Ways to Navigate Imposter Syndrome
There is a silent yet meaningful dance that happens as a creative - an edge that you move close to just enough to feel inspired, motivated, creative, and intentional with your values. move too close to that edge, and you find yourself wavering on comparison, envy, and imposter syndrome. It’s a beautiful gift to have a creative mind and a passion for communicating with others through your creativity, but it can be really challenging to feel like what you’re doing is making a difference if there are voices in your head telling you ‘you aren’t good enough.’ Imposter syndrome is real and unfortunately (yet fortunate) it happens to us all - regardless if you’re artsy fartsy or not. it’s easy to get swept away in the wave of what others are doing, how they’re doing it, or if they’re doing it better than you - but it’s important to be aware of those dangerous thought patterns that leave you feeling unworthy. I feel a push and pull with social media - a tendency to create (in a perfect way, hello perfectionism), connect with others, and all the while maintain a balanced and intentional home/work/school life. It can be really hard to show up on social media when you feel like you are better enough than the person before you - yet, we show up anyway. and yet, we start to notice that if we shift our gaze on ourselves, shift our perspective to adoration towards ourselves, and shift our purpose to doing what aligns most with our authenticity (no matter what that looks like), it feels good to feel seen. it starts to feel motivated to show up vulnerably in a public space, we stop critiquing ourselves and start finding small things that we love about ourselves, we start looking forward to chatting with the online friendships we’ve built, and we start to feel inspired - not debilitated - by our online space (yes, I’m talking about you algorithm). I’m still working on this, but what I do know is:
being myself is incredibly important to me.
being kind to others is incredibly important to me.
expressing myself is incredibly important to me.
The rest is a cherry on top.
There’s a quote by Henri Bergson I love that goes, “To mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
Here’s to creating ourselves endlessly, compassionately, and freely.