Here’s your mantra for the week! This week’s card is from my Cards for Creative Courage oracle deck. You can get it here or here.
Today’s card reminded me of a guest post I wrote a while back, during the book tour of my second gratitude journal. The post was originally published on WestVeil Publishing on 26 September 2022, and in it I explained how I’d learned to live with imposter syndrome.
Rereading it now, I can’t help but want to share that post with you, especially since it reminds me so much of what I’d written for my first Monday Musing here on Substack. In that post, I mused about Paulo Coelho’s quote ‘If it’s still in your mind, it is worth taking the risk’ and how it changed how I respond to my creative impulses.
Here’s the original post:
Living with imposter syndrome
Someone recently asked me what had been the most difficult thing to overcome on my journey to becoming a published author.
I didn’t have an immediate answer, since there’s a lot I find hard. Both about being a writer and about being a published author. Especially when it comes to books that have my own name on it.
When I arrived in Edinburgh for the 20Booksto50K conference and writing retreat during the summer of 2019, I had published two anthologies and one romance novella. While these books hadn’t been easy to produce, they hadn’t been that hard to publish. The romance novella was co-written with a friend and, since we’d published it under a pen name, it didn’t have my own name on it.
The anthologies did have my name on them, but they were mostly other people’s stories. I’d written the introductions and one included a very short story by myself, but that was it. I was plenty of nervous about that, but since only a fraction of the finished books was actually written by me as me, I was able to let it go.
While the only plan for Edinburgh had been to finish the second romance novella, I found myself talking to a number of non-fiction authors over the week. I’d been playing with two non-fiction ideas forever, but I had no concrete – let alone immediate – plans to actually publish these books. Not only had I never written anything like them before, I also knew I’d be publishing them under my own name, if it ever got that far.
I understand now that it was that particular combination that made it so hard to ignore the awful little voice inside my head that is my imposter syndrome. I’ve always worried about whether the world was actually waiting for my creations – because who am I to write about X or Y – but nothing I’d ever published had been mine alone, even if it had my name on the cover.
Those non-fictions books would be all mine, and that scared the hell out of me. It meant that people knew who to point to when they – inevitably, of course, as my imposter syndrome kept reminding me – hated what I’d written. There would be no pen name to protect me, and neither could I soothe my imposter syndrome by reminding it only a small part of the book was actually mine.
Talking about my ideas with those other non-fiction authors in Edinburgh and seeing how both excited them convinced me to publish the two books after all. In fact, I published the first one in the week after the conference, and the second one a week later, while I was still riding high after all the support I’d received during the conference.
I published those first two non-fiction books without much faith in myself. It was other authors’ overwhelming faith in me that helped me silence my imposter syndrome enough to actually get the books out there. However, as I witnessed how well both books were received, my own faith grew. It made me realise I’d been right about these ideas all along – they had been worthy of pursuing, no matter what my imposter syndrome had been trying to tell me.
I’m still not ever convinced that my next book is going to have an audience, but publishing these first two non-fiction book has taught me that, if a creative idea truly resonates with me – and just won’t leave me alone – it’s worth pursuing. It taught me to focus on what I’m creating, on what I’m bringing into the world, not on whether or not anyone would be interested in it once it was there. It also taught me to focus on why I wanted to pursue something and what I had to give to the world, instead of on what the world might want or expect from me.
The closer I’m able to stay with myself while creating something new, the less my imposter syndrome shows up. It’s always there, lurking in the shadows, but as long as I stay focused on me and what I’m creating, it’s not as loud and persistent about how or why the world doesn’t need yet another one of my books.
Publishing those two books might not have silenced my imposter syndrome forever – I don’t think anything truly can, to be honest – but it did help me find a way to live with it without it getting too much in my way.
It’s been one-and-a-half years since I wrote this post, but much of it continues to be true for me. My imposter syndrome does show up less and less – even if it’s still lurking, ready to come at me when I let my guard down – and it’s even less in the way than it was in September 2022.
I still don’t think I’ll be able to get rid of it entirely, but when I look back at where I was before traveling to Edinburgh to attend that conference and retreat and where I am now, I can’t but acknowledge how far I’ve come over the past five years.
It’s like C.S. Lewis once said,
‘Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when we look back everything is different?’
It makes me excited to see where I’ll be once the next five years have passed.
When was the last time you reflected on your progress? If it’s been a while, you might want to take a moment and sit with where you are now and how it compares to where you were five, or even ten, years ago.
Happy creating, and happy reflecting, this week <3
Mariëlle
Does cartomancy intrigue you, but you aren’t sure where to start? Or do you own a deck but aren’t entirely sure what to do with it?
So You Want to Sling Cards, Too? is a three-week mini-course for those who are entirely new to cardslinging and those who’ve just started playing with cards.
During this live course, which consists of three 90-minute Zoom calls, we’ll move from getting to know your card deck to learning how to interpret your cards, to asking your cards the right questions.
For more information and to enrol, click here.