Imposter Syndrome

Apparently it never goes away. From Joe Rogan to Jordan Peterson to Seth Godin, the greatest thinkers of our day declare that imposter syndrome is a part of the game. At least for change makers, feeling like a fraud is an indicator that you’re pushing the boundaries past where they’re set.

By all measures of success and meaning, that’s a good thing.

But how can I be comfortable when I don’t feel like myself? That’s easy: I can never be comfortable with who I am, because always changing. I’m a different person than yesterday. I’m still me, but that me is entirely different. New. Fresh. Unknown.

Consider this from the cellular perspective. Every time I take a bite of food, those molecules are broken down and eventually become my physical body. Or they get used as energy or excreted. Let’s take this further: each time I take a shit my physical body is drastically changed. I am made new by physical release.

You can be made new each day, too. It will just be uncomfortable. You won’t feel like yourself. You might even feel like an imposter.

Embrace it. It means you’re changing, and change is good.

I missed 5 days, but Here’s a Poem

This week was the first time since July I missed some days of blogging. I was planing on going back and writing a blog for each day I missed, but that’s ridiculous. Better to start fresh. As I like to say, Nunc Coepi—now I begin. Now I begin to blog every day again, until the end of time.

I’ve made a commitment to start “creating” at least once a week. Right now, this means sitting down and free writing. I free wrote this past Tuesday and creating some interesting work. Here’s one of the thoughts (if you can call it that) that I created:

Reality is a broken rocking chair.  It’s uncomfortable and you can’t lean back as far as you’d like, but you sit in it and hope anyways.  Hope is dangerous.  I tell myself to stop hoping every day.  I say, “Don’t hope.  Make it happen.  Think it into existence and existence will follow suit.”  I am a father wearing a banana suit into Walmart.  His kids aren’t around, but he’s rehearsing his act. Uncomfortable resistance, too drastic to be saved for Halloween.  Why do I hate Halloween?

I like the first line and the line about the banana, but the rest doesn’t make too much sense (yet). I like writing and not knowing what it means. It’s the half-known world, the uncertain realm of the universe. Certainty bores me and cannot be trusted. I want to be okay with being uncertain, more like the weather. Less like construction plans.

Here’s to an uncertain life on a rock floating through nothingness.

Put on the New Self

I heard a reading at mass today from Saint Paul. It read: “Stop lying to one another, since you have taken off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed, for knowledge, in the image of its creator.” (Colossians 3:9-10)

This speaks to what it means to be a human being, that is, constantly changing who you are. You aren’t the same person you were last year, let alone last night. Friends and family members often treat us as stagnant beings, thinking we haven’t changed since their last encounter with us.

But think about it biologically. Every time you move your bowels you lose tens of millions of microorganisms from your microbiome that have lived in you for days. The argument could be made that those organisms are a part of you because without them you couldn’t survive—they digest, metabolize, and assimilate your food. You are, quite literally, a different person after your morning dump. And you’ll never be the same again.

Maybe instead of wishing we could hold onto who we were we could better accept and embrace the New Self who is inevitably on the way. The only constant in our world is that everything changes, including you and I. I reckon we would be happier people if we treated others as New.

If we allow ourselves to be renewed with knowledge of what is rather than what we would like to be, that would be a pretty good start.

Nunc Coepi

Three days ago I listened to Episode #376: How Seth Godin Manages His Life — Rules, Principles, and Obsessions (Repost) of the Tim Ferris Show. I listen to a lot of podcasts, but this was one of the top 3 I’ve heard this year. Mr. Godin authors what is considered one of the most well-known blogs online. He has many opinions, but they all stem from his experiential wisdom. When he said, “You should blog every day. It should become your job to notice things,” I felt like he was singling me out.

This is radical advise. It doesn’t just mean starting a blog, posting here and there when it’s convenient and inspiring. No, blogging every day requires discipline, not inspiration. It means posting when I don’t have time and when there’s 20 other things on my agenda. It means no matter what my mood is, I’ll find the time to share something. And it means being more creative and personal than I’ve ever been.

As the hardest man on earth, David Goggins, says: Roger that!

This is the first of many blog posts. I will blog once a day for the rest of my life. This blog will be my living journal, my personal manifesto. When my work on earth is done and I’m ready to retire at 120 years old, people will look back through 36,000 blog posts to this, the very first one.

I told you so.

People say I’m extreme. I call it devotion.

Nunc coepi. Now I begin.