Tag Archives: imposter syndrome

It’s Enough. Or Is It?

I was reading an article (The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women) about Imposter Syndrome and remembering again that it totally applies to me.

No matter how much I do, I feel like it’s not enough. I’ve done six performances in the past two or so months, more than I did last year. I’ve been meeting tons of artists, and just a bunch of cool peeps in general. But yet, I sit there thinking, “I haven’t done enough. I’m bored. There’s not enough going on.”

It’s been a little over two months since my life completely changed and I became a person on my own again. Freedom comes at a price–in this case, it’s the price of ten years of hard work and dedication to one person.

It sucks, making choices. No one can ever give you a road map that circles right and wrong and points in the exact direction you need to go.

But what does this mean for art? I was talking to a friend who is going through the exact same thing and we were talking about how in the beginning of the transition from married to single it’s excitement and shock and stress and who knows what. Then that settles down. She said, “It’s back to boring life. No more excitement. But you have your music, that’s your life line. I have my book. That’s mine.”

It’s true, music, and especially writing, continue to be my lifeline. But I can’t quantify them. I don’t measure myself on the societal scale everyone else seems to measure themselves on, i.e., if I have x amount of readings/performances, that means that I’m that amount closer to y. Who knows what I’m closer to or farther from. Who knows what will take place in the next couple of years.

I spent my twenties in the life of a more grown up person. Married, settled, pretty stable, going from one job to the next. I feel like I just came out of a tunnel into…my twenties again, take two, but now I’m 31. Only I look like I’m twenty-something, so that’s a plus, I guess.

I always pictured more…something in my life. More travel, more shows, more musicians, more excitement. But don’t we all? Is this all something we’ve grown to expect through media? Probably. Our brains have been blitzed out by the tube from childhood on. We overlook subtle every day beauty and life, as some random guy was telling me outside a coffee shop this morning, once we turn into teenagers. But you look at a child and they’re like, “Ooo, butterfly!”

***

I was napping today to the tune of someone hammering on the roof, children laughing and a BBQ outside. My room is in the middle of this cluster of Victorians that meet in their backyards. Naps are good. This nap was one of those ones where everything runs through your head, like a shuffle of the week’s events being put into file boxes in your brain.

I thought about how this week I talked with two different people about awesome music I’d never heard of before, and about the way we write our own music. I went to the lake with a new girlfriend, watched a meteorite shower, had crappy diner food with people two nights in a row, performed an hour set at a bar in front of a bunch of people I don’t know, finished my tattoo, worked on a new song, spoke at a meeting about being sober, got some poetry and a non-fiction story accepted to an online magazine I’m the contributing editor for, fixed my road bike and rode it everywhere I could, even around Lake Merritt with a girl friend, walked with another girl friend partially around the lake…on top of my normal library shifts, etc. I even went to Lip Service West to hear my friend Josh read, and saw a bunch of writer friends and heard some awesome stories.

And here I was, feeling sorry for myself because I felt lonely and bored and like I didn’t do enough.

***

It is so hard to practice positivity instead of negativity for me, but somehow I keep swinging back to positivity, even if I spend two weeks mired in the gloom. Who the hell knows what will happen for me in the next couple months or years. Nothing has been easy, but sometimes, like I said before, it’s the hardest times that are the best times. And the hardest times shake us up so we have to change.

I wanted freedom, I got it. Be careful what you wish for. I should change the No Regrets tattoo on my wrist to No Expectations. Because I still have a lot of regrets, but I’m learning to let go of expectations for how my life will pan out and what/who will be there on the stage with me.

Imposter Syndrome

I think that many writers and musicians struggle with something called imposter syndrome.  It’s an actual thing coined by psychologists in the ‘70s: an inability to internalize accomplishments. Basically, it feels like you aren’t really that great and that you haven’t done anything of noteworthy praise even if you have. All the hard work you’ve done is just the hard work you’ve done–you feel you should have worked harder.

I haven’t won any medals for my art, nor published in any famous literary magazines. I haven’t made a complete record or been signed to a label. Many of us haven’t. But I have made tiny accomplishments, and like many, I continue to practice most every day on making my writing and/or music more palatable to me and other people. I continue to send work out, getting published or being asked to play sets here and there, chipping away, realizing full well that a lot of times I’m published or asked to play out because of who I know or being in the right place at the right time. It’s a small world.

Regardless, there’s this deep seated fear when I’m around other people who are also artists. What if they find out about me? What if they find out I’m not really real? That I’m a fraud or a fake and that I can’t really write and I suck at music and I’m just pretending I know what I’m doing? What if they listen to my songs and cringe? What if they read my non-fiction stories and go, “Poor thing, deluding herself that she can write.”

When all else fails, resort to LOLcats

Every time I start talking with a new musician or writer and we get to the point where we want to collaborate or exchange work, I run through my list of creations and start backpedaling in my head. Maybe next time, I think. When I’m better. I can send them something then.

Practice has taught me to share anyways, to keep creating and honing and articulating in spite of the very real sensation that I’m not really real and any moment the art police are going to come in and arrest me for taking up space inside their museum of only the best and most pertinent creations. It’s an uphill battle fought with a too-flimsy stick on terrain that is slightly moist and covered with slippery rocks. Below me, at the bottom of the hill I climb every day I hone my craft are the creations I’ve sacrificed along the way.

Like a collection of disabled dolls with their limbs sewn on wrong, my prior creations make up a landfill of misfits. Each time I’ve finished something, I  move on to the next thing, try to make the next thing better than the previous thing in an endless process of replacing an older creation with an upgraded version and discarding the previous experiment after seeing its glitches.

Above me is the holy beacon of recognition, thought to be obtained through self-awareness. It is tinged with the chance of social status, validation, an endlessly tantalizing carrot on the stick pulling me forward in spite of the years of hard work ahead (most of the people I know who are finally getting published to accolades are now in their forties).

Sucking at your art is relative. It depends on who you talk to, who you compare yourself to. If I say I suck because I only lifted 42 times on one arm with a 16kg bell and one of my readers says he can’t even lift one of those bells a portion of that number of times (which happened the other day, thanks Mike!) I pause for a second and go wow, my reality is entirely based on proximity and perception.

Of course, the whole thing unravels and I’m sloshing down a slippery slope straight into my pile of misfit creations just as soon as someone near me does better or ignores me or gives me some harsh and needed feedback. Then everything I’ve done up until that point simply doesn’t count.

It’s so easy to forget what I’ve done, to wish for more. To be impatient with myself. To feel like a camper in my own body. Sometimes I read my writing and wonder who wrote it. Sometimes I wonder if writing being a reward in itself is enough, if making music for music’s sake is going to continue to fulfill me the rest of my life, if it’s OK if I never “make it.“

It is and it isn’t. Like Pinocchio, I want to be real; like Christopher McCandless, I find that happiness is often only real when shared.