Coming Into Land
“I have challenged fate to chess and am now attempting to keep all my confidence from puddling in my boots. What if I’m the only one betting on myself because everyone but me can see I am not suited to play at all?”
Mackenzi Lee, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy
A few months ago, I received some news. It was big news—huge news. It was the first time in almost two years that I was being pulled in a definite direction after an extended period of drifting, country to country, project to project. Waiting for some divine sign that would help coax me towards what I was supposed to do next.
I was in Italy at the time; in Florence, one of my favourite cities in the world. I’d left my phone upstairs as I indulged in the hotel’s complimentary Aperol spritz hour. I was alone: a few days to myself, researching a niggling plot hole in the novel I’d been rewriting on and off for several years. It was still niggling, despite having spent an hour that afternoon in the company of Botticelli’s first painting.
But, I digress. I hadn’t expected to hear back about this news until the end of the week. And, the truth was, I’d already convinced myself it wasn’t going to happen. It was self-preservation, more than anything: I had a busy weekend ahead celebrating my best friend, in the company of a dozen girls, more than half of whom I hadn’t seen in years. The last thing I needed was to get the (seemingly inevitable) bad news on my way there and spend the rest of the weekend in a funk.
The point is, I didn’t expect it. Not already on Tuesday; not at all. So, when I saw the email, the one telling me I’d been accepted to the writing residency, I was alone, in a hotel room in Italy, with no one to tell and no idea what to do.
So, I did the only logical thing I could under the circumstances. I went and had a really nice dinner.
The glow of disbelief carried me through the rest of that busy week and into the next, as I settled back into a routine at my parents’ house where I was staying. It was another week or two before it hit, around the time I started considering the logistics: paperwork, flights, somewhere to live. That’s when the sneering demon of imposter syndrome reared his head, taunting me from the end of the bed.
It was hardly the first time we’d met. He was there a decade ago when I walked through the halls of a since-closed-down Vegas hotel. The badge around my neck declared me an AUTHOR and, with my debut novel under one arm, I headed towards my exhibitor table where I sat next to a woman in her 50s who seemed to have made a career out of writing books about boys who rode motorcycles and never kept their tops on.
The demon was there the day we opened each year’s edition of the film festival, as I fended off an array of questions from the mundane (“how do we get the printer working?”) to the obscure (“how do we get this person’s visa approved?”) to the unforgettable (“are you available for Viggo Mortensen to call you in five minutes?”).
I tried to explain this concept to my mother and received a baffled expression in response. But I’m not the only one who sees him. Studies show that 70% of people will experience imposter syndrome at some point in their lives; anecdotally, it’s thought to be more prevalent in women.
The weeks passed, inching closer to my departure date, back to Canada. The public announcement went live and I watched friends, family, old colleagues, and acquaintances react. No one seemed as surprised by the news as I was. But still, the demon hung around.
He followed me to Toronto, and cackled from the closet as I settled into a new apartment in my old city. He climbed aboard the bus with me on my first day, claws digging into my back as I walked toward campus. He leered over my shoulder as I introduced myself to the rest of my cohort, challenging every word I said.
It’s been three weeks now. Three weeks of writing, and talking about writing, and laughing about writing, and bonding over writing. I don’t see him so much anymore. Every now and again, I lose my footing and he appears through the cracks in the ground below me, as though he has been waiting for this moment.
I stomp on his scaly fingers and kick him back where he belongs. Because for every moment I question whether someone made a mistake letting me in here, I have three times as many where I smile, proud; confident in the work I did that led me to this point.
The work that led me to be writing this now, sitting in the shade of a pine tree, overlooking the sprawling grounds of the Canadian Film Centre.
Where the demon is nowhere to be seen.
