When can you call yourself a writer?

This question came up in the Facebook creative writing forum the other day.
There were different opinions of course ranging from
                        If you're published
                                     to
                     If you feel like a writer.

What do you think?

Do you have to have someone else's approbation or to be published to in anyway consider calling yourself a writer?

Let me put it another way. If a man is sitting in an attic room, starving because he's spending his money on paints, he paints but nobody buys his pictures - in fact society in general laughs at them - is he a painter? Is he? If he is, what if he was a woman and doing those things? If that changes nothing then what if it wasn't painting but writing? Obviously I'm labouring a point but its a valid one.
So, what if you're published online on a poetry page by someone?
I don't think the FB debates were going to change any opinions but I had - and have -  my own and I guess you can tell them from the questions above.

I write but actually I will only call myself a writer when the whole world thinks of me that way even though I'd be up there fighting for other people to think of themselves as writers without a single other person thinking it than that person themselves.

Funny isn't it?

But being tough on myself is something I've learned to live with and love as one of those little quirks of nature that I'm trying to grow to love.

I'm also working on a collection of poems - two to be precise - that are growing so large that I'm considering buying an external hard drive as my computer is wobbling under the weight of the number of documents I'm accumulating.

I'm hoping to use some of them in the online poetry cafe I'm creating for the FB / OU group as I love performing and this seems like a great way to combine to loves. Now if only one could do that with 'partners' - what a thought!

So performance poetry here I come!

   Yola

In the garden, warm
in the height of summer, we
share an ice-cold Pimms.
Mother and daughter
bonding over best china's
a thing of the past.