Imposter Syndrome

I’m practicing for a series of races. I started some new meds last year for my lungs. They’ve been doing great, so I started training for some races. After so many years of not being able to do a lot, having this opportunity to maybe complete some things that seemed like crazy goals…

I’ve got a friend who is a paraplegic. And a professional triathlete. He used to live and train at the Olympic Training Center until recently, and then moved back up to Denver. He needs assistance with some training, so asked me to train with him. It’s been great for me to have an accountability partner.

I signed up for two triathlons this year. The idea sounds a lot better than the reality. The bike and swim isn’t bad, but the swim scares me. I’m an ok swimmer normally, but with racing, it’ll be terrible. That’s the first event, the excitement… I’ll be struggling to swim my swim and keep my pace down and not get over-excited and burn myself out part way through.

I’ve done some tris before, but that was 20 some odd years ago. My first one is in February in Arizona. Water will be about 60 degrees, so I bought a wetsuit. I took it to the pool the other day and really felt some imposter syndrome kick in. I was nervous to step out in my tri set and then to put the wetsuit on and swim in that later. I’m not that great of a swimmer, and it felt like people were expecting me to be awesome with the tri set or the wetsuit. Swimming is a little different than other sports. There’s less people that just wake up and say “I’ll start swimming tomorrow”. Most of the people at the pool swimming laps are former competitive swimmers. Way better than me. But I survived.

We had the bad Marshall fires a week ago here in Colorado. I volunteered two days this week to help Team Rubicon. They were an official member of the National Incident Management Team that was responding to the disaster, assigned to support the Logistics Cell. I’ve been a member for years, but had never been deployed on an op before. One thing that was funny, was that just a day or two after feeling the imposter syndrome with swimming, I was walking into the Incident Base, and didn’t feel any at all. Even though I’ve never worked with TR before, and maybe should’ve felt a little self conscious walking, I didn’t. And once they started the briefings, I felt like I was home.

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Arizona Nights

When we first moved to Arizona, back in 1989 we had to live in an apartment paid for by my Dad’s company for several months. It was the first time we really did that, owning a house was really a big deal for my Dad, he thought leasing cars or renting apartments was for fools. That was a unique experience for me. I’m not sure if my little sister enjoyed it, and my older sister stayed behind in South Carolina, but I flourished there. In junior high and middle school we didn’t have too many extracurricular activities. CCD with church, and the occasional soccer league or summer activity, but no formal after school things. So we’d go to school, then come home, and we were always the new kids. So we just never really grew roots. But the apartments were different. There were numerous kids within a couple years of my age, and for whatever remarkable reason we all really got along. So when school got out, I’d rush through my homework and then head out to the basketball half-court until the others showed up.

There was a Thrifty drugstore a couple blocks away. So an exciting Friday night or spring-break night for us was to walk down there, get an ice cream cone for $.25, then walk back, screwing around with one another the whole way. Sometimes we’d go McDonald’s and take a booth for hours. I had my first not-a-date dates there, walking down to the gas station with the cute girl to fill her bike tires up so that we could find the leak or going to the grocery store to run an errand with her.

I’m back in Arizona this week. And walking down to the main shopping mall area for dinner and back. I stopped into the grocery store for some bottled water because the hotel water tastes terrible and then headed across the street for some Dairy Queen to savor on the rest of my walk home. Even though I was alone, it still made me think of old times. I was here two weeks ago and it was humid, being that we’re right in the middle of monsoon season. I love running here in the morning usually, but those two runs sucked. But tonight it’s was back to a normal Arizona night, warm and dry with a great breeze.

I’ve missed this place. As much as I hate the heat during the days, I love the nights.

I should be working now…

But I’m not. It’s late at night and I’m procrastinating. Which will bite me in the ass tomorrow, when the work I’m not doing is due.

I started playing some online music to try and get me a little more focused, and that of course got my brain wandering. I’ve been a computer guy/computer geek for decades now, not just years.

When I was a kid, we mostly lived in smaller towns. Nashua and Altoona Iowa. Then we moved to Savannah, Georgia which was a nice, but small city. And then Orangeburg, SC, a much smaller city or town. I turned 15 there and learned how to drive there, but it was such a small place there wasn’t really any place TO drive. We moved to Tucson shortly after and that was another small city, and then Phoenix. Even though Phoenix was a decent sized city, I was still under drinking age and didn’t really know where to go or how to be in a city. I knew where the late night record stores and burger joints were, but didn’t have a big group to go hang out with, and definitely didn’t know where the “hot spots” were. That changed a little when I turned 21 and dated a woman for the summer. She was 31 and had lived in Phoenix most of her adult life and had been married to a local musician before, so that summer was kind of my first taste of more adult living and fun. Bars and live music, etc. After that I was in the Army and more small towns.

I enlisted in 1995. The internet was around then and trying to figure out what it was. AOL? Compuserv? In the Army, I learned computer systems and networking and had access to free, and at the time, relatively un-monitored internet. So lots of chat rooms and what not. It was a great window out to a bigger world, from a small office on an Army base in a small town. Towards the end of my time in the Army, I picked up on internet radio, in the 98/99 time frame. And had a work computer that could support it. So while I’d be on the internet, chatting up whoever, I’d have internet radio from big cities playing. LA, NYC, DC, Seattle. Even though it was mostly music, you still got the idea of the size of the city from the online radio station. First, the fact that they HAD an online broadcast. No station in that little town had an online broadcast at the time. But then the quality and professionalism of the DJs and broadcast and even the ads.

I didn’t realize until years later, how much of an impact the radio playing in the background had on me, that was as much of a “window” on bigger city life as the chatrooms and internet were, but it’s hard to explain, so I’m not even going to try.

As I sit here tonight, listening to one of my favorite jazz stations from Seattle, I’m struck by where I am in my life. Living in downtown Denver – not a huge metropolis, but a decent sized city. When Covid isn’t going on, I’m out and about, I know where to go and how to have fun and experience the city. Where to go shoot street photography, where to eat and drink and look at art and listen to live music. And I’ve spent time in some of the LAs and Chicagos and Parises and NYCs of the world. Took a much different route to get here, but I’m here and it’s been fun.

I’d love to ruminate and elaborate more, but that work isn’t going to do itself!

Nostalgia

When I was a kid, I worked in fashion retail stores in the mall. I’d mowed lawns for a developer years before then, then for an Ace Hardware chain. But my first “real job” at 16 was as a sales associate for Miller’s Outpost in the Tucson Mall. I became friends with an assistant manager there who moved to a competitor and moved with her, and got promoted to an assistant manager role there there. I also worked for a shoe company and for a gift/stationary store.

Even before there, shopping malls were threaded into our lives. I’m an 80s kid. Almost every week we’d go to church on a Saturday night, then we’d go to the mall. We’d have dinner as a family, then Dad and Mom would wander around and we’d have an hour or two to wander and then meet back. I went to my first comic convention in the middle of a shopping mall in Savannah. When I was mowing lawns in the third and fourth grade, that was a huge thing, to be able to go spend money there every week. I loved people watching, I loved the energy. I loved Christmas shopping and the day after, going to exchance things. Back-to-school shopping at the mall. It was all great.

Working in the mall was just… magical. It felt great to have responsibility, to have a routine, to have a network. I could wander around and wave at friends who were working there. Kids from school would ask for a discount. I’d work with someone at one store and they’d go work at a different one and the network would spread. I’d help friends from school get jobs. At 16 or 17, in that space I was a big shot in my own little way. I had a confidence there that I didn’t have in other places. I was good at my job.

One of my favorite times was Christmas season. I loved going into work and just getting a buzz from the rush and energy. An 8 hour shift would just fly by in the blink of an eye.

I always get nostalgic when I watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Valley Girl and see the kids working the the mall, meeting in the mall. I don’t understand the death of the malls now, it doesn’t make sense to me. I understand some of the appeal of Amazon, but being able to go to the mall and see and touch, to watch people, to meet friends there, to go with the family and everyone can go do their own thing and meet back up and knock out all the errands. Colorado has a lot of new outdoor malls that don’t make sense to me. On a rainy day, or a snowy day, I used to love to go to the mall and just kill time and get out of my house in terrible weather. Why would you make malls outdoors today?

No real point to this, just noting the feeling of nostalgia after seeing the mall on Stranger Things and other shows lately.

Perspective

I’ve got a friend who is a total rockstar and who deployed to NYC to assist with the Covid-19 crisis as a nurse. It was a good experience for her, there’s a lot of turmoil for her at home right now, so it was good for her to just go to work, be crazy focused all day (even if it was terrible in some ways), go home and be so exhausted she passed out and didn’t think about home life in great detail for awhile. It sounded a lot like a combat deployment, and I’m sure that unless you were there you can’t really understand it.

That change in perspective hopefully did her some good. She’s got to go home and deal with the stuff, but she’s coming home changed by her experiences and with a new perspective. My wish is that this will make that dealing easier than when she left.

It was also a good chance for her to realize how other people see her. How much she’s loved and appreciated, see for herself how strong she is and how much everyone else knows it. That’s a lot of pressure, the imposter syndrome set in a little, but she left home alone to a city she hasn’t been to as an adult, she walked into a new hospital, a new specialty with procedures she wasn’t familiar with in the middle of a crisis situation. That’s pretty much the most difficult professional experience imaginable. And she killed it. But there was so much praise and appreciation that at least a bit of it penetrated her shields. I hope she can carry that with her. Everyone should know that about themselves but unfortunately few do. It’s a great gift.

Problem Solving and Communications

I’ve had this ongoing struggle for the last couple of years in my professional life.

When I left the Army, I went to work for a company that made pre-fabricated buildings. It was a very male dominated, more blue collar workplace and it was an easy transition from the military. After that I worked for two global organizations, based in Europe. A lot of German counterparts, and our conversations were fairly… emotion free. We laughed and joked, but we could be bluntly honest and not worry about hurting feelings. The stereotypes about German personalities held true.

Since then, I’ve worked for smaller, US based startups with significantly younger and more diverse teams. In these groups, feedback has to be carefully. So a lot of times, my feedback is perceived as a personal attack. Some of that is people today. They get emotionally attached to their ideas. And can’t separate that in the office place. Some of it is delivery, and I’ve worked on changing mine. The question is, how much change is too much? What can I stomach and still feel I’m being authentic? I don’t want to spend the rest of my career censoring myself.

What’s funny is at my current job, my current boss is a cheerleader type. Doesn’t like people saying/thinking/spreading negative thoughts. She originally disliked me because she thought I was very negative. It’s taken about a year for her to get that I’m not, but I don’t sugar coat things. My feedback isn’t tearing people down, and it’s always intended to help and make things better. She now actually sees me having a calming effect on her when things are going bad and expressed appreciation for my personality recently, but it’s taken a year to get here.

I was discussing this with a friend and she mentioned her husband:

Honestly M struggles with the same thing professionally. His ability to notice the problems and solve them is probably his greatest strength, but the problem is that a lot of times people don’t really want to hear with the problems really are.

Hell yeah, that’s EXACTLY it.

Late last year, a friend told me to apply to be a part of a Veteran Research Review board. I did and was accepted. Researchers who want to do research pertaining to Veterans can present to the Veteran Research Review Board. We’re a group of Vets and we’ll evaluate the research project and make suggestions on how to interact with Veterans, etc.

After a researcher presents his project to us, we give them feedback, and then a week or so later, they respond to us with whether or not they found our suggestions helpful and how they’re going to incorporate the feedback.

The last researcher called out a Veteran specifically in his paperwork.

Indeed a very helpful meeting. I think several meetings with them, and me learning how to communicate with them (how much information to give and how much to ask and how to ask) was helpful. One veteran member in particular was very helpful and thoughtful.

The Board facilitator sent out his notes first, then reached out to me afterward in a separate email to let me know that he’d taken a point to stop by their desk to talk about me specifically and that he appreciated my feedback.

Maybe I just need to go into research and academia?

2020

Things are going well for me. Work sucks, my job is crazy. But I’ve got it compartmentalized.

I’m really happy in my new place. I was talking to someone (and if I’ve told this story here before, I apologize) and it dawned on me that this is the first time I’ve ever really created a space all by myself. I lived at home. I went to college, but that was shared with a roommate and temporary and there was only so much you could do. Joined the Army and a similar situation. Got married. My ex really ran the house. Not in a sexist kind of way. She just really, really got bored and wanted to constantly re-arrange, re-furnish and re do/re-cover/re-paint/re-whatever furniture. Our taste weren’t alike and I wanted things to stay the same and she was always changing things. After we divorced, I kept the house, and I made small changes, but a lot of things stayed the same. You were already used to a layout in the kitchen, so why change it? There’s only so many ways you can re-arrange furniture in a bedroom. It’s always kinda feel the same. Same bathroom, even if you change the tiles, repaint it, get new towels. Repainted, moved out of the basement, but it was still the same house. With the same ghosts. Without major reconstruction, it was always going to feel the same in a lot of ways.

This place was completely new to me. I left a lot of stuff at the old place. Started new with a lot of cloths, furnishing, appliances and plates and silverware. I left a lot of stuff to my son and his friends. This place has a distinctly masculine vibe, not that odd feeling of blending a guy’s and a girl’s tastes together. I have a huge rolling tool box for my TV stand and my leather work bench in the corner. Hammers, tools, guns, bikes. And I realize that this is important to me. This time, this period. Dating people is good, but not rushing into moving in with someone or more is important too. I’ve been alone and single before and I’m in a good place to date. But living in this space I’ve created is important, and I’m savoring it.

So all the day-to-day stuff that goes with that is good. My leatherwork is good. I’ve got good goals for 2020. My health is doing ok, considering I have a potentially fatal lung disease. 🙂

Marla got married this year. My grapevine told me. And I’m good with it. Having her at the wedding last year was annoying. Mainly because of the issues with my family. It felt like an intrusion and a lack of loyalty. It wasn’t because of unfinished business with us, or jealousy of her happiness with her boyfriend. I just didn’t need to daily see my past when I’m focusing on the future. Like it or not, there’s some reminder of past failings when I see her. I didn’t love it when she was at the guitar recital because there was still drama going on with my sister over the wedding. BUT, from both occasions, I was able to see how happy she was with her new guy, and how different she and he both were from me and where I am now. I don’t want that person in my life, nor do I want to be in hers. I don’t want that life. I love mine.

When my friend told me, there just wasn’t a pang, there wasn’t a hurt, there wasn’t a sniffle. I can’t say I’m happy for her, not because I resent her or resent that relationship, but because I just don’t care enough to really spend time thinking about it. I guess on some intellectual level, I’m happy if someone finds love, there needs to be more of it out in the world. This is a nice place to be. Not hung-up on past stuff, looking forward to and optimistic about the future.

So I’m going to go and do some stuff on my 2020 goal list. Late!

High School

A friend went to a high school reunion this weekend. Lots of drama with an ex, blah-blah-blah. But she had this to say and I thought it was brilliant:

Some people haven’t changed which is good and others haven’t and that’s bad. So pretty typical high school reunion.

The little things…

I’ve noticed myself doing little things for people. Like, in the process of doing it, I just catalog it. “Huh, this is a good thing.” I’m glad I’m doing them.

The thing that I overthink, is whether it’s normal now? Or is it me trying to. And at some point will I take someone for granted, and stop doing the little things? And then I remember my marriage, and all the things that I didn’t do then that I should’ve.

It would be really easy to beat myself up for that. But I wasn’t evil. Or inconsiderate. Just a lot less aware. I did little things. And I had a right to expect my partner do some of things that we argued about in terms of division of the chores around the house. The problem was a lack of awareness and experience.

I’m terrible when it comes to taking care of someone when they’re sick. Not as bad as I used to be. But not great. The problem is that when I’m sick, I just want to be left alone. I don’t like a lot of fuss. Give me a dark room and leave me alone to either die or get better. Because I don’t want anything, it’s hard for me to know how to take care of other people, it doesn’t come naturally. But over time, people have told me different things that they like when they’re sick, and I try to do those for someone. And if those don’t work, or make them feel better, or give them comfort, I ask them what they need and do that.

Doing little things for people is kind of like that for me. We weren’t deprived growing up, my Mom did little things for us, Dad brought things home for us kids when he traveled sometimes. But we definitely weren’t spoiled. And it wasn’t just gifts. It was a lot of the love languages. We had time with mom, but at the time we didn’t necessarily call it “quality time”. It was nagging us to do homework and to practice piano and do chores. Now I realize it for what it was but then it seemed… prison ward-y. Same thing as acts of service. In hindsight, Mom and Dad did tons for us, the best they could. But we didn’t see it as such. Instead of being grateful for the hard work Dad did to put a roof over our heads and clothes on our backs, we were upset he wasn’t at more of our games.

We didn’t touch. We didn’t hug as adults until after my older sister passed away. We DEFINITELY didn’t do words of affirmation. We great up thinking we were disappointing them all the time. We grew up pretty independent, which later in life seems like a terrific gift, but it took me awhile to realize it as such. I’m very self contained, so that created a general lack of awareness about what other people would like. The little things.

It’s been nice to open up and let people in. To know what it’s like to have someone go to the store and get gatorade for me when I’m sick, instead of having to go myself. To have a co-worker think of me and bring me a breakfast burrito at work. To have someone send me a text to say they’re just thinking of me. Have a friend buy an extra concert ticket for me. And it’s even nicer to know how to do those things for them. And to know that this IS normal. I was always an ok guy. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know.