Imposter Syndrome and Me

Escorting Helene de Boissiere - Swanson to my local senators’ offices after she walked to my state to speak to them about the Equal Rights Amendment.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that imposter syndrome isn’t real, at least not in terms of being a psychological condition. I disagree.

I only have an associates degree in psychology so I’m probably not the professional whose final word you should take on the subject, but I do have a lifetime’s worth of experience in imposter syndrome.

I’m the kind of person who has done a lot of crazy things that you would find on a lot of bucket lists. I’ve dug up dinosaur bones, I’ve traveled to Hawaii and the Bahamas, I’ve been on television (a couple of times), and I’ve even been published a few more times than that.

From the outside it would look like I don’t consider myself an imposter. I’m always doing interesting things. But I’m also swamped so much in self-doubt that a lot of those interesting things turn out to be one-shots, and I don’t end up building the kind of career or (the right kind of) notoriety needed to develop consistent relationships that would allow me to do those things long-term.

I destroyed a relationship with my anthropology/paleontology professor that would have allowed me to keep digging up fossils and restoring them for display. That may have become one of the best careers I could ever imagine having. Deep inside, I’m still that autistic little kid who only ever wanted to look at, interact with, or talk about dinosaur bones. Instead I gave in to my social anxiety and accepted a friend’s constant offers to smoke weed while out there. I’m not anti-pot at all, but there’s a time and a place. I knew better and I also knew that I had disabilities that put me in a headspace I should not be in around others - specifically many headspaces.

I blew it, and not only can I not go on digs that way again, but my professor isn’t even allowed to bring students on his paleontology digs anymore.

While treating an academic opportunity like a burn isn’t something that can be considered imposter syndrome, the permeating shame I feel at socializing at all in an important (or any) setting kept me from reaching out and communicating properly to anyone and the indulgence in a substance to calm myself down when I knew it was a bad idea was a self destructive behavior.

Now, the television stuff…

I’ve been on television a couple of times. My absolute favorite is what the photo above was from, was when I was on Fox 5 because I was helping a woman who had walked across the United States to bring attention to the fact that the Equal Rights Amendment still hasn’t been ratified to the constitution nearly one hundred years after it was written. I escorted her to my state senators’ offices.

I’ve been part of activist endeavors ever since but infrequently (in my opinion) and never as consistently as I want. I want to run for office one day but the permeating shame of some of the things I’ve been through keep me from regularly pursuing this endeavor, because, in part, it would open the door to everyone’s eyes again. I grew up from eighteen years old to my early thirties online. People have known too much but not a lot about me for a long time, and this is what I’m opening myself up to again.

I was an eighteen-year-old with undiagnosed autism and other disabilities who moved to Atlanta (and traveled a bunch of other cities) and decided I was going to be a model. Let’s not go down those dark corridors. Let’s just say that they can make running for office difficult, even though I have a lot of diverse experience that puts me in a position to understand systemic problems and to help create a world where human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation of other kinds are eliminated with prejudice. Even though women’s organizations have been pushing women to run for office, especially local office, I’m reluctant to pit the diminished version of myself in my mind against who I really am, especially in the public eye.

I think rather than it being a separate condition in itself, imposter syndrome at the very least could be a real symptom that takes place side by side with others. I would be curious to study whether people with more trauma-based disorders experience imposter syndrome as crippling as the one that’s held my life in limbo for as long as I can remember.

I’ve done great things, but I’ve lacked in consistency to help me be successful at them so I can keep doing them. I think it’s something we all deal with in one way or another. ADHD, PSTD, and being on the spectrum doesn’t always help with that and can often be the source of the difficulty, as could my extreme case of agoraphobia. If you can’t even keep your environment straight, or your grooming or hygiene in order, much less go outside where there are other people, then how can you tackle life’s big mysteries and dramas, its horrors and its wonders?

Oh, yeah, and how can you save the entire human species and the ecosystem we can’t survive without after the human species has spent thousands of years trying to destroy it?

I suppose that brings me to a friendly reminder: everyone is facing something they don’t understand right now and it’s good to be kind to yourself and others, but especially yourself. You are living through an apocalypse, more or less, one of the big moments in the books. One of the things that is helping me heal the most is understanding that the littlest things really are victories. I finally called my landlord after months of letting the place I’m renting just rot and asked him to fix the dishwasher that’s been broken for two years (and he did right away because he’s awesome, I’ve just been too anxious to let anyone into my house), and I’ve rediscovered in two days that I am not a slob, I’m just not a domestic Goddess and I need a machine for that if the guys I live with aren’t going to pull their full weight in that department.

Also, if you’re a guy, please stop trying to get women to do things for you without substantial pay. Period. No, I don’t care if you’re in a relationship. We have enough to do just trying to become full citizens with all the resistance against the addition of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, something one hundred years overdue, if not overdue from the country’s very founding. If you haven’t, call your senators and representatives about that and demand ratification, and then stop whatever automatic urges you have to ask women to do things for you unless they work for you and you pay them very, very well, equally or more so than any men who may work for you.

And a third thing: be proud of yourself on this journey. I know I’m proud of you. Now wish me luck while I learn how to be better to myself and my ambitions.