Imposter Syndrome

Authenticity
Cartoon by Michael Lipsey
Facebook post
I was intrigued when my nephew Jerrod posted the definition of imposter syndrome: "the inability to internalize your accomplishments; the persistent fear of being exposed as a 'fraud.'"

Jerrod concluded: "I'm sure I have this; I've always said I've lucked into everything in my life."

And I had to concur: "Interesting and worrisome concept. A little voice inside my head likes to tell me that anything I've ever done (being a teacher, a writer, a parent, a daughter, etc.) has been substandard. Why is that? Now I know!"

Wikipedia says that the term was coined in 1978 by clinical psychologists, but I'm thinking back to 1977, when Marilyn French wrote The Women's Room and I felt in my gut the terrible truth of Kyla's oral exam:

" 'I really failed. . . . That's the truth. . . . They said I passed. . . . But I really failed. . . . They demoralized me, they had that kind of power, I gave them that kind of power. . . . I can't feel legitimate . . . ' " (563 - 564).

Sure sounds like "imposter syndrome" to me! I suppose it has been around forever and that we all (well, maybe not all?) suffer the side effects from time to time. Time to upgrade that self - image! But how?

***********************

Here's one helpful tip.
Should you ever start to feel this way, don't!
Please remember: untrue!
That's just the anxiety talking.

Instead, remember this message that
my nephew Hans sent awhile back
These are the true words!
I keep them in my saved file
and re-read whenever necessary:

***********************

Thanks again to Michael Lipsey, Jerrod Rosenbluth,
and Hans Carriker for sharing these insights!

More here from nephews & nieces.

***********************

P.S.
The Anxiety Lying to Me?
or Hey, has anybody seen my Self - Confidence?
I often brood about the perceived valuelessness of my role -- berating myself for not generating revenue, for lacking ambition, for giving up the struggle to do both the career and the kids. Yes, I was so lucky to be at home with my flexible schedule and my piano, my books, and my e-mail, my grocery store just around the corner and my kids across the street in their little brick school house. My family can live without my practicing my profession, and so can I, though at times I do feel rather useless and non-contributory, and non-revenue-generating. Still, it's hard not to love such a great life.

Even so, I sometimes fear that being respected around here is indeed tied to working for money. These days, working for love doesn't really count (if it ever did) as anything more than some kind of peculiar self - indulgent hobby. Of course, that may be just a distorted misreading on my part: you know, the ache of modernism, the quandary of the new millennium, the price of feminism, not to mention a surefire way of punishing myself in my head for never working hard enough, never being good enough. After all, the theme of my fundamentalist protestant upbringing was: "You should be ashamed of yourself, young lady." So is it any surprise that I am, even now at age 60? Pathetic, I know, but true.

Listless

LOST LIST
Uh oh! That scary moment
when you have only your mind to rely on!

by epigrammatist and collage artist
Michael Lipsey

Artist's note: "True story. It was at Target, where there could have been a thousand different things on the list. I posted these words a while ago, but it took some time to find an image for them."

LIST LESS
First and most important item on every list:
1. Make some more lists!

NOT LOST
Or, as we like to say around our house:
"It's not really lost unless Mom can't find it."

Another solution from childhood days:
sing the Blue's Clues Song:
"Go back, go back, go back, go back to where you were!"

*************************

Related blog post, on the serious side:
Lost & Found

Additional Words of Wisdom and
Collage Cartoons by Michael Lipsey

Trees, Trains, and Idiots

Imposter Syndrome

Election Aftermath

"Would you like anything to read?"

My Times

Hanging Onto the Dream & Winnow the Dreams

And a New One Just Begun

Cursive Writing & Cursive

First Friday

Parallax

A Little Crazier

Ancient Tortoise on the Road

Jonathan, the World’s Oldest Tortoise
born circa 1832

Never known to hail from the Midwestern United States;
and yet . . .

Recently my friend, artist and writer Michael Lipsey observed:

"In every life something occurs
that is so strange that one is
never quite sure if it actually
happened or was imagined.
(Spooky music is playing.)"
I immediately thought of that time on a rural highway in St. Charles County, Missouri, when I stopped my car to watch a huge tortoise walk slowly slowly slowly across the road in front of me. I didn't get out of the car, but it seemed like the tortoise's back would have been up to my knees if I had gone over to stand beside it. It was broad daylight, but no other cars around, no one in the car with me, no camera on hand for documentation, no such thing as a cellphone; so as I resumed my drive, I could only go inside my head and ask: "Did I just see that?"

That was nearly 50 years ago, and I still wonder! Was that tortoise a hundred years old? Or older? Where was it going? Where had it been? Truly I heard the spooky music that day and felt transported outside of Time as we know it.

Cherub on a Tortoise
by Dorothy Tennant (1855 – 1926)

Previous Michael Lipsey Connections:
Quotidian, Fortnightly, Kitti's List

Tuesday Afternoon

Photography by Jay Beets
"The trees are drawing me near
I've got to find out why . . . "
A song for the Vernal Equinox ~ when it falls on a Tuesday:

Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)
Tuesday afternoon
I'm just beginning to see
Now I'm on my way
It doesn't matter to me
Chasing the clouds away

Something calls to me
The trees are drawing me near
I've got to find out why*
Those gentle voices I hear
Explain it all with a sigh

I'm looking at myself reflections of my mind
It's just the kind of day to leave myself behind
So gently swaying through the fairyland of love
If you'll just come with me you'll see the beauty of
Tuesday afternoon

Tuesday afternoon
Tuesday afternoon
I'm just beginning to see
Now I'm on my way
It doesn't matter to me
Chasing the clouds away

Something calls to me
The trees are drawing me near
I've got to find out why
Those gentle voices I hear
Explain it all with a sigh

~ by Justin Hayward (b. 1946)
British musician, lead singer and guitarist for The Moody Blues

[*Could this be why: "If trees could build houses
they would build them out of our bones." ~ Michael Lipsey]

Whenever I hear anything from Days of Future Passed (1967), I always remember writing a letter to my friend and pen pal Jill in 1976. We had been in grade school together but gone to different highs schools and colleges. During the spring semester of our freshman year, no sooner had I written to tell her that I had just bought a copy of this album, than she wrote to me with the same news. It was such an odd coincidence, because it wasn't even a new album at the time, and we hadn't discussed it or anything. Just one of those funny synchronicities.

*******************
Although it took place on a Sunday not a Tuesday,
I also have to point out that
today is the wedding anniversary
of my maternal grandparents
Paul & Rovilla,
married 91 years ago today.

They were married 39 years.
Rovilla died in 1966; Paul in 1983.

Here they are in 1965

Hanging Onto the Dream

"There's an in between time when you wake up,
hanging onto the dream, but beginning to remember
things you need to do today."
by epigrammatist and collage artist
Michael Lipsey

Contemporary poet, Barbara Kunz Loots describes the tension between possibility and duty with elegant simplicity. For her the "infinite possibilities" are "delicate grain," the "infinite duties" are "the plain bread of day," and "hanging onto the dream" is watching "the gold illusion drift away":

Waking
How hard it is to winnow the dreams from waking,
To watch the gold illusion drift away
And turning to the delicate grain of morning
Grind it into the plain bread of day.
by Barbara Kunz Loots

Last day for
"Winnow the Dreams"
on the
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A fortnightly [every 14th & 28th]
literary blog of connection & coincidence; custom & ceremony

New fortnightly post coming tomorrow:
"At Least Eleven"

Daredevil

Daredevil Geranium ~ Salmon Pelargonium

It's been a month, and I still can't remember,
but I don't think it was about geraniums!

"Can anyone remind me why I wrote
'Daredevil'
on my to do list for today?"

1.
Jason Fish:
Wouldn't happen to refer to the new-ish TV series on Netflix?

Gerry:
That was my guess . . . someone must have mentioned it to us
. . . maybe it was Jason!?

Brendan McInerney:
It's an amazing series.

2.
Leonard Orr:
I hope you were not planning to walk on a tightrope
between two Chicago skyscrapers
(with Panama bag filled with books).


3.
Michael Lipsey:
Perhaps you were going to jump the Grand Canyon
on your motorcycle?

4.
Anthony Cawdron:
Buy their IPA

5.
Cate Delong:
I think you meant to buy a new lipstick in hot pink.
What do these guys know!

[My favorite: Extreme Pink, lower left]

6.
Nicole Evans-Greek:
Swim in freezing weather?

7.
Sherry Owens Vollmer:
When you do remember,
please tell us because now I'm dying to know!!
My vote would be the lipstick...hahaha!

8.
Bruce Carriker:
This was the day you're going skydiving.

P.S.
How about "The Present"?

Bones, Trees, Houses

"Bones...trees.....houses"
Cartoon by Michael Lipsey
A few weeks ago, when writing about the Guayacan Tree (and shortly thereafter on the Vernal Equinox) there was one quotation that kept eluding me, something I read somewhere about trees and houses made of bones. After an hour of fruitless searching for the lost thought, I gave up locating the passage and posted the essay without it, even though it would have made such a perfect connection. I lamented the failed memory recall, filing away the almost but not quite remembered line under "maybe one day I'll relocate it."
Today was the day!

I guess I know what I'm going to discuss tomorrow for my

Fortnightly Connection & Coincidence!

Stay tuned for

"Trees, Trains, and Idiots"!

A Little Crazier

"If you enjoy seeing things from a different angle, then this is the book for you -- or the perfect gift for a friend who likes to discuss life's larger questions: living and dying, love, work and play, religion, science, health and manners..."

***********************
A few months ago, I came across the following quotation, on A Word A Day, and thought it was so good that I just had to post it on facebook:

"Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self,
is nuts."
~ Leo Rosten ~

My facebook friend, artist and author of distilled wisdom,
Michael Lipsey
wrote back:

"Crazy people are only a little crazier."
see I Thought So (shown above, p 24)

This, in turn, brought to mind a couple of memorable passages from my previous reading:

1. The description given by David Sedaris of his job as one of Santa's Elves in a big department store. He deals with many visitors -- crying babies, excited and / or disappointed children, prejudiced parents, exhausted shoppers, and one day:

"At noon a huge crowd of retarded people came to visit Santa and passed me on my little island. These people were profoundly retarded. They were rolling their eyes and wagging their tongues and staggering toward Santa. It was a large group of retarded people and after watching them for a few minutes I could not begin to guess where the retarded people ended and the regular New Yorkers began.

"Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it."

from Holidays on Ice (p 15)
by David Sedaris

and

2. The description Margaret Drabble gives of her character Shirley's visit to a "Welcome Break" rest stop somewhere near London on the ring road. I had the good fortune to hear Drabble read aloud this very passage when she visited Purdue in 1991:

"The room is full of waifs, witches, grotesques. Shirley has never seen such a miserable of collection of people, such a gallery of unfortunates. What has gone wrong? Is this some outing for the disadvantaged, the disabled? No, it is Britain, round about Budget Day, March 1987. Shirley is appalled. An immensely obese woman . . . Two thin tall lanky youths . . . A young couple with a baby, pale like convicts . . . an old man on crutches . . . A young red-haired scruffy Irish girl with a back-pack . . . A grim - faced middle - aged couple . . . A four - foot dwarf . . . Is this the prosperous south, the land of the microchip? Everybody looks half dead, ill from the ill wind. Their faces are white, pink, grey, chapped, washed - out, ill nourished, unhealthy, sickly, sickening. . . . Shirley does not know whether she feels sorry for these tramps, these refugees, these motorway wanderers, or whether she feels she has nothing to do with them at all. Is she still part of the human race? Is this the human race, or are these shadows, ghosts, lingering afterthoughts? This cannot be what is meant.

"I am delirious, thinks Shirley. This is a dream, and these are apparitions. Perhaps, thinks Shirley, I died back there on the motorway. . . .

from A Natural Curiosity (p 128 - 29)
by Margaret Drabble
See also Drabble's The Peppered Moth

Readings for Lent, Easter, and Women's History Month

Handey, Hemingway, Huxley, Emerson,
Steve Jobs, Maya Angelou, Henri Nouwen,
Duo Dickinson, Michael Lipsey,
Nadia Bolz-Weber, and more,
reminding us each in their own ways:
Memento Mori
@The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker

Rembrandt, Stacey Zisook Robinson,
E. M. Forster, Ella Wheeler Wilcox,
depicting the steadfast
Esther of a Thousand Ideas
@The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker

Janeen Koconis, Lydia W. Gaitirira
and many young writers from Kenya, striving
To Create a Space for Women's Creativity
@Kitti's Book List

The Mourning After

Halloween ~ Just Before Midnight
Downtown Chicago 
Photo by Sam McCartney

Last night, a happy haunted Halloween; this morning, a blustery All Saints Day. We awake in mourning -- for Halloween, for October, for Daylight Saving Time. As of today, it's all over, and the bleak mid - autumn is upon us. In fact, we are precisely in the middle of autumn, at the magical half - way point between the Autumnal Equinox (Mabon) and the Winter Solstice (Yule), which is what all the Samhain and Dia de los Muertos celebrations are all about.

As a special bonus, the hour that we sacrificed back at the beginning of Daylight Time is restored to us, but still, despite that extra slice of light on the sundial, it seems to have have grown darker out and I cringe to "always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near." Why is that?

Thoughts from friends and poets:

"Time has come today! Time!"
Thanks Rita Burrell

"Do not let yourself be deluded by anyone;
this is all I teach." ~Rinzai
Thanks Michael Lipsey

"Take pity on time ." ~Edward Lucie - Smith

" . . . our pitiful share of time . . ." ~X.J. Kennedy

"Do not pity the dead, Harry.
Pity the living . . . " ~ J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (722)

*************

And, finally, this poem, which you might remember
was recited in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral
-- that's how I first learned about it.
In connection with the above passages, I think it explains why
the custom of mourning for an entire year makes a lot of sense:

Funeral Blues
(Song IX / from Two Songs for Hedli Anderson)

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)

*************

Need something to fill that extra hour?
In addition to contemplating our mortality
and that of our loved ones, past and present,
check out my book blog & get some reading done!
Current post: "The Jeweled Books in the Shelves"

Cursive Writing

D'Nealian Script, a cursive alphabet —
lower case and upper case.

"I've always believed that there was a certain age
after which I would be all well and I'd stop feeling
as if I'd been abandoned here on earth with no explanation.
When I was little, the magic number was 6 --
the first - graders had maturity, secret information
(like gnostics), and lunch boxes. Then 13, 18, 21 . . ."
~ Anne Lamott ~
from Grace Eventually (p 243)
When I read these words a few years ago, I identified at once with Lamott's first - grade faith that all would be well and her misconception that the bigger kids had all the answers. Her gradual deflation expresses precisely the dismay that I felt back in grade school when I learned the truth about cursive writing -- that it was a sham, a trick, a false lead.

I shared my cursive writing story recently with epigrammatist, writer, and artist Michael Lipsey when he posted a similar sentiment on facebook:

"The biggest misconceptions of youth are that
somehow things will fall into place as you get older,
that there will be answers to the larger questions,
that you will attain maturity, and certainties,
and self-confidence. Perhaps this is true
if you have a talent for self-deception.
But eventually you figure out
that there won’t be any of these things --
that you will just have to muddle through
as best you can until the end."
For more on Cursive Writing and the Meaning of Life
see my new post "Cursive"
on The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker

Time's Most Favored Season

Laguna Beach Nursery and Garden Center, California
Don't let anyone tell you that autumn doesn't come to Southern California!
These are without a doubt the most amazing pumpkins and
the most beautiful harvest displays that I've seen all season!

******************

"Ada had tried to love all the year equally . . .
Nevertheless, she could not get over loving autumn best . . . "
~ Cold Mountain ~ Charles Frazier ~

**********************
Almost Halloween, that mystical half - way point between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice! Like Frazier's Ada, I too have a heart that favors fall. In fact, one of my favorite poets, Lee Perron, claims that even Time loves autumn best:

Fall Arrives
Fall arrives, time’s most favored season—
at last the heart, the mind loosens its fist
so that I no longer need to know who I am

I return to the hills and the great presences—
light, heat, clouds, the bull pines—
to recover for myself the purity of the falling world
to enfold it like a pearl in the mind’s silence

I read the calligraphy of the oaks against
the fading skies, the grass bending in the meadow,
the last robins— I’m a circle reaching
the first place for the first time

for in youth among fall leaves I refused
to acknowledge the ancient writing—
that the basket of summer empties, that
the hours of men are as wind-driven clouds—
and yet among fall leaves
I was overjoyed with the beauty of loss

now I stand on autumn’s wooded knoll
that my life too may vanish,
that night may fall into the earth’s arms

time is calling her trout
from their playgrounds in the sea
to river mouth, and redemption, and fury

it is by means of the long delay
that we come to the righteousness of passion.

by Lee Perron
Contemporary American Poet & Antiquarian Bookseller

For this poem and more, by
Janis Ian, Stephen Stills, Michael Lipsey, the Little Prince,
the prophet Jeremiah, Green Day, and Optimism Revolution

see my latest post
about autumn, time, and contentment

"My Times"

on
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A fortnightly [every 14th & 28th]
literary blog of connection & coincidence; custom & ceremony

Reading the Obituaries

"True Romance #5"
in True Stories ~ by Margaret Atwood
I don't think about you as much as I ought to, I don't have to, you're there whether I think about you or not. Many people aren't.

When I do think about you it's not what you'd expect. I don't want to be with you: most of the time that would be an interruption for both of us. I like to consider you going about your routine. I think about you getting up, brushing your teeth, having breakfast [and reading the obituaries]. I vary the breakfasts, though I don't devise anything too fanciful for you, I stick to cornflakes, orange juice, eggs, things like that. No strawberries out of season. I find it soothing to think about you eating these mundane and in fact somewhat austere breakfasts. It makes me feel safe.

But why should you go on eating breakfast at the same time, in the same way, day after day, just so I will be able to feel safe? You're contented enough, true, but there must be more. I'm getting around to that. One of these mornings, when you reach the bottom of your cup, coffee or tea, it could be either, you will look and there will be a severed finger, bloodless, anonymous, a little signal of death sent to you from the foreign country where they grow such things. Or you will glance down at your egg, four minutes, sitting in its dish white and as yet uncracked and serene as ever, and sunlight will be coming out of it. But on second thought your coffee cup will be vacant and the egg, when you finally close your eyes and slice it open blindly with the edge of your spoon, will have nothing in it that is not ordinarily there. Then you will know that at last I have imagined you perfectly. (44)

Breakfast Pottery by Emma Bridgewater

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Previous March First Posts

2010: Kiss Me & Kiss Today & Dear March

2011: My Vegetable Love

2012: Love However Brief

2013: Beyond Ideas

2014: The First [Mild] Day of March

2015: Wind from a Leaf

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

An Anne Taintor for Michael Lipsey!

First Friday

Across the country, in many towns and cities you can find a variety of First Friday events, most having to do with art galleries, restaurants, neighborhood tours, and Open Houses. Here in my little community, the event that I participate in on the First Friday of every month is a spirituality discussion group. We gather informally, but regularly, just seven or eight of us, to talk about the nature of our quest for spiritual connection -- within ourselves, with each other, with the universe.

We have each tried many paths to peace, and we share with each other what has worked so far and what has not. For me, the journey is like Franz Kafka's reflexive parable on parables:

On Parables
Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says "Go over," he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter. . . . *
from Parables and Paradoxes
by Franz Kafka, 1883 - 1924
The fabulous, the unknown, the incomprehensible, the cares we have to struggle with. That's what we discuss.

For example, this past Friday, we invited a special guest, Goldie Freeman, who talked to us about strategies for stress reduction, relaxation, and self - healing (see card above). I was most intrigued by Goldie's description of how our souls can be shattered by trauma and how the dislocated shards must be gathered and restored in order to achieve spiritual wholeness and health.

I couldn't help thinking of the selfish Voldemort who severs his soul intentionally, in his remorseless quest for immortality at the expense of others. The symbology of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had been on my mind all day, and prior to Goldie's presentation, I had been explaining to other group members about the Horcruxes and the Hallows. So, what a fitting coincidence that the divided soul should be one of our topics for the evening!

No matter what the subject happens to be, I never fail to leave a First Friday meeting without plenty of food for thought and the certainty of feeling more connected to the spiritual universe than I did before.

“Promises for apparently impossible contingencies
are not given. But if one achieves the impossible,
the promises appear retrospectively,
precisely where one had looked in vain
for them before.” ~Kafka
P.S. My thanks to Michael Lipsey, Master of the Epigram, for this concluding passage from Kafka.

*To read the entire parable, see my post "Go Over!"