We're all imposters

The night before I started my first job I couldn't sleep. I was so nervous I tossed and turned in my bed. A couple of times during that interminable evening I vomited my ring piece out.

I had completed an associate degree in graphic design, done a number of papers in advertising and marketing and a six month internship at an advertising agency. But still I felt like a fraud, a little girl scribbling my drawings on the pristine art tables of the government defence organisation I'd been hired to represent in photos and typefaces.

A year later, I fled to Japan, running away from a relationship breakup and a feeling of becoming entrenched in the job I'd developed a passable level of competency at.

I followed my nose around the world, collecting experiences and avoiding the one job I wanted to do above all others, to become a writer.

I'd always been in love with words. From the moment Mr Ball, my fifth year teacher had taught our class the sky didn't always have to be blue. That it could be azure or lavender with blazes of orange heralding the sunset. That it could by torn asunder as lightning raked it, or roil moodily with clouds.

I'd been in love with stories since Mr Ball read us "The Horse and His Boy," by C.S Lewis, and I'd discovered "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe." Since I'd wept as Aslan laid himself, a living sacrifice on the stone table and returned to the Pevensie children and the land of Narnia, reborn of a magic older than the beginning of time.

I read feverishly after that, discovering the voices of Oscar Wild, Margaret Mahy, Lucy Montgomery, Louisa My Alcott, Arthur C. Clark, Robert Jordan and countless others that fired my imagination and captured my heart.

But the idea of joining their ranks...How very dare I think I contained the talent and sheer chutzpah to set tales down in writing, to create worlds in my head!

I was the ultimate imposter. A writer wannabe.

Yet, as I look back, I realise I did it anyway. I always kept a journal, always scrawled poems and little stories down before I did an honours degree and learned to write books.

Then my father died. In response I gathered his tooth brush and dozens of his ties and I bought myself a beautiful gold-edged, blank-paged book writing every day on the train to work, letting the rocking motion and the strokes of the pen across the thick, creamy pages sooth my pain. I filled my head with a modern day Melbourne split into three fantastical realities that could be pierced and moved through if you only knew how.

I wrote that story for ten years, then edited it for three more, yet still I felt like a fraud playing at being a serious writer.

"Who'd want to listen to you?" the voice inside my head would sneer.

It was around that time that my brother worked for NASA, I think he'd have had to kill me if he'd told me much more than that. But I do remember him telling me about sitting in a planning meeting with bunch of bigwigs.

"I was terrified," he admitted, "I felt like a little boy playing at the big boys table. Like they were going to catch me out at any minute, figure out that I didn't really know what I was doing...Then I realised that I could sit there in fear or I could just get on with it, do my best."

My brother felt that imposter feeling too! But he'd decided to sit at the table, roll the dice and see what happened. And boy did it work out for him.

It was about that time I made my laptop password an alpha numeric version of I am a writer.

For the next several years it would make me smile as I signed on. That simple statement,

'I am a writer.'

I would open my laptop, type in that affirmation, then get on with recording whatever idea or character was rattling round in my head at the time. After that I'd live my life, go pick up my kids from their activities and do my day job.

Two years ago COVID and other disasters struck. I took a redundancy from my nice, safe university employment, left my partner of six years and my home in the space of two days in late November 2020.

I wasn't initially in the firing line for a redundancy but somehow something magical had happened inside me. I'd kept on writing, whenever I could. And that statement I'd been typing into my laptop had permeated my thick, fraidy-cat skin, had begun to sink into my very soul. I was a writer, and I wanted to get on with the doing.

For the past two and a half years, I have been living my best life. Writing plays, novels, short stories, whatever comes.

I haven't yet made a lot of money or a huge success at it. I've realised what an enormous effort it takes to become truly expert at anything you are passionate about, but I've also come to the firm belief it's worth it.

My writing always bled through the cracks in my daily life. When I was frustrated or hurt, I would open my laptop and pound away at this or that plot line to feel better. When inspiration struck me I would run to my bed, prop myself on my pillows and type. Worlds always did exist in my head, I just had to dare to let them breathe.

I think it's the same for everyone. Even the best of us feel the imposter syndrome at some stage or other, (my brother confirmed that for me), especially when we're starting out on a pathway that makes our heart sing.

The well intentioned advice from friends and family members in this security conscious life is often of the "hang on to you day job," variety. And yet, if you light up when you talk about your tennis coaching or you can' help thinking about new recipe ideas, if you feel grounded and wonderful in the garden or, like me, writing is just something you simply have to do then perhaps meaningful work lies there ripe for the picking. Feeling like an imposter when you start doing it is simply a rite of passage, the bridge we cross to get to expertise and more importantly fulfilment. I have a favourite Japanese proverb. It goes something like this,

"We are fools whether we dance or not, so why not dance." Happy dancing friends.