m untangling emotions that resist neat categories. When I write about November Rain, I’m not just recounting late-night work or lonely walks home. I’m connecting the past to the present, the dreamer at 19 to who I am today. The memories have meanings woven through them now. Fragments become stories I can carry.

Writing lets me exist in multiple places at once: walking home on an empty street in 1999, sitting in a Canberra café decades later, imagining who I might become tomorrow. It connects these versions of myself like dots. Nothing else does this quite the same way.

Time moves too fast to grasp every moment as it happens. Writing forces me to slow down, to pay attention to the nuances. The difference between not exactly and yes. The space between being and becoming. Small details that make each moment irreplaceable.

There’s nowhere to hide in writing. Great speakers can mask weak logic with charisma. Writing strips that away. It demands precision. No tangents, no fumbling while someone waits.

I can capture what slips past in conversation because I can think about it and process the feelings and nuances behind the expressions, the pauses, the verbal and non-verbal cues.

To Write and To be a Writer

So why couldn’t I just say yes when posed with that question?

Because it’s that space between knowing and not knowing, between confidence and doubt. It is where most of us actually live, even if we pretend otherwise.

I write because I have to. But mostly because it helps me make some sense of my life. But calling myself a writer still feels audacious. Like trying to be something I am not. Yet. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe the discomfort is part of the process.

I do have things to say—about immigrant experiences and life, about songs that become time capsules, about the gap between who we are and who we are becoming.

Whether I call myself a writer or simply say “I write,” the words will keep flowing. The sentences will keep being strung. While not perfect, they will continue to tell stories. Perhaps that is the important bit. Not the title. The act itself. The showing up. The paying attention. The bridge building between past and present. Between not exactly and an essay.

And in doing that—in the honest attempt to capture something true, maybe I am already on my path towards becoming what I have been hesitant to claim.

But ask me in a café at 7 a.m., and I’ll probably still say not exactly.

Old habits die hard.