The first thing I wrote for myself, not for class, that wasn’t a diary entry, was a poem I composed using my mother’s typewriter at the age of 11:

In my world everyone is a friend.
The most happiest times never end.

I’ll lie there at the break of dawn
Watching the fun of a little fawn.

Take me to the world of dreams,
Away from all the fights,
Away from all the screams.

The second thing I wrote for myself, not for class, was a poem I typed on a computer my dad got us when I was 12 or 13. I don’t recall the linebreaks, so here it is, to the best of my memory, in prose:

Being an adolescent is not as easy as you think. You don’t understand what I’m going through, ’cause all you do is drink. The pain, the problems, the pressure. It’s too much for me to bear. The confusion and the choices. It’s like you just don’t care. It pisses me off the way you think adolescence is such a blast. You just don’t understand it all, so kiss my little ass.

That first poem was written out of wish fulfillment: I wanted the other kids to be nicer to me and for my life to go more easily. The second poem was written differently. One day in my English class, I saw on the wall a poem by Bryan Billington, a boy in the grade above mine who was once on my basketball team and who my sister had a crush on. Bryan Billington’s poem was so mad at a father who was so terrible. I was shocked that people our age could say such things on paper, and by the end of the poem I felt something of the catharsis the speaker went through. I was so impressed by it, and I wanted to make such a poem, too, in the hopes that I might impress somebody, so I imagined what it must be like to grow up, as I did not, with an alcoholic, abusive father, and I tried my best to write what Bryan Billington had already written.

II.
The semester just ended a couple weeks ago. In my workshop, I tried to talk about risk and vulnerability in nonfiction, and a number of my students talked openly about Imposter Syndrome: they feel often like they’re posing or pretending as writers. My response was, unhelpfully, Join the club.

I’ve spent 15 years now pretending to be a writer, posing as one, the way I started writing back when I was 13. I’ve worked hard to read very closely what other successful, published writers are doing, what they are making that’s getting attention, and trying to replicate that in something I’ve made in the hopes that I might get similar attention.

Attention is the heart of it. When you’re the youngest kid in a family, attention is gold. You spend hours each day digging around for it, sniffing out where you might find even just a pebble-sized speck of it. And when you do find it, you raise it up in the air and kick your heels together in delight.

In college, I had friends who wrote, who were officially in Creative Writing Classes, and who got to give readings at coffee shops in town. Wouldn’t that be fun? I’d grown up somehow to believe I was special, different, probably better than most kids, and that I deserved a life befitting such a special person. But I couldn’t act. And I couldn’t sing well. Writing seemed my only shot at escaping the fate of never being noticed. 

So: I’ve been an imposter for 15 years, working on books and publishing a couple of them, getting up most mornings to write more of a draft, or revise another one—yet what else does a writer do? What else makes a Real Writer than getting up and writing most days? What I was tacitly packing into my “Join the club” response was this feeling: All this time I’ve been doing the work of writing, of being a writer, and at every moment I’ve been waiting for a student, or a critic, or a peer to call me out on it. You’re only pretending to be one of us. You don’t actually have any talent, drive, or vision.

Imposter Syndrome. It was their word for it.

III.
Imposter Syndrome is a trap the mind makes. That trap is the basis for David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon”, which remains my favorite of his stories, because nobody else has done as good a job rendering the contours of this experience. One way out of the trap is learning that no one—foremost none of those imaginary people waiting to call me out on being a fraud—can pin down with any certainty what authenticity entails.

In other words: We all fake it until we make it.

But here, remembering my earliest writing, I’ve found another way out of the trap. I’ve always thought that I began posing as a writer since the first thing I ever wrote, but that’s not true. It’s only the first thing I ever wrote on a computer. The real first poem, the one I wrote on Mom’s typewriter, came from somewhere different than the big lie about my dad.

“In My World” was unoriginal doggerel that nevertheless put forward a vision I had of making the world a better place. It came out of what I felt, and what I wanted. And now, every time I stand in front of a classroom, and I pull out of my ass something to say that I hope sounds smart enough to ward off the pending mutiny I’m always afraid is afoot, and every time I delete a sentence I’ve written because I imagine some future reader calling me out for ripping off Wallace, or Unferth, or Nelson, or Koestenbaum, I think back of the first time I tried to make a piece of writing, and I remember that if I’m posing, all I’m trying to pose as is that kid, wanting the world to be better and more beautiful.