Two Strategies to Help with Imposter Syndrome
/Imposter syndrome is raging fiercely in me.
I am coming up against three academic writing deadlines. And as I gaze up at these huge mountains looming ahead of me, I find that I'm having a hard time lifting my feet to take the next steps forward. It feels like each individual step has the power to make or break my entire journey up the mountains, and that's too much pressure for one little foot.
When I experience this kind of fear, I don't go into fight or flight mode, I go straight into freeze.
Right now I am leaning hard into two strategies to keep inching forward.
The first strategy is to not fight against imposter syndrome. What is effective (and honestly more fun) is embracing the distorted logic and running with it. "If I am indeed a secret fraud who has fooled universities in multiple countries and languages into giving me degrees, I can probably do it again. So, what would someone who knows what they are talking about write in this paragraph?"
The second strategy is the garbage truck draft (named after my son's current favorite toy). In this draft, my sentences can be absolute garbage. Usually when I go back to them, the sentences are actually quite usable; but on days like yesterday, they live up to their name… The genius of the garbage truck draft is that it gives me permission to cut through my perfectionism and put my thoughts into words; it helps me carve out a larger composition into which I go back and refine the details.
A more elegant name for a garbage truck draft could perhaps be étude, or study. The painting here is a study Ingres made in preparation for a larger painting, Roger Freeing Angelica. Here we see his preparations for Angelica: how the light and shadows will work across her form, how she will hold her body when tied to the rocks, the look of melancholy that will contort her face. When he incorporated her into the final composition, Ingres painted her more finely with completed details.
But for now, here is the space she will take up.
"Angélique", Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 19th century, Musée du Louvre
