Imposter Syndrome

One of the benefits of living an interesting life is that I’ve had the opportunity to make interesting friends. One of the disadvantages of having low self-esteem is that I’m forever measuring myself against them and coming up short.

I’ve always struggled with this. I sent my Subaru Justy post to Kyle as a way of reconnecting and he was amused and surprised by a few things, notably that I thought he was a couple of years older than me. He was a year ahead of me in school, but only because his birthday is just a few days after the cutoff. He’s only 4 months older than me. (Also, it was an ‘88 Justy, and there were 7 people in it. Memory, you sketchy bastard.)

When we met he knew more about computers, which I was fascinated by. He knew about music and bands I’d never heard of, he had a wealth of in-depth knowledge about things, he was way more athletic than me, and he had this sort of reckless confidence that I definitely admired so in my head I immediately put him above me. (Which, of course, triggered my competitiveness but that’s a whole other blog post.) And when I started thinking about this I noticed that I have a life-long pattern of immediately deferring to people I admire for one reason or another, putting myself below them in some imagined hierarchy and marking myself as their inferior, not a peer.

I neither recognized this pattern nor realized there was a name for it until 2010 when I was invited to attend ORD Camp in Chicago. ORD Camp is (was?) an event in Chicago that, until COVID fucked up everything, was a yearly gathering of a curated group of the best and brightest in a wide variety of fields. From their website:

ORD Camp is an invitation-only unconference in Chicago. The one thing that all invitees have in common is that they are exceptionally passionate about what they do. We hand picked ~350 people that will make the event interactive, provocative, and thought provoking. If you think you should get an invitation, check out our call for attendance.

The purpose of ORD Camp is to bring together a group of interesting people in the Midwest and beyond to create new connections and collaborations. We’ve invited people doing interesting work in fields such as art, education, data visualization, software engineering, mechanical engineering, customer service, usability, cooking, computer security, hardware hacking, juggling, and other emerging fields.

I was nominated to attend by my friend Harper, who is an incredibly daunting person to be friends with. He’s loud, funny, outgoing, generous, kind, and a for-real, no hyperbole, actual genius. He thinks about things from angles that I sometimes cannot even comprehend and talking to him sometimes feel like being a dog in a math class.

dafuq?

ORD Camp put me in a position to meet a lot of people like Harper. Entrepreneurs, creatives, facilitators, performers, thinkers, doers, makers….a lot of great minds, all in one place, all being nice to dumbass ol’ me for no good reason at all because I definitely am a total piece of shit. This is absolutely how I felt walking around that first ORD Camp…it was deeply inspiring to hear so many brilliant people talk about the brilliant stuff they were working on but also, I am just a moderately charming guy who throws shit around and makes jokes about it. In the “how do you stack up to this dude who just sold his company to Google for more money than you’ll ever see in your lifetime you Florida white trash chump” department I was, shall we say….lacking? So I tried my best to keep my mouth shut and observe and what I realized was this:

In a room full of geniuses, nearly all of them think they’re the imposter.

I’ve been lucky enough to be invited back to ORD Camp many times over the years and I’ve met more and more incredible people and the only defining characteristics that everyone seems to share is that they’re brilliant and they don’t understand why they got invited. Imagine zooming out on that picture! There’s an old adage, I learned it from carny friends, that if you can’t spot the mark in the first 10 seconds of the game you are the mark. And here you have a gathering of people all desperately assuming they are the mark because they’ve arrived in the one place in the whole damn world where no one is.

Even funnier, the unofficial game of ORD Camp is Werewolf…a party game where everyone is a Villager except for a couple of people who are secretly Werewolves slowly killing off everyone until they get caught or win. The thickness of that irony, that a room full of people who think they’re an imposter are playing a party game where your job is to ferret out the imposters…when I first caught it myself I laughed for a solid 10 minutes.

I’ve had some of the very best conversations of my life at that conference, or with people I’ve met there, and over the years those people and those friendships have helped me to finally understand and accept my worth in the world.

It took a room full of imposters to make me finally feel like I wasn’t one.

And they aren’t, either, but of course they’ll have to come around to that on their own like I did. And I think maybe that’s the biggest thing I took away from all of it…I was able to see and understand this larger picture of how many other people are completely alone but on a similar journey as me. We’re all just these bright dots, pinging around, and trying to find a way in the world that won’t dim us too much. Our struggles are the same but different, our stories are the same but different, our ends will be the same but different. I have written about community before and will definitely do it again and again at greater detail and length, but the community I found with ORD Camp truly has changed me in ways that I feel every day.

Thanks for that, Harper. And thanks also to the founders of ORD Camp, Fitz and Zach, for having me back again and again and helping me find my way. Everyone should be so lucky to have such amazing friends to light their way.