Do you ever get the feeling you’ve made a terrible mistake?
Underneath logic, success, achievement, esteem…you just can’t shake this feeling, this feeling that you’re the worst.
I once heard Amy Tan, the author of the Joy Luck Club, call it the imposter feeling that she couldn’t shake, despite her success.
I’ve been walking around with this feeling a lot lately. It’s stronger than ever and it’s familiar in the same way looking in the mirror is familiar; I don’t have to look in the mirror to know what I’m going to see and I don’t have to acknowledge this feeling to know that it’s always been there. Well, it’s been there at least since I was 9 years old.
I’ve heard others talk about this feeling as an existential crises or angst. And many others talk about it as anxiety and panic. I used to panic when I felt it, my panic looks different today than it did when I was younger.
Anyway I’ve been trying to sit with it, to really let it come up and to be immersed in this feeling of dread, of inadequacy, a feeling of being worse than worthless of being alive yet being a mistake, a feeling of hopelessness. What the hell is going on here.
What the hell is going on!
Do you feel this way? Do you move through your day keeping this feeling at bay, pretending it doesn’t matter, ignoring it, only for it to come seeping under every door you’ve closed?
I think at least some of my less attractive habits have been formed around trying to cover this feeling up.
I’m 51…
What’s worse is that it’s such a powerful feeling, so true in it’s depth that I’ve assigned equally deep rooted meanings (see above) and I wonder…are these meanings my meanings? Have I formed these meanings and given them to myself? Are these meanings pre-packaged? Did they come with my human apparatus as a signal, a sign, that I truly am those meanings? Was it a warning to myself, genetically encoded to keep me…keep me…keep me…what? To keep me on track? To keep me doing the right thing? To keep me doing good? Is it a joke?
Times that I have done good, done well, done right, I don’t recall being motivated by this feeling. In those cases of being a “good” human, I am motivated by a completely different force.
So what is this? What is this primordial seeping of worthless ness, of bad ness, of being an imposter of being irredeemably inadequate? Is this feeling my friend or my foe? I’ve always treated it like my foe. I’ve always treated it like my monster. I’ve always treated it like my gospel. I’ve always treated it as my reality and I’ve built a world around it that relies, not only on the actual feeling and meanings I make of it but the actions and efforts I undertake as a result of thinking it is real.
And so then I realize that maybe it is not the feeling and the meaning that should continue to be my judge but the actions I have not taken that should inform and motivate me. For isn’t the endless making of meaning and the process of this making, also endless, what renders my structures, my walls, my chains. And when faced with new action based on new discovery, isn’t it my structures of meaning that keep me seated and wondering and philosophizing and angry and quiet?
Do I sit and examine the structures again or do I make mist where walls have always been?