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My entire life, I’ve felt like a fake. An impostor, someone parading about as a normal person, terrified that any second someone would rip off my mask and reveal the monster underneath, like some Scooby Doo villain. “This is no normal person at all!” Velma would declare knowingly. “Just a sad, insecure creature with bipolar disorder and closeted love for women!”
However, it wasn’t until I began writing that I learned there was an actual name to this feeling. I remember when I published my first book. The excitement I felt for a solid week, for once feeling like I’d actually done something worth mentioning. Then I went out with my husband to meet some new people and a stranger asked me what I do for a living. I was unemployed, not going to college and had just published my first book with plans to write another. What did I tell them?
“I’m a stay at home mom.”
My husband looked at me with this incredulous face and then looked back at the stranger and said “sorry, she’s a writer. She just published her first book.” I then proceeded to demean my accomplishment by saying things like “oh, it was self published” and “it was just a sort of writing experiment.” When we got home, my husband launched into an entire Inquisition asking me why I said the things I did. I told him that I wasn’t a real writer, therefore I can’t exactly call myself an author…
