It’s Not Impostor Syndrome If You Are Actually Faking It
“Excessively creative”, that’s what my husband calls me. I have creativity in my blood. My mum cooks the best vegetarian meals most of you will never have tasted (but really should), repeatedly getting ‘meat and three veg’ guests to exclaim “I didn’t even miss the meat!”. My father has this innate ability to work out some DIY option for almost anything (he once made a workable alternative to a plastic moulding machine that would normally cost $20,000 using an oven, and old vacuum cleaner and a wooden frame he made from scraps he had laying around). My sister has conquered many a field, music, art and is now a fantastic fabric artist, making some of the most wonderfully imaginative quiet books, quilts and toys for her children. I have fond memories of listening in awe of my brother jamming out improvised jazz riffs on both the guitar and piano. Art, music, food, craft of all kinds surrounded me growing up. As the youngest I watched, absorbed, and dabbled in all of the ways laid out before me, the path smoothed out and worn, the obstacles removed by my family working it out before I got there.
In my own life, I was five when I proudly proclaimed that I wanted to be an artist. I remember feeling so proud of a painting of a white horse and rider I did as a 7-year-old that it hung on the wall in my bunk for months. As a pre-teen, I voluntarily did extra homework as an excuse to write a 12-page story over a weekend and get it graded. I had music lessons from 5 till late teens. I have had a blessed, art filled upbringing.
So why am I telling you all this? Not to show off my artistic upbringing, or to brag about my family (although they are pretty awesome), but because in spite of the copious amounts of creative fertiliser, I still failed to grow. Sometimes, I was actively cut down. The 5-year-old proclamation to become an artist was met with derision and scoffing from an adored uncle who told me you can’t make money as an artist. That horse painting? That was the last time I remember painting. I strove for recognition in music so much that I burned out and quit all together. An idea for a novel come to me at 17 but after many months of work and the naivety of not backing things up, I suffered a corrupted hard drive and lost over 50 pages of work.
The decade following as an adult, I tried to fit the mould prescribed to us, get a job, earn money, be sensible, tick of the markers of adulthood. I worked at a bank, trained in Commercial Cookery, even earned an associate degree in Ministry and Theology and most of a Bachelor’s in Media and Communications (still going on that one, actually). But no matter which avenue I walked down I did not fit. The rigidity of the bank, the sameness of everyday as a cook, even being let go from a job as a youth pastor for being “too creative for church ministry”. . .
I took that as a sign. After licking my wounds for a while, I realised I had been running away from what had always known myself to be, an artist. Now don’t get me wrong, a soul of an artist does not a talented one make. I have the desire to be a painter but have only painted once since that white horse from my childhood, the results which were truly not good and were in fact shame hidden in the back of the recipient’s wardrobe.
I have a list of activities that I secretly claim as being part of my identity and yet, if I am honest, I don’t do. Instead of suffering from impostor syndrome, I have been simply an impostor, faking my credentials in the club of creativity. It’s hard to call yourself a musician/artist/writer if you haven’t played/drawn/written in years. Even with my qualifications in cooking my husband does most of it at home. This year I am taking my creativity back, reclaiming it, bringing it front and centre. I am going to do what I claim is who I am.
Art – 100 art pieces. Draw, paint, sculpt, anything! Just do it twice a week
Writing - Start that novel again, maintain this blog and reach an end of year word count of 50,000 words total
Cooking - cook my way through a book I found at a second-hand store called Professional Vegetarian Cooking by Ken Bergeron (285 recipes)
Music – Actually start music practice again, 100 days of practice = 50 hours
Photography – Complete a 52-week photography challenge (one shoot a week), and gain my Diploma in photography
Craft – make 100 tangible, 3D, in-real-life things
These are based on the idea of doing each activity twice a week. I have had to include flexibility to account for migraines that I get regularly and that wipe me out for three days at a time as well as my proclivity to suffer from depression (hoping this might help with the management of that). However, as I am ever the optimist, I do have a stretch goal: DOUBLE IT!
In full honesty, I know how lucky I am to be able to undertake these activities. I have a supportive husband with a secure job, and fair chunk of free time in and around my studies. Its only because of both circumstances that I can even consider this undertaking. The freedom to take these creative desires of mine and make them a reality, to take myself from the creative impostor to simply a creative. I am telling you all this, not for grandstanding, accolades or encouragement (. . . maybe a little bit for accountability), but mostly in hopes that in sharing my creative journey through these intimidating tasks I have chosen for myself, that I may become your creative fertiliser so you can grow your own.