Is it Imposter Syndrome when you’re a nobody?

I’m about to get what the kids call ‘real’ here, well more so I guess, but whilst I’ve been recovering I’d had to deal with reflecting on this last year and have been thinking about how… empty my exhibition had left me. I felt like an interloper, like I didn’t deserve to be on those walls with everyone else, like I got an automatic pass when everyone else has been an extra two months of work compared to me. I just didn’t feel like I deserved to be there.

I should be extremely clear on this, no one in my class made me feel this way. In fact everyone has been extremely supportive and frankly I’d literally wouldn’t have been there if they hadn’t had done the work of framing and hanging my work… I guess I also feels worse because of this, because my brain is fucking diseased.

Neil Gaiman recounts a story about another Neil’s feeling of inadequacy and of the first times I think myself and the world at large came to hear the phrase ‘Imposter Syndrome’, and in many ways I felt that way in this exhibition… what struck me is that I didn’t feel that way at the Salon and ONO earlier on in the year.

I think the difference here on reflection is that I feel proud that I got into those two fairly. With ONO I was helping out a lot with setup and back end, being the secretary of the group and was taking notes and minutes all the way up to my hospitalisation. With the Salon I was selected for the work by professionals and I do feel like I earned my placement on those walls. So why do I not feel the same this time?

Looking back on what I just wrote it hadn’t occured to me that it might sound like I wanted to be praised for my attendance, and just to be clear I did not. I got embarrassed when I returned to class one time after my hospitalisation and people clapped for me, and no the baby didn’t look at me. Again the class has been nothing but overwhelmingly supportive, and maybe that’s why I feel like a fraud.

Part of me feels like I could have done more with my work, to use the time I wasted to make it pop a little more, or maybe gone with an alternative printing process instead of cyanotype (which in honesty it would never had gotten finished as I was unable to get into TAFE to print that entire time). I feel like everyone else’s work was just so damn good and mine… just wasn’t. It feels like whilst everyone ran to the finish line, I tripped and fell with maybe the tip of a pinkie just over it to qualify. What sucks is that I know I couldn’t have done more, and yet I can’t shake this feeling that I didn’t do enough to be there.

I’m both proud and disappointed in my work, especially as it didn’t sell despite some assurances it might (not that I believed it tbh), and I really could have used the money at the moment… especially with the non-prize I got from the Skulls Award.

What hurts is that after a year of working hard, pushing myself, to going through a life-changing situation, failing out of a degree I deeply wanted, and spending months stuck in misery… it ended so flat. I would have appreciated it more if my work had just spontaneously combusted leaving everyone else’s work intact… and yes I have contemplated setting fire to the bloody thing.

S