Coping with Imposter Syndrome

As I mentioned in my Sick Not Weak talk, I experience a lot of difficulty dealing with Imposter Syndrome. Ironically, the wonderful reception I received from co-workers, friends, family and even strangers was a trigger for a huge case of it! I couldn't help feeling that I didn't really deserve the praise being thrown my way.

That aside, this past week I ran face first into a veritable snake pit of imposter syndrome - the self-assessment part of our bi-annual reviews.

As part of it, I had to explain all the wonderful things I did since my last review and how that has positively affected the company. I essentially had to brag about myself, and if you've ever experienced imposter syndrome you'll know that's about as easy to do as chewing broken glass. So, I started and stopped the process several times. I felt like I should just say, "Why did you even hire me?!".

Finally, on deadline day (of course), while in the shower I was wondering what to write. After some thought and some arguing with myself, I actually said out loud in the shower, "I did X and it really helped with Y, damn it!" Then I did it again... "I did A and it really helped with B, damn it!". In a few seconds I came up with three or four things I could put in the "accomplishments" section.

I finished my shower, got dressed and went right to my computer to enter what I had thought of. I started to think of all the sentences I could finish with ", damn it!", while pounding an imaginary fist on the table. The result was a good number of accomplishments that I was confident made positive contributions to the company.

Those things spawned thoughts about what I needed to write in other parts of the assessment, and completing it took about 20-30 minutes. That was after feeling blocked for a number of weeks.

So, if you're having a tough time coming up with good things that you've done, try that little trick. Try thinking of all the sentences about what you did, ending them with ", damn it!!".  This could be for self-assessments like mine was, for your resume, when prepping for an interview, and probably many other areas way beyond just your job.

If you do use it, please let me know how well (or not) it worked for you.

Damage Assessment

Photo by the Massachusetts Dept. of Environmental Protection

I've always been a bit of a weather geek, and tornadoes have fascinated me for decades. They're simultaneously the most frightening, most awesome and even the most beautiful weather phenomenon in existence. I live vicariously through storm chasers like Reed Timmer and Canada's Dave Patrick, watching as they get up close and share the excitement and awe they express as much as I can via an Internet connection. Something I find interesting is how their excitement can turn very quickly to dread when they realize that a tornado is about to or has hit a populated area and people or animals may be hurt.

When I started to come to terms with my depression, I spent some of my time thinking over the relationships I've had over the years. It wasn't pretty. What I saw in my mind was the type of damage you would see from a powerful tornado - only a narrow strip of land affected, but complete devastation within that strip. Buildings were leveled, trees stripped of foliage and bark and people wandering around wondering how they would rebuild.

The question I asked myself was, "Did the lives of any of those people improve in any way as a result of knowing me?" At the time my immediate answer was no, and even now I struggle with the answer after finding medication that helps control the depression and with a few months of therapy under my belt.

For the longest time I thought I had been holding onto the guilt of how I acted during those relationships, but recently I realized that what I was holding onto was shame. The light bulb moment came while listening to an audio CD of Brené Brown. Something she said hit me like a freight train:

Guilt is, "I made a mistake". Shame is, "I am a mistake".

I felt completely eviscerated when I heard that... I am a mistake. It captured in four words what I had been feeling for close to 30 years but couldn't articulate.

The shame that I've felt for leaving that strip of total devastation has been overwhelming, and has seemed to compound itself like interest on a maxed credit card. It's as if the tornado has done nothing but grown larger and stronger over the years and no matter what I tried to do differently the damage still occurred. I have wanted to think that I was a good person, treating other people well, but my shame was preventing that. To me, the damage was visible to anyone just like in the picture above - a scar across the landscape that may take a lifetime to repair, if ever.

Now that I'm being treated, I can't say for certain when if ever I'll feel better about all this. I suppose the transition from shame to guilt means that what I perceived to be permanent, irreparable damage can indeed grow back just as the trees will in that forest. That transition probably also means that I can move from a place where an apology for how I treated someone would seem so grossly inadequate that I couldn't do it, to this:

If you were among the people who I didn't treat well for whatever reason, please accept that I'm truly, deeply sorry.

The Mask

Picture by Greg Williams (gerg1967)

In June 2013, the massive, decades-long juggling act I had been performing came crashing down.
While I had suspected for a while that I had some issues, to use the cleanest euphemism possible, I resisted accepting that they really existed. I'm sure those closest to me knew that all was not well, but even with them I tried to hide what I was feeling. To the rest of the world, I presented (or tried to present) a persona of that was always joking, making light of any and all problems... except possibly crappy software development but that's a topic for a different blog!

In short, I spent decades wearing a mask.

I wore a mask that attempted to project someone who was always happy, finding humour in any situation. I wore a mask that attempted to project someone who was comfortable in their skin. I wore a mask that attempted to project someone who hadn't stumbled their way to a pretty good career in the software industry. I wore a mask that hid enormous pain that had been accumulating for many years and wasn't going away by simply ignoring it.

Certainly there were plenty of times that I was genuinely happy. I have been fortunate in so many ways, and my depression hasn't been anywhere as severe as that experienced by many people. I have been blessed by having had relationships that allowed me to grow. I have been blessed to have watched the birth of my two kids. I have been blessed to have a fantastic family who would go to the end of the Earth for each other. I'm especially blessed to have a wife who loves unconditionally and, despite my resistance, encouraged me to finally seek help.

But despite all those great aspects of my life, I wasn't feeling good. In fact, I was feeling worse. My work was starting to suffer. I was experiencing issues with many things due to the anxiety of dealing with them. My relationships with friends had all but evaporated because I was isolating myself.

The mask was starting to crack, and this past June it finally shattered. I couldn't deny my problems anymore and was forced to deal with them.

What I didn't expect was that the impassable wall of anxiety I had built was much more difficult to scale than any of the problems. Those are more like mountains, needing a slow and steady climb but still surmountable. Indeed, some have been mere hills easily conquered with a day hike.

In the end, the carefully and elaborately constructed mask that was intended to hide the real me from the outside world was working in reverse. It was hiding the true nature of that world from me.

Sick, Not Weak

As my introductory post to this blog, I'd like to start with a video of a talk I gave at my work in September 2013 called "Sick, Not Weak".  It's my story about finding out how I actually had depression and generalized anxiety disorder, and the effects those had on my life in the nearly 48 years prior to that diagnosis.

The title was borrowed (the polite term for "blatantly stolen") from Michael Landsberg of TSN in Canada.  Michael, who suffers from severe depression, has been a very outspoken advocate of making mental illness visible so that we can deal with it like we do physical illnesses.

If you like this video, please share it with others so that we can encourage more people to tell their stories, even if it's to themselves in a mirror.