Impostor syndrome haunts me as a high school dropout, often seen as less capable than those who spent years learning their craft.
One of the terms that keeps coming up during recovery is the idea of the “Impostor Syndrome.” The feeling that you are a fake, and that you are not due fruits of your labor. When you come from a background of working low wage jobs, almost all of society sees your work as worth only as much as the legal minimum you are to be paid. The old adage goes, that if they could pay you less, they would. Never is that more apparent than when you wait tables. Back in the Midwest that would extend to what they called “server wage” but was colloquially known as “slave wage” due to being so little amount of money that it would barely cover the taxes you were expected to pay. Your real wage came from the tips you would earn by impressing yourself upon the diners with your ability to take an order, fulfill said order, and eat any shit that is handed to you along the way. You got really good at eating that shit, because if you didn’t, you’d blow the whole facade up and you’d get nothing. Or even worse than nothing: a quarter. I remember in one of my first jobs, when someone left a veteran server a quarter, she chased them out to the parking lot to give it back to them. We laughed, but she wasn’t laughing. She didn’t want them going through life thinking that was an acceptable way of treating people.
As a writer, impostor syndrome has always haunted me. First, by being a high school dropout who never went beyond his eleventh grade, you are always seen as a dolt by some who spend half of their lives in a classroom learning what it means to do this or that. I commend anyone who has that kind of patience, but I think even if I had graduated and gone on to college, the chance of me finishing that would’ve been slim too. Life has always taught me more and my desire to work and earn money always outweighed my preparedness for the future. Back then, I didn’t think of living well into my twenties, and I also cared so little about what people thought of me that I made it a point to disregard any and all advice anyone who ever cared for me would give me. Sure, I listened to them from time to time, but it wasn’t just a grain of salt that I took with their words, it was a truckload. Anyone and everyone had their own path, I surmised. Lives weren’t better or worse (unless they were) but things were mostly just different between people.
Now, while I’m trying to move towards the goal of becoming a more established, or at the very least known writer, I find myself clawing through my past looking for those words of wisdom that I took for granted. Not that I am trying to find them to either live or die by them, no, it is simply that I want everything I can get. I’m more searching for something to combat the constant doubt that comes from being with ones on thoughts as much as I am with mine. The place that I find myself now is one of solemn isolation as opposed to the drunken isolation of the past. My motivations are unhindered, and my mind is clearer than it has ever been, and that is causing me to not have a more solid vision, but one clouded with misconceptions about my abilities and what I have to offer a world that is crammed full of people who have spent their whole professional lives calling (and well, being) a writer.
I’ve always been a writer. There is no doubt in my mind about that. Since I learned to put two words together, I’ve used them to create stories. Creating stories is what has driven my mind since the dawn of my imagination. Some days when I was a child, I could just sit and live inside my stories. They gave me a place of safety, a place to escape to when the real world became too cold and too bitter, especially for a child to inhabit. Whether it was just in my head, or down in long epic comic books I wrote, those stories were a part of me, as my stories of today still are. I went on from writing comics to writing out by hand short stories, always long and epic tales with weaving plots and character development that involved people paying for their sins and becoming better for being held accountable for them. They were stories of righteous violence. Upon my first experience with a word processor, I typed out my stories on the tiny screen and watched in wonder as my words came crunching onto the page. Something inside me changed the day I saw the words in black ink against the white paper. For years after that I would write on a typewriter because of the tactile glory that came from the sound and motion of the arm coming up seemingly out of nowhere to thrash the letter onto the page.
Upon my first experience with a word processor, I typed out my stories on the tiny screen and watched in wonder as my words came crunching onto the page
As I got older, and the price of the home computer fell, finally I sat down in front of something even better than a word processor or a typewriter. On the computer screen, I could see my words and play around with them like never before. If I wanted to move something to another place, I only needed to select it, click and drag it. Suddenly my epic stories found pacing and the stories unraveled over serialized entries. Of course, these were all ridiculous tales about some Sci-Fi or Speculative fiction tale I dreamed up, but to me they were real once they were done. When a printer was added to the mix, I would go through those ink cartridges one by one to the anger of my dad who paid their weight in gold. Those days they were just as if not more expensive than they are now. After each page came clunking out, I’d take them and staple them together like a book. I read them over and over. Sometimes I let other people read them, but usually I would write them, print them, staple them together, then put them away and start on the next one.
One of the things that held me back when I tried to write screenplays is that once I’m done – like really done – with a story I lose any and almost all interest in it. Likely, this is a byproduct of writing poetry for so long. When you write hundreds of poems a day, some surely stand out, but even the ones that are close to your heart, the ones that make you tear up just reading them out to people, even those get thrown away and moved on from without much thought, because the thing that was more important that what you had written are the ones that have yet to be written. I see that even with this website. Sometimes, as I’m sure it shows to writers, I write something here and hit publish and then never come back to it. I think there are one or two in particular that I have never read. From people who I know who have gone down the academic path, this is sacrilege; to throw ones writing out into the world without spending the time to refine it. I’m of two minds when it comes to this practice. One, as much as I am focused on creating content for this website, it is not my main interest, as my short stories are. Second, and perhaps even more importantly, my style of writing is free flowing. Right now, I’ve been working at a coffee shop down the street from where I live, I’ve been writing nonstop for about two hours, and I’m positive that this essay has too much in it due to the fact that I’m right now at around thirteen hundred words when I usually don’t let them get that long.
There’s also the fact that I do nothing to promote this website. I’m sure there are places where people could find it from. I’ve shared it with people I know, friends and family, but I doubt that many of them think to look here and spend time reading them. Hell, I barely could get them to read something when I put it physically in front of them. That is probably one of the parts of the academic experience that I lost out on the most, to be able to have peer-reviewed material and see the benefit of getting feedback from people who actually knew what they were doing and not just people who would say “yeah, okay that’s good.”
What are the things then that make me a writer? Well, I write. I write all of the time, every chance I get, and I write down my thoughts, and I write down what I feel when I feel it. All of my life is about being open to things that will help me become a better writer.
