I know what you might be thinking … who’s the imposter? What’s happened?
Really, I just want to talk about imposter syndrome because … well … I have it. I mean we’re talking about the creative space here. Anyone who’s ever been in this space has probably encountered the dreaded imposter syndrome before. There is endless mental chatter that tells you that you aren’t enough or that you’re just faking. Voices whisper that you won’t ever be successful and that you will never be able to call yourself a real author, creator, entrepreneur. These voices tell you that you have to do more. You have to write more, market more, just … be more.
But it’s all a lie. You don’t need to be anything other than what you are and you don’t have to push harder to be valid. You know what I have discovered by giving into these thoughts and voices in my head? Burnout. I have discovered just how devastating it can be to try so hard that you just can’t do anything at all. You lose sight of important things in life, start pushing aside things that really matter to you. Maybe you even push people out of your life. It’s not that you mean to. It’s all by virtue of the hustle. You don’t have time for people. Quality time that you once had with loved ones is now for writing one more page in your manuscript or posting that reel that you have been working on for three days.
Imposter syndrome sucks.
A lot of my peers tell such inspiring stories about how they became authors. I’ve heard so many people say “I wrote my first novel when I was five years old. From then on I was hooked and just couldn’t stop writing!”
That’s not my story.
I have always loved to write. I had seen a movie where one of the characters was an author. She had submitted a manuscript with an editor and on screen, that was just a large stack of papers bound with a plain white cover with a title on the front. I thought that manuscripts were created by stitching a set number of blank pages together and you just … wrote until there were no more empty pages and that would mean the book was finished. So I gathered all of the old spiral notebooks in my house and carefully removed the spirals. Then I hand stitched them together and glued on a fabric binding and the two best covers out of the stack of notebooks. And then I just had to write.
And I did try to write my first book at a young age, but I hit writer’s block. Being so young, I had no idea how to navigate that and didn’t really have anyone close to me that would be able to help me. Instead, I just gave up. What was the point? It was just for fun. Little did I know then, that could have been the start of a career for me. I suppose in a way, it was. I wrote short stories for school and always really enjoyed those. But I never once thought I could make a career out of writing, so as much as I loved it, I never pursued it.
It wasn’t until I was well into my marriage, had a couple of kids and a dog before I started writing again. That was after years of not writing. I didn’t know then that I would ever publish anything and I certainly didn’t know that I would want to make a career out of it. How could I ever be a real author if I hadn’t been writing consistently since childhood? How could I be a real author if I didn’t have 5 or more manuscripts in progress?
Fast forward to me publishing two books, having another baby, and then getting a divorce. The series didn’t get finished and I had to start over in so many areas of life.
Every now and then I found myself on social media, my peers were making waves. Books that they were still working on after I had already started publishing were taking off. They were finding success. And what was I doing? Nothing. There was no movement. I lost any traction I had. I felt like I had failed and my author career was dead in the water. The Imposter told me that. Those voices haunted me, and they still do.
The Imposter told me that I would never regain ground. It told me that I would never be a real author and that if I tried to start again, I would only fail. The books will never become popular. No one would ever want to read anything else I ever wrote because I failed so spectacularly the first time.
The Imposter doesn’t care that I had to start my life over again with three little kids in tow. It doesnt’ care that I had to go back to work for the first time in five years. It just doesn’t care, period. It doesn’t want to see me succeed.
As I re-emerge into this world and into this career, I’m trying to do things differently. More than ever, I want to live my dream life. I want to have a career that I’m proud of and that is sustainable, leaving room for the things in life that are most important to me. And I can. I can have anything I want. And the Imposter? It’s just chatter. It’s all talk with no proof. The only thing that is certain, is that if I don’t try, failure is inevitable. I can’t wait to see where I can go and all I can accomplish when I don’t let Imposter Syndrome win. I’m valid, my work is valid, and you, the reader, you are valid.
