To all my fellow trickster gods and goddesses
Open-scene, a wintry Buffalo day not unlike most. On this particular day however I found myself walking into a board room. Like others of its kind, the minimalist room contained a larger-than-needed square table with seats — like what you’d expect to see in a Bond villain’s hideout. Except this happened to be a university research building on Buffalo’s burgeoning medical campus. Around the table were industry leaders — most of which twice my age. Some were founders of successful tech companies, others were prominent investors, and community leaders.
I set my bag down, grabbed some water, and pulled up my seat. **ah hem**, as I cleared my throat. “Great to see everyone”, I said as I opened my bag — pulling out a moleskine notebook and my laptop. I anxiously jotted down the date, time, and subject matter of the meeting, as I do with every meeting. I then began notating those in attendance.
As I wrapped up my legal-Pavlovian-ritual, I paused — finding myself asking one simple, yet anxiety inducing question:
what the [expletive] am I doing here?
Later, when I arrived home I was greeted by my ever-so-supportive and amazing wife (@amberasmall). She knew I had been excited about this particular meeting and inquired as to how it went. Fortunately for me I answered her honestly (Eventually). “It was great”, I remarked. The look on my face clearly left her with more questions: “then what’s wrong? You look melancholy”, she inquired. “Nothing. Honestly, it was a great meeting. But as I sat there with a table full of community leaders — people I admire and look up to, I could not help but wonder why exactly I was there”, I confessed.
“You are there because you are incredible”, she assured me. “And what you have is imposter syndrome.”
Imposter what? “Imposter syndrome. You have imposter syndrome. It’s typically something that women struggle with, but clearly you have it,” she quickly diagnosed me. Not in a clinical sense. More along the lines of a spouse putting their hand on your forehead to diagnose a fever. Of course, being the type-A, over-analyzing-attorney I am, I decided to spend some time on the Google machine.
“Holy [expletive]”, I said aloud, “this describes every damn thing I’ve felt. Ever.”
For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon, Wikipedia has a lovely definition I’ll share with you:
“Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon, impostorism, fraud syndrome or the impostor experience) is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud’. Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds, and do not deserve all they have achieved. Individuals with impostorism incorrectly attribute their success to luck, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent than they perceive themselves to be.”
This described perfectly the battle I have with myself almost daily. After several days of mulling this around in my brain, I decided I needed to talk to someone other than my wife to get an “objective” opinion. After all, she loves me and may be bias in her exculpation of my fundamental self-doubt.
Enter-scene, Lynn (we’re using a pseudonym here out of respect for Lynn’s privacy). Lynn has been a close friend since law school and someone I have a tremendous amount of personal and professional respect for. Much to my surprise Lynn confessed that she often felt the same exact way. Here’s a woman who has worked her ass off to get into a position that almost anyone would be envious of and she’s feeling the same exact thing. Well this got me thinking:
Maybe they’re both right. Maybe this is just in my head.
Be that as it may, it’s a vicious cycle.
Admittedly, by all accounts I have experienced “success”, and am incredibly blessed and humbled to have a career that I love (or two or three), a home in a community I love, incredible business partners, and an amazing wife I love more than anything who enables me to accomplish things I could never dream of as a kid growing up in the Adirondacks. But despite all of that I have found myself increasingly insecure about professional achievements which then motivates me to work even harder — driven by anxiety and a fear of failure. This hard work of course contributes to success which I then discount as luck or circumstantial, and the process starts all over again. If you haven’t tried this form of self-abuse, let me tell you, it’s a real barn burner.
Enter-scene, April. See a few months earlier I submitted a proposal for a paper to an academic legal conference at the urging of a fellow faculty member at UB School of Law. The paper was entitled “The homogeneity of developing unicorns: a survey of deal terms and diversity in early stage capital transactions”, and included research I have been working on as part of my role at UB School of Law.
“A long shot”, I said to myself.
Well, the paper was selected and with it came an invitation to the conference. Of course, now I had to actually go present on my paper in front of a room filled with a couple of dozen distinguished faculty members from law schools all over the country.
“Well surely this is where the house of cards comes tumbling down”, I thought to myself. Surely.
You’d think I’d be getting the hang of this by now but alas, here we are again. Then something magical happened as I was diligently preparing for the conference — I opened Twitter and randomly discovered the following had been posted by someone I followed:
I immediately started laughing at the absurdity of it all. I also saved the image and shared it to my personal Facebook page with a quip about how this pretty much summed up my feelings about presenting my paper at an academic conference. Surprisingly, friends and colleagues commented about how they feel the same exact way. We all got a pretty good laugh. We had, after all, fooled everyone.
As I was boarding the flight back to Buffalo from the conference I presented at (which was fabulous by the way) some friends and I joked in a group chat about how we would work “Trickster Goddess” into papers or books some day — perhaps in a footnote or a dedication. But as I sat down into my seat, I couldn’t help but pull out my phone and start writing.
