Impostor Syndrome almost ruined my life
In January 2020, I decided to publish my first book. A number of life-changing events took place that made me want to do it. At the time, though I didn’t know this, I was suffering heavily from impostor syndrome. If you don’t know what that is, no worries, I didn’t know it had a name till a few months ago. I only knew the feeling. The impostor Syndrome is that feeling of inadequacy that makes you feel like you don’t belong with your accomplishments. I may be sitting in a room with colleagues some of who look up to me and still feel that I did not merit being in that space. It made me downplay my own abilities and accomplishments. I did not feel that I was deserving of sharing my story or being a YouTuber or even publish a story. What would I say? Who would be interested? These were my condition up until 2020 when I decided to share some of my hidden works with the world.
It was a collection of poems I wrote over a fifteen-year period. I do not consider myself a poet by any standards but I have my moments. In all the while that I wrote poetry, I had only ever shared some of them with one person, a girl I used to date, the very first one. She encouraged me to publish them someday but I never quite took that seriously. Then I discovered the Sunny Lenarduzzi YouTube Channel in 2019. Then my first YouTube Channel was still in its early days. I was a lost creative. I wanted to create content but I was too scared to be seen. Sunny shared her personal struggles in a video and encouraged us to rise to the occasion and be the heroes of our own stories. I did and got on Amazon Kindle to self-publish my first book. But that did not last. A while later, I pulled it down.
So if you thought that I had won over impostor syndrome, well you’d be wrong. Like an addict, I crawled back to my addiction and swore to forget all about my past assumptions. Truth be told, it felt relieving not to have any publications people could find. Sick right? I know. For the time I had my book online, I never made a post about it anywhere online or offline. The syndrome was not only affecting me in my struggles to create and share my content, but it was also in every area of my life. Like cancer, it was spreading to my work, my family and everywhere else. I eventually realised that it was a thing because I came by random write-ups about the impostor syndrome. I knew I had to do something about it and I did.
So in January 2023, I got my book back online. Not just the one Poetry book, but many more. Everything I have ever written will be released within the first quarter of the year and I won’t let impostor syndrome stop me. I feel like I belong wherever I can reach. Life has got me this far and I deserve to be here. I feared that people may not like my writing but you see, the books that survive in history may not always be the best-written ones. They may just be the ones that got written at all. So, my first book ever, Children of the Red Earth is available on Amazon and other digital marketplaces. Go read it and give a great review if you liked it.
