Imposter syndrom

In the past week, I received feedback for my Ph.D. thesis – three texts, two from my readers and one from my supervisor. They all have been incredibly positive – something my supervisor predicted upfront but didn’t believe him. Don’t get me wrong, I know the readers, so I know what lovely people they are. I had no expectations of them tearing me apart like one does with a piece of paper with private information written on it. But still… I don’t know. I expected them awkwardly try to say something nice while it being obvious to everyone that they’re up for an impossible task.

Instead, I got phrases like This dissertation is an excellent piece of academic work or The overall structure of the dissertation is crystal clear, the language is generally flawless, and the logic of the analyses and argumentation is iron-clad.

I’m not saying this to brag – Or am I? she asks her subconscious.

Okay, maybe a little. It feels really good.

But the point here is different.

I remember starting to write my dissertation almost a year and a half ago, and I was freaking terrified. Every word I put on the page was like torture in the beginning. I kept postponing writing. A friend of mine knew of my struggle and wrote this to me:

The most difficult part is done. You’re writing it for a friendly crowd.

By the most difficult part, he meant that I already had an account, so now I only needed to write it up. By the friendly crowd, he meant that the people most likely to read it are my colleagues from the same framework. We are a relatively small, tight group. Everyone is super nice and super supportive. They want me to succeed, so there’s no reason to fear their judgment.

I put the advice up on my wall right above my work desk, together with a few other sentences. Then, I made up a little melody to go with it because anything was better than actually writing. I spent months doing just the outline, which, in the end, I didn’t follow because once I actually started to write, the storyline and the ever-evolving account forced me to go in a different direction. Every little drag of my feet forward was met with such an incredible backlash from my emotional system, telling me that my work is shit. That it’s not good enough. That whoever will have to read it will be put in a really awkward situation. That they’ll be bored and confused.

The whole time, I was thinking – linguistics is just not for me. Give me a pen and paper and a picture of a witch sitting on a dragon and I will write you a text, alright. But an academic text? Forget it.

Except that…

Now the dissertation is done. While waiting for my defense and searching for a job, I’m trying to return to my creative writing. And I’m terrified.

I had a fun idea for a beginning of a story and for some of its characters, but I don’t know yet what the actual plot should be, or at least what it should head towards. And trying to figure it out, all my ideas seem so dull and sterile to me.

I’ve been listening to some writing advice by Neil Gaiman (a great way to procrastinate writing!), and he’s all about art being honest and writers being honest. If I’m being honest, I know what the story is about. It’s about a girl who feels too much in a world that… well, works differently. And it’s not about changing the world but learning to navigate it and lean into it. I could cry from how intensely I feel about the topic. I want the story to come to life so bad.

But every drag of my feet is a struggle. The inner critic is always up and running, never tired, always as fresh-faced as your 5-year-old on Sunday morning, when you really hoped she would sleep in. I’m spending forever on the outline. I’m staring at the quotes on my wall.

Neil’s:

Assume that you have a million words inside you that are absolute rubbish, and you need to get them out before you get to the good ones.

And mine:

Permission to write something short and bad.

Whatever I come up with sounds like shit. Whatever I write up sounds like shit. (Except for the first scene that came to me while walking to a bus stop and imagining wearing a huge straw hat.) And I feel like giving up.

I am running away from linguistics now because I never felt enough there. Am I gonna run from creative writing as well? And how far do I need to run to escape my inner critic?

I wrote so much poetry about trying to escape one’s inner darkness. It always ends with one stopping running and turning towards the thing that haunts them. How wise. How fake. I don’t want to stop running. But I do. Do I still make sense?

No conclusion here. Some say that imposter syndrome never goes away, even after great success. My dissertation has been welcomed very kindly, and I still don’t feel I did a good job. So I suppose trying to make the inner critic disappear is time wasted (and possibly counter-productive). Instead, I’d like to draw some lessons from the experience. In the best tradition of fairy tales, there are three of them:

1. The beginning is always the worst – that’s where the critic attacks the most. Push through it, survive it, and it will get easier.

2. Once the work is written up, it becomes more obvious what goes where and what feels right and wrong. I was banging my head against any wall and other flat surfaces I could find that I didn’t write up the first draft quicker without so much thinking and worrying. Because once I had it, I wished I could’ve spent much more time reorganizing and rewriting.

3. Even if I feel like my work is not good enough, if I honestly put the work in, it can be accepted and appreciated by people around me. Which is at the root of the fear, isn’t it? So maybe it’s okay that I feel absolutely frozen trying to write my novel. Perhaps I can just write the best thing I’m able to right now and let others decide whether they think it’s worth reading.

I heard somewhere that when one finishes writing a book, they are not the same author they were when they started. They are now an author with one more book behind their belt and with much more experience, and therefore it’s easier to come back to the beginning and make it better.

Sounds good to me.