dear reader,
how have you been? spring has arrived - well, april has arrived - as a Londoner i’d be a fool to associate that with actual spring.
and speaking of foolishness, my imposter syndrome has been doing a number on me this week. i have gotten pretty good at keeping it at bay the last few years, but every now and then it rears its ugly head and tells me all the reasons why my words and thoughts and feelings don't matter. despite having evidence to the contrary.
this week i spent a lot of time (some might argue too much time) updating my website, uploading my latest advice articles written for other publications, placing a link to my Substack in a more prominent place, and removing old workshops that i am no longer running for individuals, and replacing them with downloadable resources. this was an admin heavy task, and with every deletion and new upload a thought would pop into my mind: who cares? will anyone read this? do people even visit your website anymore?
it's a very human quality to fight with yourself internally, to wrestle with demons of doubt you might have been battling your whole life. but i think as a writer, it can feel constant and debilitating at times. we write to be read, ultimately. but then when people start reading you, the pressure gets higher, the voice a bit louder. or worse, your pen becomes crippled by the mere possibility of criticism from an imaginary audience you don't have/ haven't actually heard from/ do not know. and the likelihood of your imposter syndrome increases or decreases depending on your experience, your place in the world (merely by perception), and your confidence.
but change brings these feelings sometimes too. especially when we've decided to invest in ourselves and our own creativity. doubt arrives naturally, an unwanted but expected interloper, a problem of the mind that will hinder our desires for change if we let it.
it's been a struggle to push through this week, to not focus on that voice, but on my own, the one that i put on paper, the one i share with you here, dear reader.
so, what's helped?
books, always - i'm reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson and i’ll tell anyone who'll listen that they should read it too if they want to understand the world that we live in right now, and what it's like to move through it when you've been externally assigned to the lowest caste.
i’m also running again - chasing that dopamine high that honestly just makes me a better person to be around, and my body a tad stronger with each new run. it's also kept me to a routine, something i have always struggled to commit to, especially when it comes to exercise. but this time it's literally just putting one foot in front of the other. that, i can do.
and of course, there's writing. i have a new project that is very slowly forming and building and becoming what i hope will be the next, next book. these new ideas are feeding me differently, and i’m enjoying that.
imposter syndrome has an ultimate outcome of distracting us from the task at hand, because we're left in a spiral of questioning if we belong in this space, if what we say is worth hearing in that place, and if our years of experience in a particular modality make us worthy to speak with authority on a topic to those people who know less but speak much louder. imposter syndrome takes our eye off the prize, and that stops us moving forward.
so, i must remind myself of the prizes ahead: my new novel The Rest Of You will shortly be available for preorder in the US and the UK and i literally cannot wait to share it with everyone. the covers are astounding, the story is my heart song, and it's four years in the making. more on that next week.
so what about you? how do you deal with imposter syndrome? what makes you quieten the voices? how do you keep it at bay?
leave a comment, and then go do something nice for yourself.
mb x