Imposter Syndrome

I was an impostor. A poseur. A fraud.

Impostor Syndrome is the secret feeling that you’re a phony, way out of your depth, soon to be exposed to everyone, the masquerade over. More prevalent among women, it is common among successful, high-achievers. Though one may appear confident on the outside, doubt and fear hide inside -- I’m not really smart enough for this job, I’m not really fit enough to work out in this gym, I’m not really pretty enough to shop at Balliet’s. I’m not really enough ENOUGH to be who I appear to be. I’m in the wrong place. I’m not worthy to be here. I’m a fraud and soon everyone will know it.

Characteristics include being unable to take credit for accomplishments or to accept recognition for success, which sufferers may dismiss as simply luck, good timing, or perseverance. So-called impostors feel that they have fooled everyone and that they are not as smart or capable as everyone thinks. This, of course, is inaccurate.

Taking realistic and accurate assessments of your performance is key to moving past the impostor syndrome. Such assessments, however, are difficult. With each success, take time to jot down the specific actions that led to success as well as what experience and qualities underlies your success at completing each action. If we want to maintain and repeat our success at weight loss, we must learn to recognize ourselves as worthy and remember how and why we succeeded.

Overcoming Impostor Syndrome*

1. Break the silence. Shame keeps a lot of people from admitting their fraudulent feelings. Knowing there’s a name for your feelings can be tremendously freeing.
2. Separate feelings from fact. There are times you’ll feel inadequate. It happens to everyone from time to time. Realize that just because you may feel that way, doesn’t mean you are.
3. Recognize when you should feel fraudulent. If you’re one of the first to do something, even something like get a lapband, it’s only natural you’d sometimes feel like you don’t totally fit in. Instead of taking your self-doubt as a sign of your ineptness, recognize that it might be a normal response to being an outsider.
4. Accentuate the positive. Perfectionism can indicate a healthy drive to excel, but the trick is to not obsess over always being perfect. Do a great job when it matters most. Don’t persevere over routine tasks. Forgive yourself when the inevitable mistake happens.
5. Develop a new response to failure and mistake making. Henry Ford once said, “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” Instead of beating yourself up for being human for blowing the big project, glean the learning value from the mistake and move on.
6. Right the rules. If you’ve been operating under misguided rules like, “I should always know the answer,” or “Never ask for help,” start asserting your rights. Recognize that you have just as much right as the next person to be wrong, have an off-day, or ask for assistance.
7. Develop a new script. Your Impostor script is that automatic mental tape that starts playing in situations that trigger your Impostor feelings. Instead of thinking, “Wait till they find out I have no idea what I’m doing,” try thinking, “I may not know all the answers but I’m smart enough to find them out.”
8. Visualize success. Spend time picturing yourself fitting into your dream dress size or successfully completing a marathon. It sure beats picturing impending disaster and will help with performance-related stress.
9. Reward yourself. Break the cycle of continually seeking and then dismissing validation outside of yourself by learning to pat yourself on the back. Actually make a list of non-food rewards to gift yourself. 
10. Fake it ’til you make it. Don’t wait until you feel confident to start putting yourself out there. Courage comes from taking risks. Change your behavior first and allow your confidence to build.

Closely adapted from A Girl’s Guide to Project Management

Too Late

After a week of dreary weather, today was wondrous, bright sunshine, no wind. I wanted to go bicycle riding, but I give up a block from home. My bike’s broken, whether it’s the brakes or gears doesn’t matter. Walking it home, I start crying and I can’t stop.

The most tragic words in life are Too Late.

• 
  When I had lapband surgery at 54, I feared it was too late to get my life back.
• When I did get healthy, it was too late to have a child, but not too late to return to teaching.
• Last summer, it was too late for cosmetic surgery to turn me into a hot babe, but not too late to feel comfortable in my own skin.
• At 60, if I want to be a ballerina, it’s probably too late.
• And, today, it’s too late to ride my bicycle.

My parents, step-parents, and grandparents are all gone and I know each of them died with some things undone -- and it’s too late for them.

Too late is tragic because one recognizes what might have been, because one must acknowledge lost opportunity; one must be profoundly self-aware.

I don’t want my last words to be “Too Late.” I will

• find the time and money to go back to Italy and walk in the steep streets of Siena
• contact Bonnie O’Malley and apologize for hurtful words our senior year in high school
• write more poetry and submit some poems for publication
• say “Thank You” more often to the people who make my life better
• ride a boat up the Nile and climb the pyramids
• keep in better touch with friends and family
• hear (and say) the words “I love you” so many times I get bored with them
• take more photographs
• volunteer for Habitat for Humanity
• be a docent at a local museum
• keep this blog updated
• ride my bicycle again
• discover more things I want to do before it’s too late

Images by Victoria Ivanova

https://fineartamerica.com/shop/acrylic+prints/victoria+ivanova+hourglass

Full Wheelbarrow

Don't pick up other people's rocks. My wheelbarrow is full.

On SmartBandsters, a Yahoo support group, Jesse Ahroni posted the above line which provoked all sorts of thoughts for me today. Her point was that we all have enough of our own baggage to carry, so we don't need to pick up other people's rocks. If we focus on solving our own problems, we won't have time to worry about someone else's issues.

At some level, I'd like to think that my interest in someone else's problems is a sign of an empathic nature, that I am a genuine, caring human. Truth may be that I am perhaps too eager to find weaknesses in others. If they are flawed, it's OK for me to be flawed.

Of course, even if my concern is heartfelt and artless, what can I really do with someone else's rocks? I can't control other people,or their actions. Sometimes good advice is irritating. A good example can even provoke undesired behavior out of pure contentiousness.

Other people's rocks distract me from toting my own. Hmn?

Memory Palace*

One begins with a real place --
Grandmother’s house full of knickknacks,
a beloved bedroom hideaway,
the special corner of a favorite coffee shop,
the hidden stacks of Bizzell Library,
Heidelberg’s Bahnhof,
my lofty terrace overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea --
a place so real that you can float above it,
twisting and turning from top to bottom,
every angle familiar, 
placing objects in perfect settings,
framed by memories,
flooded in sounds and smells and tastes.
A place so real that you do not need it.
Keep it anyway.
For ever, for ever after.
Decide how you will travel through your memory palace.
If you want to remember in a special order,
define a route you can follow over and over,
‘til it becomes unconsciously there.
Move through your palace,
marking locations to store your memories --
landmarks, crossroads, shadows, colors,
sizes, smells, symbols.
Fill your palace with images that can store your truths for the years
when time will eat away thoughts that fill the mind now -- the yellow kitten that spits and scratches holds that first heartbreak,
the scratchy record player warns of Death’s close seductive song, 
the soft gray angora granny square quilt can be the mother lost,
the snap of a Waterman fountain pen can save every poem,
the smell of a honeycrisp apple sings of survival and joy,
the taste of Brunello will kiss a lover’s lips forever.
For ever ever after.
*Apologies to Matteo Ricci and Jonathan D. Spence (The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci).

Totally Inappropriate

Leonard Nimoy Dies 27 February 2015

I had such an inappropriate obsession with the Spock character, so here is my totally inappropriate poetic tribute --

Star Trek Again

Do you remember
lusting after the alien,
just devilish enough
for a teenage girl
to know it was so wrong
to want his hands on her,
to ache to see yearning
in his cold intellectual eyes?
How might that first forbidden desire
have encouraged
other adventures,
other dark quests,
for reluctant passions?

Leonard Nimoy Dies February 27, 2015

Anyone else remember Pon Farr? I actually got to interview Nimoy when he spoke at OU for the Oklahoma State Psychological Association in 1968. Liked him, but he was NOT Spock. Must have been a great actor...

Sienese Dreams

The Daunting Saga of the 37 Tunnels

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The GPS says I am 3 hours 54 minutes
from Siena,
but it knows nothing
of the tunnels twixt here and there,
the shock of sudden darkness
pierced by pursuing yellow eyes,
glowing red advice to "moderare la velocità,"
blinding flashes of sudden sun
as I jump through stripes
of light and dark,
13 tunnels and counting.

The car is stuffed with stuff
rattling clay pots
beating a clunky arhythmic clang
as I swerve and slide through exit curves
from each of the 19 tunnels
on the way to Siena --
some quick, some interminable trips
into heavy mountains that hang
on manmade promises of strength.
Do you doubt steel as I do?
Surely one of
22 tunnels will fail,
crash or crumble or gobble up
space it gave.

I escape briefly from the autostrada,
exit to slower curves,
through tree canopies,
and stop at a roadside shrine,
thank whatever gods may be
for a road that leads to Siena,
however convoluted and constricted
its 27 tunnels,
a fit price to pay to return
to the dream of Siena.

How did they find my grandmother 's
imperfect perfect tomatoes,
tart and sweet and juicy pale,
misshapen,
slightly green at the edges,
my reward for surviving
another tunnel on the journey,
for gripping the wheel,
turning, turning, turning,
ever so slightly
on every curve of the 32 tunnels.

A Brunello toast
to any person reborn, empowered,
tough enough to conquer
37 or 40 or 63 or all the tunnels
that ever tried to test
a traveler on the journey to Siena.

The waiter offers a firefly,
softly in his hands,
to a bambino,
giggling at captured light
that twinkles and wiggles.

Tomorrow
I will eat breakfast
with the sunrise,
stand at counters
like the Sienese,
expresso bitter on my lips,
sit in the Campo,
grateful
for all difficult journeys
that end at a homecoming.

I leave one bite
of Nonna's warm caramel cream cake
on the plate
for another time.

Grazie, grazie, grazie mille.

Heart Broke

Why is it so hard to tell someone we love that we love them? It's never a secret, because everything in what we do screams the words we are hesitant to say.

Forty years ago, I was crazy in love with a man I thought was the love of my life. In the two years we were together, he never once took me on a real date -- not to a movie or a party, never gave me a present or even a compliment, and it didn't matter. It felt so right in his arms that I ignored the truth that he did not love me. I never said it to him. He never said it to me. I was sure that he loved me, but just didn't want to say it.

At a particularly traumatic moment, I needed to ask him if he loved me. I asked. He answered.

"No."

"Will you ever love me?" I asked.

"No."

Perhaps if I HAD told him that I loved him sooner, I would have learned that he did not love me sooner, and I would have made better choices than the crazy ones made by that heartbroken, silly girl.

If I had been broken sooner, might I have healed sooner?

Years later, I saw this amazing pen drawing by a local artist in The Blue Bean, titled "When I Was Broken." And there I am.

So what if I got hurt, got broken. Done is done. Suck it up! Say it! If you are hurting, you are alive!