Imposter Syndrome

When I was a kid, I remember this one particular afternoon - it was a school swimming lesson and I would not have been more than 7 - I can't remember if it were before or after the lesson - but I remember walking past one of the "big girls" - Susan or Joanne or someone like that - and thinking "imagine being THAT grown up.

And then I was that big and I realised that it was not so very big any more.

And thence in boarding school.

I often marvelled at those around me who really had their acts together - I was alternating between trying to figure out if there were a defined set of rules that I should have read somewhere, and trying to read them by braille.

I really was stumbling myopically - figuratively AND literally. 

There was one other girl with my first name in the whole school - my name was not a pencil case name - and not only did we have the same first name, we had the same surname initial, we were in the same year - and we were both blind as bats. 

And we were both too vain to wear our glasses around the school. She was slightly ahead of me in the alphabet due to strategic vowel placement, but I had it all over her in being a klutz.

Boarding school was five years, during which time my knees hit bitumen and cement and rock, gravel and grass so often during those years that, for some periods, there was skinlessness and other descriptors designed to make you shudder.

Ejected by age and matriculation, I went to university still largely thinking "at some point in my future it will all start to make sense, and then you will be deemed a grown up." 

This was interspersed with thoughts of "Grown ups. Ha. What do they know. Who'd want to be one of them."

Then I got a proper job. One a thousand more KMs from "home" and I did stuff. Proper grown up stuff like catch public transport and pay rent and buy  alcohol and other stupid things.

I remember once saying to my sister - another grown up with a proper job far away - as we ordered a meal together: "this is what it must feel like to be a grown up."

But I also was a bit - well, contrary might be a word we should consider.

Because I still didn't quite understand how this game worked. 

I must admit that a lot of my 20s and 30s I lived a life that, when coming to forks in the road, I would choose every time the path less travelled. Not because I was adventurous and foolhardy, but because it looked like fun and was slightly foolish.

When I turned 30 I had a beautiful baby. 'Salina really was good clay. Moving up a generation must get me my grown up badge by default.

My 30s were very much a "lash to the mast" rideout.

Then I moved to Paradise and met V and got married and surely that's got to be grown up, hasn't it?

P&C President (to be fair, myself and the whole P&C were as shocked as you. It was a case of needs must rather than the winning of any popularity contest.) Grown up enough?

Having my own business, even. I mean, not a hugely successful one as I had no confidence in my boss. Still. Grown up?

Baby. Taxes. In the thirteen clients/jobs I have had in the last fourteen years, I have been confident and successful in twelve (including the one I am currently in). I must be getting close.

But things erode confidence. Teenagers. Car troubles. A pandemic. Cancer.

In two days having a renovate with all things hysterical banished - I am making some room for audacity. 

Not a "save your life" manoeuvre this time - more an "improve your life" issue.

I am starting to think that I really must be a grown up by now.

Although I still haven't found the manual.