Surviving Imposter Syndrome
I’ve been having a lot of imposter syndrome lately. It happens to the best of us and I know I’ll snap out of it eventually. This weekend, I decided to start making a list of things I’ve done over the years — accomplishments, failures, awards, and recognition, etc. Not really as a way out of this bout of imposter syndrome, but just to start brainstorming.
I have an ongoing list of accomplishments (and “nopes”, things I’ve said no to) in my daily notebook. But this was different. I started from scratch, from day one (literally there are things on there from when I was five), and just brain dumped. It felt good. I’ve been feeling super blocked lately like I’ve lost my creativity. I want to be writing more and creating more but my brain is blocked and I feel like I can’t get to that next big thing. What do I write about? What do I create? WHAT DO I DO?!? Going through my list was a helpful reminder of the successes and failures. It does help to get my creative juices flowing.
While I’m not going to share the whole list, here are some highlights, just to toot my own horn:
- ran a tie-dye t-shirt company as a kid (not my first business but the one I learned the most from)
- wrote a whole bunch of Perl scripts in college to rewrite some other Perl scripts for the UMD IT department (aka my favorite Regex)
- took down a data center early in my career
- helped kickstart the women in tech “movement” here in Minnesota
- co-created the first all-women hackathon in Minnesota and grew its community
- worked (and continue) to improve the diversity and inclusion of the Minnestar community
- had a talk accepted at NDC Oslo (next month!)
- celebrated my 8 year anniversary of starting 612 Software Foundry last weekend
Sometimes it just helps to lay it all out there for yourself. I often wonder how I got to here (and where I’m going) and this list is a partial answer to that.