Validation feels good, actually!

Nothing cures "imposter syndrome" like finally becoming good at something.

My essay last month got a lot of attention. It has over 70k views now! This is new for me. I’ve never gotten so many clicks on anything I’ve written, and it’s given me a newfound confidence. I am now approaching my life with a fresh sense of possibility and wonder. I got a haircut. I deep-cleaned my room. I said no to some graphic design projects, so that only the good clients remain. Walking with this kind of swagger feels amazing, like the recurring dream in which I befriend a HAIM sister.

I cannot stress enough, for those of you who don’t know me, what a departure this is from my normal state. I am usually plagued by a wide-ranging and ever-present doubt. Some examples: At one of my first graphic design jobs in New York, I fucked up the design of a greeting card just before Thanksgiving break, and spent my entire visit to the 9/11 museum with my family ruminating on what my boss would say about it when we returned. Not even the room with the recordings of the victims’ last phone calls could penetrate my whirring mind. During COVID, I quarantined my socks because they had been outside and were probably contaminated. I lost track of how long each of the socks had been there but kept adding more until they were distributed across the carpet like craters on the surface of the moon. More recently, during Pride, I was given a free dental dam in Dolores Park. Later I went home to drop off my stuff before going to the club, but then got out of the line for the club to go home when I realized the dental dam was at large and the cats might swallow it, forcing me to choose between a $7,000 surgery or letting them die.

One of my new fans clocked immediately what it has taken me a lifetime to come to terms with:

Sometimes my worry spreads from my mind to my body. I’ve experienced involuntary full-body shivers in anticipation of events as minor as a first date, a wedding toast, a meeting. I have had debilitating work panic attacks about things like vinyl window lettering and business cards. I have made a car full of people turn around halfway to Disneyland to check if I turned the space heater off (I had).

It’s probably no surprise that I’ve experienced many similar doubts about writing. I spent so much on that fancy journalism degree and didn’t become a journalist; why am I not Miranda July; what if that person reads that thing and gets mad; I spent a year on a novel and it’s utter trash, etc. etc.

To remedy this, I usually turn to the internet and the wider culture, which is brimming with diverse peddlers of what is essentially the same message: confidence is sexy, so you should do xyz to get some. My friend recently told me she’s doing a mushroom journey. “To UNLEASH MYSELF,” she said. She asked me if I wanted to be there. I did. I actually also wanted to do the mushroom journey, but she said I was supposed to remain stable so that I can watch out for her and be available post-unleashing to watch Queer Eye and eat soup. Later I realized that while I think the mushroom journey is right for my friend, I probably shouldn’t do it. I’ve tried so many things like mushroom journeys, and none of them has ever made me any more confident in myself or my environment. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that have failed to anoint me with Big Dick Energy:

1. Positive self-talk

2. Years of therapy

3. Antidepressants

4. MDMA

5. Moving to a foreign country that’s always on the brink of war

6. Looking at other people’s cellulite on Instagram

7. Listening to Brat

8. Dating people hotter than me to prove I was in their league

9. Dating people I didn’t really like that much so that I’d have the edge

10. Baring it all at Archimedes Banya

11. Participating in a ceremony of renewal at a Berkeley-based synagogue that involved chanting and an altar of botanical sacrifices

12. Reading all of these self-help books:

Pro tip: download your most embarrassing self-help books on iBooks so no one sees them.

Freddie deBoer recently pointed out that the millennial tendency to perform insecurity, often branded as “imposter syndrome,” is annoying. But I think a lot of us genuinely feel anxious, insecure, or uncertain, and the only real cure I’ve come across is to get more experience. The good news is that it’s usually possible to get experience. The bad news is it might take a really long time, it’s not as easy as buying a crystal, and the monotony of getting better at something doesn’t lend itself to the specific brand of self-deprecating humor some of us like to wear as armor.

Still, in all the areas I care about the most, I’ve seen that it works. Five or six years into my graphic design career, the anxiety about making mistakes began to subside. Ten years in, at my local politics job, a miscommunication that was my fault resulted in us pissing off a beloved local farmer’s market. There were angry viral tweets and even an op-ed. We had to apologize on Twitter. This would have sent 23-year-old me spiraling. But at age 33, seeing immediately that I would live to tweet another day was a major personal milestone. Not as exciting as 2k likes on Substack, but it still felt good to realize I’d gotten over something that was once paralyzing. Similarly, four years into vaccination, I no longer worry about COVID, instead stopping every so often to marvel at having lived through a massive human tragedy. Years of dating have cured me of being nervous on dates; multiple wedding toasts have made public speaking bearable. And writing an essay people read has helped me believe I can do it again.

The idea that there’s no substitute for experience is, of course, not my own proprietary concept. My friend Jenny points out in my very favorite Substack Uneasy Going that exposure therapy is an evidence-backed approach to reducing anxiety and improving one’s life. Another of my friends was recently told by her therapist that she should strive to increase her “window of tolerance.” Yet another friend recently recalled how making friends at the foreign middle school her parents put her in during their sabbatical helped her stop eating lunch alone when she returned to the states.

Sometimes life exposes you to your greatest fears via brute force. Last summer, I lost someone of almost mythical import in my life to addiction. I wondered if losing a friend this way was somehow my failure, which is also my fear about the cats—that they will die because I didn’t protect them from themselves. But one strange silver lining I noticed after this loss was that I don’t freak out about the cats anymore. If I could survive losing someone so vitally important to me, I think, I could probably handle losing a cat. Actually, I don’t just think that. I know it, in only the way experiencing it can achieve.

Writing a clickable essay on Substack is, of course, not a cure-all for my writerly ruminations. But it’s definitely had a major impact. This blog is my most consistent writing and publishing practice to date, and I’ve felt plenty of panic about what I choose to post here. But I didn’t stop posting, even when some of the posts got 4 clicks. Now, for the first time ever, my brain has a rebuttal for a lot of its churning writing doubts. You wrote something that you thought was good, and then it made other people laugh, I keep thinking to myself whenever my brain starts to gnaw on whether it’s worth it to keep going.

So if you are one of the people who read my work and liked it, thank you. And if you’re someone who is wondering why you’re not confident in whatever it is you desperately want to do, maybe you just need to get out there. Pick your socks up off the floor, give your cat a dental dam and go enjoy the 9/11 memorial.