This is a fun topic for me to jump in on because this whole blog is kind of a secret at the moment. I’ve been slowly setting it up, learning my way around WordPress, trying out a few different kinds of posts, plugging in the Google Analytics to see if anyone is actually reading and then instantly feeling guilty about the privacy implications around using them… I have been thinking a lot about the boundaries in my life between putting myself out there in a professional way and my fear that the exposure will somehow lead to my downfall. Call it impostor syndrome or paranoia – it doesn’t make it any easier to take the plunge.
Maybe I could make this about the impostor syndrome that I hide in my core – that makes it sound kind of dark and kind of intense but I don’t know how else to put it. I very rarely know exactly what I’m doing – I spend a lot of time figuring out stuff and making mistakes. After 5 years as a librarian I still feel like I tricked my way into my job and they will find out any day and send me home. I may be qualified in the ALIA sense, but so little of my degree was library specific, something that is really standing out to me now that I am back studying in the School of Information at Charles Sturt. I may be doing a Masters and doing the Archiving and Record Keeping stream but the subjects I am doing at the moment are very information generalist subjects that… echo some of what I was originally taught but are almost hilariously more conservative and library specific. I keep on having these moments while I am doing the readings – ‘oh, so that is why people do things that way here’ which is totally wild. You would think I would know, looking at my job title and experience.
I am really interested in what it means to keep showing up, to keep trying, and to finally be able to own some of my experience and expertise in the moments when it does all feel right and make sense. The secret to combating the overwhelming experience of impostor syndrome is being able to hold on to these moments. I presented my first presentation at a conference at the beginning of this month. It was one of those events that I was graciously volunteered for by my managers and although it was on a topic and with content that I have presented in workshops to higher degree researchers and academics before – something about it being in a conference program with an audience that I wouldn’t know much about until I was in the lecture theatre really terrified me. It was going to be a presentation on publication strategies in the librarian stream of ResBaz Sydney. I spent a lot of time in the lead up feeling pretty terrible, I wasn’t on until 4pm and the whole day before I was extremely tense. But then I got up to present and it… actually went okay. I didn’t fall on my face, the technology mostly worked, I spoke for the amount of time I was meant to, and people asked questions! Meaningful ones that I answered on the spot and felt good about. A colleague posted an action shot to our library’s Twitter:
And another one sent me an email the following day congratulating me on how well I had done. Take that impostor syndrome, no one threw fruit or booed! I seemed as legit as anyone else presenting that week! Aha! Maybe I do know some things, maybe I did get the job for more than my Rumpelstiltskin like trickery. It genuinely made me feel like maybe I could do a conference presentation again, with material that I had written all myself on a topic of my choosing. So hopefully writing this up will help make that feeling last, and make me less stymied by my secret doubts and shames and put myself out there in more ways and own that I may actually be a competent professional. At least some of the time.