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Hello and GoodBye Imposter Syndrome
On accepting its inevitability and making peace with your monsters for good
Sometimes I start to wonder whether I am real, or maybe I am just making things up. Maybe I am just dreaming it all, and I will wake up and I’ll go back to my life before writing. I’m not sure I really had a life before writing — as it was somehow always part of my days… what I really mean is going back to the moment when I haven’t written anything for an audience.
Up to very recently, my writing existed in a vacuum — on my laptop, in my dog-eared notebooks, in several files scattered on my phone. It existed, but only barely — like it was something translucent, dream-like, intangible, where you get the feeling, but you cannot really put a finger on it. Balancing between a dream and reality. And then I entered the world of writing for an audience and I left my safe little bubble — only to let monsters out of the box, only to allow them to haunt me, only to grow and improve and finally become the writer I was always supposed to be.
Imposter syndrome, the empty-page-disease, aka writer’s block and the damned comparison — these are my monsters and if I am not careful enough, they come out to play and they throw me around, leaving me breathless and in tears.
