After Five Years of Creating, This Fear Still Haunts Me

As I sit at my desk at just past 5AM, I’m very thankful for what life has thrown at me, how I’ve overcome, and where my days will lead. I’ve achieved a lot in the last five years, not in monetary success or accolades, but in the scope of work and how far along I am on my creative journey.

Travel back three hours ago, 2AM. I sat down at my desk in mild panic. I’ve never really thought of imposter syndrome as something that has affected me, but I’m not sure what else to call it.

I’ve been hiding, producing, yes, but hiding.

I recently took the time to work out my bottlenecks and came to the heavy realisation that I’m all output with no clear throughline, no audience, no eyeballs. Just banging out work and hiding away.

While my direction is the same as it has always been, it’s time to stop hiding. It’s not just me and the screen, it’s me and seven billion others, some of whom have paths to follow that are similar to my own, and I can help those people, but I can’t do it hiding. I can’t be moving in a million different directions and hope to land at a destination worthy of the time I have spent trying to understand and fashion insights that move the needle in the journey of overcoming, becoming, and creating.

The fear is that I am not enough, that I am still, after all these years, half baked, or even worse, overcooked, that my efforts will, in the end, amount to a life of change and growth, but only for myself, not those I can help, those in need of light in the dark places we find ourselves at times of great upheaval.

In some ways, I feel more ready than ever, but we can all feel like we have something to offer those walking their own path that might have a similarly angular trajectory to our own. But the doubt comes from knowing that, while many might possess that feeling, not all are really up to such a task.

The doubt is: which of those two groups do I sit in, the delusional wannabes, or the ones that actually achieve such things, and those that do it in such a way that success doesn’t lead to a hollowing out, and a state where you’ve made it, but the goal, the whole reason you stuck your head out in the first place, is gone, and it becomes all about success, forgetting the mission that called you there in the first place.