The Writer’s Table: On Impostor Syndrome & Self Sabotage
“Darling, stop standing in your own way”
“Why do you look like that?”
It was mid July, riding in a car in the sweltering Philadelphia heat, taking worried glances ever so often at my newborn son strapped in his car seat. It was one of the first times I had taken him out, and I expected any moment for him to be in tears from a combination of the intensity of the sun, being strapped down in a chair, and his perpetual hunger that arose every other hour. I was immediately filled with irritation because I knew my aunt and mother were about to start harping on about my appearance as they had been doing since I came back home. “You don’t look happy. You should have make up on. You can do your hair. Wear some lipstick?”
“Maybe I’m not happy”. I leaned back in my seat and rolled my eyes.
Although I left the hospital with a dossier of documentation on all the warning signs of post-partum depression, I don’t know if unhappy is how I would describe the myriad of emotions I felt after the birth of my child. At a time when a woman’s hormones are all over the place, along with being thrust immediately into the role of motherhood while recovering from pregnancy, labor, and feeling like a stranger in your own body, I know that the one thing I did feel was utter overwhelming, crippling, anxiety.
Was I a good mother? Was he eating enough? Was I doing things right? How come I am not feeling the rush of love they promised, instead of this numbing bone deep exhaustion? Am I supposed to have this much resentment? What qualified me for motherhood anyway?
“Yeah, that’s never going away,” My friend, R, assured me over our usual Thursday glass of Rosé. “You just kind of get over it and keep it moving because you have to. We all feel like impostors.” And there I had it. I felt like a total, complete fraud.
Imposter syndrome is something that a lot of the world’s population grapple with. It is a persistent feeling of inadequacy, holding yourself to impossible standards, and feeling like you are undeserving of any of your accomplishments. It is a tiny whisper in the back of your head that you are not good enough, that you do not deserve to be in the room, much less have a seat at the table.
It is when you battle with the confidence of being who you want to be, because you think think you have not earned your stripes yet; that job promotion, that new career, that new life path that you have chosen, the new project you have embarked on, the accolades you have accumulated, and so on, fills you with apprehension, irrational self doubt and unworthiness.
It is when you hesitate to talk about yourself, or when you shy away from sharing your talents because you are your own biggest critic.
It is poking holes and finding faults in everything that you do because you are not perfect at it, and instead of giving yourself the forgiving room to make mistakes, you feel frozen and find yourself lacking.
It is when someone compliments your work and all you think about is the ways it can be better, and in extreme cases, it is when you never achieve the things you set out to do because you already feel like you have failed before you have begun thus inadvertently end up holding yourself back.
It is when women are harder on themselves because they feel more pressure to prove that they deserve a seat at the table. When we downplay our accomplishments under the guise of humility. When we hold ourselves to higher moral codes and impossible standards of womanhood that have been determined by misogyny. It is when we struggle to wear many hats and blame ourselves when we are unable to do it all or “have it all”.
It took me a while to realize that I had been dealing with impostor syndrome, particularly when it came to my writing.
I have the same reaction when anyone refers to me as a writer: shrink, hide, repeat.
No matter how many people send me messages, tell me they love my work, stop me to talk about it, I have always felt that I didn’t deserve to call myself a writer. After all, no-one is paying me to write, I have not published any books, hell, I do not even have my own blog or website. I felt when it came to writing, I had accomplished absolutely nothing. So, whenever someone asked me what I did, I’d hesitate; then list anything but that, even though it was the one thing I have always wanted to be.
In doing that, I realized I was shrinking myself. I was acting small. I was being a coward, and most important I was letting opportunities pass me by. Various offers were coming my way and I would turn them down because I didn’t think I was qualified enough to do them any justice. Even though, generally, I am a confident person, I felt that calling myself a writer in the sphere of the other amazing writers I admired felt arrogant at best.
When I began to open up about these feelings , I discovered I was not alone.
“Perfection is boring and nothing magical ever happens in our comfort zones”
Many of us struggle and will continue to struggle with feeling inadequate all our lives. We impatiently gloss over our wins while we obsess over our losses. We spend so much time sifting through our flaws with fine toothed combs that when we accomplish something good there is a part of us that chalks it up to timing and serendipity rather than deserved rewards for skill and hard work. We forget to enjoy the moment because we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop; that moment when everything may come crashing down.
So if you’re one of the self sabotagers out there like me, know this: you deserve to be where you are. You deserve what you have. You should embrace confidence as second skin; you have a right to be whoever you decide to be, no matter how many times that thing changes. Perfection is boring and nothing magical ever happens in our comfort zones; you have to be willing to take a risk, and if it doesn’t pay off, be willing to take another risk. You have to learn to accept life in the stages in which it occurs, and wherever you find yourself, embrace it, and if you don’t like something, change it. You have to silence the negative voice when it starts to whisper those self doubt mantras in your ear.
You must trust the good in yourself before the bad.
You must own yourself. You owe yourself that much.
Four months later, I am in love with every part of my child, but I still have moments where I feel anxiety creeping up. Instead of giving into it, I allow myself to enjoy being a mother, even though I know I am not perfect at it and will make mistakes. I leave room to be human and know that it is perfectly normal to feel overwhelmed sometimes by the responsibilities of motherhood. I am able to admit to myself that while I acknowledge the importance of breastfeeding, I will never enjoy doing it, and that is okay. I permit myself to ask for help when I need it, and hand the baby over to someone else when I am tired.
I smile and say ‘thank you’ when someone compliments my work, instead of changing the topic or making a funny or sarcastic quip. I reply to the women who write to me just to tell me I have inspired them in some way. I take pride in what I do and I am open the opportunities that are a result of my growing portfolio. And when, for the first time, a few days ago, I introduced myself to someone as a writer who was working on her first book, I knew that even though I will still have set backs and moments of feeling like a fraud, I am taking the necessary steps to claim my power back, and it feels really good.
Thank you for reading what I have written. If you enjoyed it and would like it to be discoverable to others, please like & share.
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