David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

art

Getting better at all I do is only way to fight ‘imposter syndrome’

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Nobody ever taught me how to write. Nobody taught me how to take photos. Nobody taught me how to do graphic design. Or political consulting. Or filmmaking. I’ve never been taught properly how to do any of the things I’ve spent my life doing. Because of this, I have a terrible secret.

I’m insecure about most of what I do. I feel like a fraud — and I’m scared I’ll be exposed one day.

See this simple photo of Molly sitting on my desk over the weekend? I could not have taken that photo a year ago. It looks simple — and that’s much of its charm — but it’s a very difficult photograph, at least by my standards. And unless you know a lot about photography, you wouldn’t be able to shoot it correctly, either.

If people love what I do, I beat myself up and say they just don’t realize how untalented I am. I tell myself they don’t see the work which I attempt and throw away because it’s terrible. They don’t know I’m a fraud — as a writer, photographer, filmmaker, whatever. I’m hiding it from them.

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I’m losing need to explain myself to those who misunderstand me

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For most of my life, I lived with a fear of not being understood.

When people misunderstood me in some way — my intentions, my ideas, my motivations — I rushed to explain myself. The more I grew and changed, the more my ideas and thinking diverged from that of the mainstream culture around me, so the more I felt alienated. The more I felt misunderstood. And the more I felt a slight panic that I would be “in trouble.”

This took me a long time to figure out.

When I was a child, I constantly had to explain myself. My father could launch into one of his verbal assaults any time the mood struck him. If I said the most casual of things which he misunderstood — as “disrespectful” or wrong in some way — I could be under assault without warning. And once he started, he never backed down.

I learned to go to insane lengths to be clear to him, but I still worried about the inevitable misunderstanding — and I grew up to take that same fear of being misunderstood into all of my life.

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Great men who change the world rarely look impressive from start

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It was a surprise to hear from her, but it was an even bigger surprise to find out why she was calling. An old girlfriend was looking for a recording of an interview I did about six years ago with KFAR radio in Anchorage, Alaska. I didn’t know she had even known of the interview.

I started searching through my archives Saturday afternoon, but the search for the interview turned into a survey of hundreds of other things I’ve written and recorded over the last eight years. I was uneasy with how much I hated most of the older material and I was surprised at how dramatic the shift in tone and emotion had been for my work.

From this perspective, I see something much different in my work over eight years. I see what I’ve written and spoken as a vivid record of a struggle for me to become a different person, as though I knew I was changing but was both impatient and agitated about where I was going. Seeing this clearly made me feel very vulnerable.

When I contacted my ex this evening to say that I couldn’t find the recording she wanted, I mentioned what it had felt like to see my changes through the old work.

“I always thought you were going to change the world,” she wrote in her reply. “What you’re writing now is closer to what I thought you would be than anything you had done before. Every great man goes through a dark night when he’s trying to figure out his purpose, but you feel like you’re about to explode to fame, because you’ve found your voice. I’m sorry it didn’t work out for me to be there when it happens, because you’re quite addictive.”

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