Category: imposter syndrome

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(Non)Poetic Thoughts

This morning, I wrote a poem while I was still in bed, after I’d finished listening to the last volume of Maya Angelou’s autobiography on BBC Sounds. I was thinking about her poem: ‘Still I Rise’ (that expression occurred in the final episode), and about my life, and the things she went through and my wimpish reaction to the things I’ve gone through, which boils down just to being myself, the me I am inside, rather than the external struggles she had to deal with as an African-American woman in the 1930s-60s.

Poems written at that time of day tend to dissipate quickly however hard I try to hold on to them, so I grabbed a notebook and black Crayola colouring pencil (all the pens in my desk having dried up – a reflection either on modern technology or my dependence on it) and wrote it down.

I wanted to share it, as an accurate reflection of my inner feelings towards myself after listening to the words of one of the greatest female writers of my lifetime, but I thought of the likely reaction to my honest thoughts about myself, especially the ones that come first thing in the morning, and thought better of it. I will, however, type it up, pack it away and probably read it to my therapist on Thursday.

One of the lines I rejected included the words: ‘I wish I could believe I deserved…’ – at the time I thought it was part of a killer ending, then forgot it, then remembered it while doing yoga, and realised it was best forgotten.

‘What a string of woolly verbs!’ I thought to myself. Let’s take them in reverse order, as being the closer to the object of the line (which was probably another verb: ‘to be’, followed by some complimentary and hence wholly unrealistic hypothetical idea of myself). First, ‘Deserved’ what does that mean? It’s completely subjective. Does a convicted murderer ‘deserve’ a second chance at life; to rot in jail for the rest of his/her natural days; or a speedy execution? ‘It all depends…’ which is why we have jury trials and other complicated (and expensive) systems of justice to decide such matters for us. You can’t talk about whether anybody ‘deserves’ any particular outcome without taking it from a specific point of view.

Next: ‘believe’, which is also subjective, though in this case it’s clear that the subject, ie) the one doing (or failing to do, or incapable of doing) the ‘believing’ is myself. Why am I incapable of believing I deserve whatever goodies (probably praise, or love, or happiness) I had in mind? Arguably, ‘belief’, or ‘disbelief’ just is what it is, but if I had to justify or rationalise it, I would probably say it was based on the evidence of a life-time of living inside this head, and as no one else has access to that mental space, their ‘beliefs’ can be discounted.

And finally: ‘wish’ the woolliest of the lot – enough said.

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Creative Spirit

I was going to walk down to the knitting shop today, but… looking out the window, I don’t think I’ll bother. This is a bit much even for me with my oh-we-often-get-snow-flurries-at-the-beginning-of-April smugness – not that we’ve got actual snow here, just freezing rain, but still, it’s a bit much. I wasn’t planning to buy more yarn (still working my way through the stash) but could do with a 5.5mm circular needle to replace the one I’ve been using, which is on the verge of breaking, but over the weekend I’ve started two more top-down jumpers (one knitted, one crochet) to go with the two I’ve got that I can’t make progress on (one because of the needle breaking and the other because of lack of the right yarn). Three of them are knitted, the latest one (started Saturday evening, pulled down and restarted yesterday) is an experiment to see if it’s possible to use the same general top-down approach but with crochet, and if it works will use up a load of yarn which I’ve had for about a year and have tried to start various projects which I’ve later abandoned.

Do I want/need/will I wear all these jumpers? Probably not, but that’s not the point.

I was going to write about creativity – I half started yesterday, at the end of ranting about something, I can’t remember what. If I’m making something, or thinking about something to try – it doesn’t much matter what – I can sort of keep my head above water – as long as I keep my expectations low, and don’t think that what I make will be wonderful when it’s finished, of course, but when it’s done, it can be pushed to the back of a cupboard and forgotten about – or, in the case of writing, in the back of some folder on my hard drive, or shared on Facebook, or even better, Twitter, where I have 200 ‘followers’ but none who ever respond to anything I share (that’s an exaggeration, I’ve had two ‘likes’ in the last two years, both from people I used to know personally but haven’t seen in years).

For most of my life I haven’t considered myself at all ‘creative’ – except for this half-arsed idea that I might have been a ‘writer’ if I’d ever worked at it, but even then I was always conscious that I didn’t have the guts, talent or chutzpah to stick at it and make it work as a career. When I read ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ last year, I came across the idea of the ‘creative spirit’ which is crushed out of young children if they don’t get the chance to use it. This resonated with me, as I thought about my fear of judgement, of what I make never being good enough, of the ludicrous hubris of ever thinking I was ‘good enough’ at anything, the ‘who do you think you are?’ arrogance of that whole idea, and the ridicule that followed from it.

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Everything in the Garden…

I’ve already been to the Co-op today. I managed to avoid going all last week, because I stocked up the week before when I was having visitors for the weekend. And by using up supplies of longlife and evaporated milk, and Elmlea (which I’d bought to put on trifle – for my visitors – till I went to the shops again and managed to get real fresh cream); taking dinners from the freezer backlog of all those ‘chef’s surprise’ slow-cooker meals which have been building up; and a take away curry delivery on Saturday, I held out without needing to go until today. Saturday’s dinner in the slow cooker will be belly pork with cannellini beans, celery, red pepper, carrots and maybe sweet potatoes cooked in cider, because too many of the ‘chef’s surprises’ seem to have sauces based on tinned tomatoes, and I fancied a more radical change.

I have been getting discouraged about a lot of things lately – mainly the garden. My Facebook memories keep showing all the lovely things which were in flower at this time last year. Someone said to me the other day that my garden is ‘blooming’, but he was judging it from Facebook, where I have posted pictures of every single flower I’ve seen so far – sometimes several pictures of the same one, over a number of days, as I’m still trying to post a photo every day. The actual total of flowers so far has been: one yellow and three white daffodils on the forecourt, and in the back garden one blue hyacinth and a handful of mini daffodils; two hellebores (one single and, more recently, one double flower), a few blossoms on the rosemary which were only visible if you looked very carefully and a couple of yellow celandines under the camellia (which I only just remembered). The rest is a desert of weeds, rotting planks and general junk currently in transit between the sheds. Is this disaster down to the hot, dry summer last year, or a total lack of interest and attention? I assume most likely a combination of the two.

It’s the curse of social media. However honest I try to be about my general worthlessness and self loathing, it seems that people want to keep seeing me in a more positive light. Which is very frustrating – but on the other hand, if they could see me more clearly, they wouldn’t want to be my friends anyway. And then I’d feel even worse.

I honestly don’t know how to shake off these feelings, and more and more it seems that there isn’t any escape. The effort required feels overwhelming, but so is the effort to pretend to be what I’m not: brave, positive, upbeat, hopeful, happy etc. Feelings always take control over intentions to change, to find a better way to be.

I almost didn’t write today. Perhaps it would be better if I didn’t throw all this out into the void. But I usually feel better afterwards

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January Morning

January Morning (poem)

There, I’ve written a poem. Will that do for today?

I seem to have run out of steam, at any rate.

Yesterday, talking to my therapist in our weekly Skype session, I told her about the bookshelves, and moved the laptop round a bit so she could see them. She was impressed, more impressed than I thought was necessary. It’s that thing I always have: I did it, not very well, and it took me a long time, but if I did it, it can’t be that hard, anybody could do it, and probably make a better job of it, in less time.

I told her how I’d been worrying about what books and knick-knacks to put on them, what impression would they give of me, how would people judge me, and drew attention to the fact that two of the shelves were already full of chaotic clutter.

‘What people?’ she asked.

‘Well, you I suppose’ given that no one else will be coming round any time soon.

‘What does it matter? They’re your shelves; you choose what you want to put on them.’

Put like that, it does sound a bit ridiculous that I’ve been worrying about this all week. As soon as I put something on there, I worry about what it says about me – that I have no aesthetic sense, that I can’t see what should go where, like the cross stitch and needlepoint pictures and weavings that I’ve made but never put on display, or the clothes I’ve knitted or crocheted and never wear in public.

‘And yet you write about your feelings and put them out there where anyone can read them.’

‘Well’ I said defensively, ‘I’m pretty safe in knowing that hardly anybody does’.

It’s the paradox of my life. I hide away from people because I’m afraid of being judged and laughed at or despised, and yet I put my feelings in words like this, and share them where they can (theoretically) be read by anyone. And I’m just as uncomfortable with being judged by others more positively than I judge myself as I am with those who find me wanting.

I want others to see me as I see myself – and yet still love me, when I can’t.

But in all this chaos I can still open my door – and my heart – to a new morning and think: ‘something good may happen today’ and write a little poem about it – and share that with the world.

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Dichotomy and Transitions

Thinking of what to write today, and how to carry on with the thread of the last few days, it occurred to me that the two examples I gave as people noticing a ‘transition’ from ‘Belinda’ to Melinda’ were from my twenties and thirties. Not only that, but it might seem that both refer to a single period of change – which isn’t correct, because the conversation where I was warned ‘not to go back into my shell’ happened long before my first meeting with the other person, so I’d obviously slipped right back into my shell by that time – just as I did between the networking and the travelling.

Which might sound as though I see ‘Belinda’ in a negative light, and ‘coming out of my shell’ as progress, when actually I’m coming to recognise that both of them are so integral to my personality that I need to embrace them both.

The other thought that struck me was that these days, and for the last several years, the issues I have are largely concerned with ‘transitions’ in the other direction, when people who think they know ‘me’ are surprised by encountering Belinda – the ‘this isn’t like you! This isn’t who you are at all!’ reaction that I get when I share my self doubt, fear and sense of inadequacy. Though now I come to think of it, that’s not recent at all – it’s been an undercurrent that’s been there for decades, at least as far back as my mid-thirties.

It seems that a pattern is now starting to form: timid Belinda dominated in my childhood, when Melinda, or the Wild Spirit described in ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ (incidentally, I think the author should have made more effort to find a synonym for ‘Run’ which starts with a W) was systematically crushed and squeezed out on the grounds that A) ‘good girls’ didn’t behave that way; and B) her aspirations weren’t realistic for such a mousy little nonentity (here I can’t help thinking of Janis Ian’s song: ‘I learned the truth at seventeen/That love was meant for beauty queens…’).

Melinda (and I’m annoyed with myself that I’ve slipped back into using that dichotomy, but it is very convenient) crept out cautiously when I slipped out from under the parental yoke and ran away to the comparative freedom of university, where ‘A’ was no longer being so closely monitored, though I was still often stymied by ‘B’. Then I got married and started work, and found myself staring down the barrel of adult life…

I’ve just got into my stride, and the word limit is looming. And I still haven’t answered the question I asked two days ago: ‘Do I control my thoughts, or do my thoughts control me?’ I think the answer is quite clear – it’s my thoughts which are in charge, and there isn’t a great deal I can do to bring them into line, any more than I can give precedence to either Belinda or Melinda.

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Still Holding That Thought?

Yesterday morning, I posed a question, started to explain what I meant and got distracted into another part of my past. I will try to answer before the end of these 500 words, but as I don’t know what I’m going to say till it happens, maybe I won’t.

I started thinking afterwards though: I mentioned (if not yesterday then recently) that I don’t like meeting new people and making small talk, but presumably I must have got over that to some extent when I was going to the networking meetings – yet I went from there to travelling alone, where I became the Invisible Woman. How did that happen?

There’s quite a simple explanation really, and one I’ve thought about a lot over the years. When I first started blogging, I described it as two different personalities, and gave them different names: Belinda and Melinda (later to be extended by the addition of Cassandra and, ultimately, Cat By-Herself). But that led me down some strange paths, to the idea that I could somehow do away with Belinda and become Melinda permanently – Bel symbolizing all the things I disliked about myself, and Mel some kind of happy-crappy life-and-soul fantasy me. Part of the thinking behind that was the times when people have commented that I’ve ‘changed’ dramatically when they got to know me better – telling me that I’ve become a ‘completely different person’ and that I mustn’t ‘go back into my shell’. What they were seeing was just that I had grown used to them, to the setting in which I interacted with them, and was more relaxed – which is clearly what happened with the networking group. It’s not the case that anything has changed within ‘me’, just that this is a process I always follow with new people. I meet someone, I don’t know them, they don’t know me, I don’t know if they’re going to like me, I don’t know if I’m going to like them, it takes time to negotiate all that to the point where I can be comfortable. It’s a scary process, and one which I’d really rather avoid. I don’t have a problem with being somewhere I don’t know anyone as long as I can stay the anonymous ‘Invisible Woman’ and don’t have to worry about whether or not they are going to accept me.

Also, I implied that nothing came out of the networking group for me, but that’s not strictly true. One week the speaker had just finished writing his autobiography, and was looking for an editor. I spoke up, said I could help him with that, had a chat with him, talked about self-publishing (about which he knew nothing and I knew very little more, but, I thought, enough to sound convincing) and he promised to send me some of his first draft. That was the first germination of the idea of Damson Tree Publishing, even though he never got back to me, and when I contacted him he’d employed someone else.

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Hold That Thought…

Do I have control over my thoughts or do my thoughts control me?

When I was going to ‘business networking’ breakfasts, ten years ago, the speakers often emphasised the importance of having the right attitude: plan for success, visualise what you want to achieve, believe in yourself, banish negativity etc. Softer, gentler life-coach types would also add things like: practise gratitude, be in the moment, take care of yourself; but the general thrust was pretty much the same – you can do this if you think you can. Think right, and everything will fall into place.

Needless to say, I struggled with all this. I would go to the meetings, listen to the talks, chat to people, get a momentary buzz of: ‘I can do this!’ and then go home and remember: I had no clients, I didn’t know how to persuade people to buy my services, and I wasn’t sure that what I could do would be ‘good enough’. And, also needless to say, I blamed myself – I was never going to get anywhere with an ‘attitude’ like mine, if all these shiny, happy people could make it work for them, what was wrong with me? And the answer was: this is what’s wrong with me, the fact that I have to ask: ‘what’s wrong with me?’ and so it goes, round and round and round.

But I met some nice people, and I ate some good breakfasts (not necessarily a healthy habit to get into) and gradually – mainly in retrospect – I came to realise that they were mostly in the same boat as me – scrabbling around trying to get business from other people who were also scrabbling around trying to get business, in the belief that by behaving like ‘business people’, they would magically find success, by ‘investing’ their hard earned profits into subscriptions that accumulated up and up the pyramid to the people at the top. I was ‘invited’ to be a local organiser, which meant my subscriptions were halved in return for a few hours spent every fortnight sending out invitations, following up to check who was coming, getting there early and checking people off the list as they arrived, collecting £10 from each and paying the venue for the breakfasts, then passing on the balance to the regional organiser. And every day of the week, in a different venue, there would be another one of these meetings, where I could go and pay £10 for another breakfast, another pep talk, and maybe meet a different group of people, but most likely many of the same, and so on. At least I felt I belonged to something.

I seem to have digressed a bit into reminiscing about those days. I’ve never been happy about meeting people, or good at making small talk, but I suppose I bit the bullet and got on with it and it didn’t kill me, though it didn’t make me a business person, either.

But that’s not what I was intending to write…

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What am I Worth?

What am I worth?

This was a question posed to me yesterday by my therapist.

‘Imagine it as a title on your blog’ she said. ‘What would you say? I’m trying to challenge you.’

She’d accused me of being obsessed with monetary value, with trying to apply a monetary value to who I am and the things I do.

‘Very early on in this process’ she said ‘maybe in the second session or so, you were quick to tell me that, although you’re financially comfortable, the money you were living off had come to you from your husband in the divorce settlement, and somehow it’s not due to your own efforts’ (or words to that effect – I’m paraphrasing, because I can’t remember exactly what she said).

Which is true. But what I’d just been talking about was the amount of time that goes into things which I know have no realistic possibility of a monetary return, specifically my knitting and crochet (and of course, so obvious that it wasn’t even brought into the conversation, my writing). I’d mentioned that earlier this week I’d been asked how much I would ‘charge’ to make something as a commission – a question I never know how to answer, because half the time I say too much and put them off, and the other half I aim too low, which can also put people off, or just leave me thinking that I’ve undersold myself and somehow failed in that way. Underlying this, I suppose, is an assumption that I am a professional person who sees the things I make in terms of exchange, and has a system for determining prices, whereas from my point of view, they’re just the (rarely useful, and occasionally embarrassing) results of me finding enjoyable ways to pass the time – in other words, hobbies. Incidentally, the word ‘amateur’ comes from the latin word for ‘love’, meaning someone who does something for the love of it, so that a century ago, ‘amateurs’ in most fields (particularly sport) were afforded more respect than supposedly self-serving ‘professionals’.

I know all this, I know that for creative work the price depends on what someone is prepared to pay, rather than the effort that went into doing it, and I also know the argument put forward by creative people that the workman is worthy of his hire. And I know that I’ve never been able to square this circle, and this is a big reason why I’ve never been able to make a success of business, and it all ties up with social anxiety, lack of self belief, and not being able to ask for anything from other people.

But I can’t see the leap from this to the suggestion that I’m fixated on monetary value. She mentioned the struggle to change the law so that it affords value to the traditionally unpaid work of housework and child-rearing, but to me, any capable adult should be able to pay for their own needs. To be continued…

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Wherever That River Goes…

No post yesterday, because I got up and took a flask of coffee to the beach, arriving a few minutes  late for sunrise (but there was low cloud over the sea anyway) and writing in a notebook, which I might or might not copy onto here, but today I’ve got other stuff in my head so will go ahead with that.

One of the songs from my youth that listening to Amazon music has reintroduced me to is ‘The Ballad of Easy Rider’ by the Byrds, and now it’s stuck in my head. It starts like this:

‘The river flows, it flows to the sea,
wherever that river goes,
that’s where I want to be.
Flow, river flow,
let your waters wash down,
take me from this road
to some other town.

All (s)he wanted was to be free
and that’s the way it turned out to be…’

‘The Ballad of Easy Rider,’ Roger McGuinn & Bob Dylan

Notice how I subtly changed the gender in that second verse? It’s true, all I wanted was to be free, and that is ‘the way it turned out to be’, though not quite the way I might have expected (or even hoped for.) But I’m still very grateful for the way it is – despite the warning from another song of the same era:

‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,
nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free…’

‘Me and Bobby McGee’, Kriss Krisstofferson

…a warning that kept me stuck in a sad but ‘safe’ situation for many years, which has brought another song to mind…

‘How often does it happen that we live our lives in chains
and never even know we have the key?’

‘Already Gone’, The Eagles

But that’s enough soft West coast country-rock from the late 1960s and early 70s for today.

Going to the sea yesterday morning did its magic of lifting my mood. I sat on my usual bench behind the beach café, writing in my notebook, and two people passing by said: ‘you’ve got a good spot there!’, and later on my way home I sat in the Rose Garden and read for a while, and another stranger said the same thing. But when I got home and started trying to tackle a project I’ve started, I had a massive setback which threw me into despair about how useless I am and what a charlatan because people have expectations of me and really I don’t have a clue what I’m doing and am scrabbling all the time to keep going, and everything is ten times harder for me and takes ten times longer than any normal competent person but nobody sees it and I hate myself and I hate being me.

I talked to my therapist in the afternoon about it, this massive fear I have of cocking everything up. She talked about adjusting to not being ‘needed’ any more, but I don’t want to be needed, I don’t want anyone to depend on me, I can’t stand the stress. I want to be free of all that. I want to run away again.

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Rabbit in the Headlights

Today I am in freefall. I know I’m losing my grip on life, I can feel time whooshing past me ever faster and I am so paralysed… I can’t move, I can’t function. I know this is a difficult time, I know the reasons behind this stress this week, but how do I deal with it? I am sitting here writing, rabbit in the headlights syndrome. I haven’t done my morning tai chi/yoga since Thursday, or blogged since Friday, though yesterday I wrote but didn’t post. I remember being in bed looking at the clock at 5:50 thinking – I’ll get up now – then finding myself sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the wardrobe, glancing at theclock it it was 7.05 and what had I done in that hour? I couldn’t remember – not asleep, just lying in bed, thoughts churning, maybe looking at my phone, everything pulling away from me, leaving me behind, sitting on the edge of the bed, panicking.

Someone on the dyspraxia Facebook group yesterday evening posted a question about ‘imposter syndrome’, other members’ experience of it, and its relation to dyspraxia. My feeling is that it’s probably not directly caused by dyspraxia, but like many things it can be a consequence of the things that are. It relates to what I was saying the other week about lack of control – when I manage to do something ‘right’, it feels like luck, or a fluke, because I can’t see any way of making sure it always happens that way again, but when I do something ‘wrong’ I can see exactly how my actions have contributed to it, though I can’t see how to stop myself doing them again. So past experience of getting something ‘right’ isn’t helpful in making me believe that I can do something else ‘right’, because it’s in the past, and there’s no guarantee that I can do it again, or that my past success wasn’t just down to some external conditions which won’t apply the next time.

Confidence and self esteem are supposed to grow through small incremental steps, through trying things and learning and taking pride in achievements, however small. There are plenty of things I have learned to do by practice and repetition – like driving a car, or cooking Bolognese sauce (though last time I forgot the bacon) or the first 28 movements of the tai chi form – but none of that is a guarantee that I won’t make a catastrophic mess of any one of those at some future attempt (though I admit that ‘driving’ is the only one with the potential to be truly catastrophic), and it’s not much of a help in learning something new, or applying old skills in new settings.

This is why other people’s beliefs and expectations about me become such a burden. I feel as though everything I’ve ever done is built on sand, however irrational that may appear from the outside. Every new challenge is a new opportunity for disaster.