Imposter syndrome

My battle with mental illness has taught me that there is a term for basically everything. Tired and sore all over? You have fibromyalgia. Do you have too much energy or are too hyper? You have ADHD. Do you wonder why you are so moody? You are probably bipolar. Are you constantly sad and don't feel like getting out of bed in the morning? You may have depression. Are you constantly nervous? You have anxiety. Do you feel lazy and you can't get yourself off the couch? They have a term for that too – inertia.

Recently, my therapist told me I suffer from Imposter Syndrome. What is that? All I said to her was I don’t think I am good enough to work a different job from what I've been doing my entire adult life. I worked in the food industry for over 30 years. I'll admit that by "food industry," I am using a euphemism for McDonald's.

Quick digression – now is probably a good time to bring up another term – trigger. Trigger is something that can cause you to have a strong negative emotional reaction. It is something that can bring back bad memories. The word “McDonald’s” does that to me so I will use it as little as humanly possible. The only way you will catch me driving past a McDonald’s is if I didn’t know it was there or if I have no other practical away around it.

I’ve been gone from that job for two years now. I worked there for over 30. I haven’t set foot into a McDonald’s more than a handful of times since I "separated ways" (their words, not mine) with my employer, usually to use the restroom on a long road trip. I’ve eaten at a McDonald’s maybe once, but no more than twice since I left. Again, only because it was convenient on a long road trip. I absolutely refuse, however, to step foot in, or spend a single penny at one of the 18 McDonald’s owned by my previous owner. The way I view it, those owners had taken enough away from me. I am not going to give them a penny more.

Back to imposter syndrome. I thought I just suffered from a lack of self-confidence. I just thought I was a perfectionist. I thought doing my job well included putting in long hours and doing everything myself. These are all signs of imposter syndrome.

I have always said I never wanted to win the lottery. I'd much more prefer to win the second highest prize. Sounds stupid, right? Who wouldn’t want to win the $100 million grand prize? Who would rather win the second place $1 million prize? This guy.

I would never want the attention that comes with winning one of those huge jackpots. A large part of me would be embarrassed to win that much money. In a world with so much poverty, I would feel like I didn’t deserve that money. I would be feel like an imposter. I am not the type to own my private jet or own an island in the Caribbean.

But why not me? Somebody has to win the jackpot, right? And I would probably do more good with the money than someone else.

I played poker online for a living for about five years during the poker boom of the early 2000s. I must say I did pretty good at the low to mid-stakes level. I was always too nervous to play higher stakes, or maybe I didn't feel like I was good enough. I became fairly well known in the close-knit online poker community at the time. I hated people knowing who I was. People felt the need to chat with me all the time during games. Sometimes it would just be small talk, but often it was saying a lot of negative stuff to try to get my off my game. My opponents also were extra motivated to beat me. There were websites at the time, and probably still are, that would track your results. Anyone could look me up. I felt like I had a target on me. As crazy as it sounds, just like winning the lottery, I felt a tinge of embarrassment to win too many tournaments. I feared success. I feared recognition.

That is imposter syndrome. I didn’t think I was a great poker player. I felt like I was a fraud, and just plain lucky. I know what you are thinking. Poker is all luck. You would be wrong. It has been a big debate for decades now, especially seeing as how the government outlawed online poker in 2011 because the government considered poker a game of luck, and therefore gambling. But like Matt Damon says to his girlfriend in my favorite movie of all-time, Rounders, during an argument about his gambling:

Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker EVERY YEAR? What, are they the luckiest guys in Las Vegas? It's a skill game Jo.

Obviously there is some luck involved, but there is an element of luck in every sport, be it baseball, football, basketball, tennis. Don’t get me started on the subject, because twelve years later I am still pissed that the government took that away from me… and made me return to the “food industry.” I get even more pissed seeing gambling on sports online being so readily accepted nowadays, but online poker still remains illegal in most of the United States.

But that was a case of me suffering from impostor syndrome. I particularly hated it when friends invited me to play at home card games. They all knew I played online for a living so whenever I lost a hand, I could hear them whispering to each other, “He ain’t that good. I thought he was a pro.”

For a majority of my career in the food industry, I was the first/top assistant manager of the restaurant. I was content to stay in that position for probably fifteen years. My supervisors and owners would periodically ask me to accept a promotion to store manager, or what they later called General Manager (sounds more impressive, right?). They virtually begged me for ten years. I never accepted it. They would ask, “Why not?” After all, isn’t that what everyone wants at their job? Promotions. More status. More importantly, more money.

Not me. 

I knew how much more work being a General Manager involved. I didn’t know if I could handle it. I didn’t know if I would be any good at it. I didn’t want to fail. But if my supervisors were showing confidence in me, why wasn’t I confident I could do the job? I was afraid I would be revealed an impostor - that my whole career had been a ruse.

The other reason I didn’t want to accept becoming a General Manager was that I knew I would get obsessed and the job would consume my life. In researching imposter syndrome, I learned that there are five types of imposter syndrome. I won't list all of them, but one of them is the perfectionist.

When I finally gave in and accepted the promotion, guess what? I was pretty damn good if I should say so myself. About three months after accepting the promotion, however, my owner, and the man I had worked for my entire 25-year career, sold off parts of his franchise, which consisted of 14 restaurants. I now became part of a franchise of 18 stores with all new owners, new supervisors, new store managers, new standards.

Would these new owners question why I ever got as far as I did? Although things wouldn’t end well five years later, I was consistently in the top third of the company every month for sales, profits, and pretty much every operational metric. I worked my ass off. I was right about being consumed by the job. The job wasn’t just my career, it became my life for five years. I thought about it 24/7. Technology now allowed me to do more office stuff from home. I could monitor sales and service times from home in real time. I could work on schedules and inventory from home, What a curse.

Bottom line is I got burnt out. The toxic work environment created by the new owners, and particularly my direct supervisors, wore me down to the point I am now. Every day was negativity which just fueled my imposter syndrome. Nothing was ever good enough for them. Maybe I did suck.

As I learn more through therapy, I realize my issues, as is true in many cases, began in my younger years. I’d be in whatever grade, you name it, and I’d bring home a report card with straight As and only one A-. I would get whipped with the belt for getting an A-. God forbid if I ever got a B. I still remember the first time I ever got a C was in 5th grade science. I just couldn’t get the concept of concave and convex lenses. The teacher, Mr. Walker, tried to comfort me saying it is not the end of the world getting a C one time. It was to me.

And maybe feeling like an impostor has been evident in my romantic relationships. I have been with my life partner, Erin, for over 15 years. Of course the question is why aren’t we married. It is a fair question. I am 51 years old. We have lived together for over ten years. We’ve never once had what could be considered an argument, never mind a fight. 

Maybe I am afraid Erin will wake up some day and realize that she has wasted all this time on a loser like me. I have zero reason for believing that, but I do. I know I feel inadequate, especially now that I am jobless, when I get together with her parents. I feel like they talk about how their daughter could do so much better than me.

Her family started a tradition during COVID of doing weekly Zoom meetings and they have continued it to this day. Every Sunday night, we log on to our computers, and just like when they play the theme song to the Brady Bunch, four squares pop up on our monitors – her mother and father in one box, her brother and his husband in another, her sister in another, and lastly me and Erin. I always feel uncomfortable during the hour or so that we are together. It is torture for me. I fear one of them asking me what am I up to, or what do I have planned for the coming week. Uh, nothing? After we log off, I slither away with the feeling of complete and utter inadequacy.

I also don't have any kids. Could this be another result of imposter syndrome? I know would be an amazing father, but, at the same time, I have never felt I could deal with the financial stresses of having to care for someone other than myself.

Even me writing this blog I feel imposter syndrome. Just me using the term "blog" instead of "article" is a sign of it. Nothing against bloggers, but, in general, saying you are writing an article gives more credibility than if you say you are writing a blog. Writing a blog sounds like it involves less effort and is just a quick, impulsive journal entry. An article sounds like it is more thought out and involves more thought. For the record, this article is now over 2,500 words. I've gone back and edited it too many times to count. Perfectionism at work.

If you click my "about" tab at the top of the page, you will see I write: "I am never looking to monetize this website, nor am I under any illusions that I ever could." The last part of that statement is textbook imposter syndrome, even though I had never heard the term at the time I wrote it.

There are ways to overcome imposter syndrome I have come to learn. They haven’t helped me yet. I won’t believe I have conquered imposter syndrome until I get hired at a job outside of the food industry. Like I insinuated earlier, I’ve gotten pretty much straight A's my whole life. I graduated college with a 3.4 GPA.  Hopefully, I’ve proven to you I can write complete sentences pretty well. I know I can do better than working at a brain-dead, conformist, standardized job. I just need to believe it, and I don’t yet, and I won't believe I can until I actually do it.

Other things one can do is keep things positive. Eliminate as much negativity from your life as you can. Talk to yourself in the mirror if you have to. Praise yourself even if no one else seems to. Pat yourself on the back. Do daily affirmations. For the last five years at my last job, it was negativity every day. I had to deal with customer complaints every day. I had to call and apologize to customers even though I knew the customer was out of line. I had to respond to texts late at night or on my days off from managers at the store whenever there were problems they couldn’t deal with, which was often. I grew to dread the sound of a text notification on my phone. To this day, that is one of those triggers.

An important realization to come to is that we are not alone in our suffering. There is help out there - either professional therapy or emotional support groups. I will never forget the day that I, finally, broke down and had to accept the fact I needed help. I was sitting in my parked car in the doctor's parking lot and just started sobbing.

Another of the categories of impostor syndrome is The Soloist. The soloist thinks they can do everything themselves or that things are only done right when they do them. I always thought I was Superman, but no one is. We are all human, and we all break down.

As a weird coincidence, maybe even what could be qualified as a manifestation, an odd thing happened as I was writing this article. My favorite band of the last few years is Halestorm - a hard rock band fronted by a woman, Lzzy Hale. Lzzy, in my opinion, has one of the most amazing hard rock voices, male or female, of all time. As I was writing, I had searched "imposter syndrome" on YouTube on my TV. I just absentmindedly let it go from one video to the next on its own. Suddenly, I hear what sounds like Lzzy's singing voice. I look up and discover she had collaborated with another female rock singer and they had just released a video just last week for a song called, "Imposter Syndrome." That blew my mind!