But What do You do?

At the start of this year and the turn of the decade (though I am aware of the arguments surrounding whether 2020 was the start of a new decade or if 2019 started the decade…it’s a thing, look it up… But I digress) I spent a little time reflecting over the last ten years of my life.  I – like many of those whose lives I have the opportunity to catch glimpses of through the lens of social media – feel the proud accomplishment of starting a family.  I marvel at the mysterious way that starting a family seems very recent and very far off all at the same time.  Sometimes I can remember doing the things that childless adults do like it was yesterday, and sometimes I can’t believe my children weren’t always right here beside me.  What incredible little beings children are, and you have to admire the power they have to go back and forth between making you feel like everything and then sometimes like nothing with immense agility.  One afternoon my children and I were admiring the many abilities my younger sister possesses that would impress most anyone, but especially young girls ages four and six, their ages at the time.  We discussed her talent for sewing which provides them with artfully-made felt toys in the shapes of various fruits and vegetables and crafty homemade costumes for Halloween and themed birthday parties as well as her mad pogo-stick skills allowing her to hop up and down stairs, which she had mastered as a child.  After listening to me explain to them that these are wonderful talents and that they could do these things too if they only practiced, the eldest of the two asked, “Mommy, what can you do?”  To this the younger one replied, “Mommy’s really good at laundry.”  We all laughed and I thanked her for noticing my adeptness at this monotonous and typically unnoticed task, but I couldn’t stop thinking – you could say haven’t stopped thinking – about my older daughter’s question.  What can I do?  It’s true I’m not a person of especially great talent.  I am by nature a highly inquisitive person and my somewhat obsessive behavior often leads me down paths of research or experimentation in a subject or activity I find interesting just long enough to be considered adequate; and then I move on.  


When I entered graduate school a few years ago after being out of school for nearly ten years, I felt out-of-place for more reasons than being a bit older than most MA students.  I felt my brain had turned to mush in the time I had been away and I was learning to be a student all over again, and let’s face it, I’m not sure I was the best student even when I was one for eighteen consecutive years.  In the first and second semesters I asked several people advice on how to navigate through grad school, and almost everyone I asked gave the same answer.  Fake it ‘til you make it.  I was astonished at not only the frequency with which this answer was given, but with the sources that delivered them.  It wasn’t just fellow MA students saying this, it was the PhD students, professionals, a professor!  I was “shook” as the internet would have it.  My husband is an advocate of the fake-it-‘til-you-make-it mentality but he’s a trained actor, a trade where making it literally is faking it.  Surely these intellectual academics don't fake it, do they?


In the late 1970s, psychologists Suzanne Imes and Pauline Rose Clance coined the term "imposter phenomenon," which is now more commonly known as “imposter syndrome.”  It refers to the idea that though an individual has experienced a great amount of success they retain internalized feelings of fear of eventually being exposed as a fraud.  These individuals often feel that their success is accidental or acquired by luck rather than hard work, knowledge, or any real merit.  I wasn’t aware of this phenomenon until grad school, yet no two words could so thoroughly describe my experience.  I believed I received “A” grades because the professors were nice or that I passed my French translation exam by luck or that I survived my culminating experience oral exam because the evaluators of said exam felt sorry for me.  Reading has always been my thing, yet suddenly I felt inadequate at even that.  

In the years of adolescence when our personalities are reduced to our interests which usually take shape with our after-school activities we are often asked “What do you like to do?”  An introvert’s interests don’t often count as extracurricular activities.  Among mine were nature, animals, music, books.  “Yes, but what do you do?” Some people are just relentless.  The truth is I like to do everything.  In fact, I want to do so many things that I have not taken the time to master any of them.  One could argue that Audrey Hepburn was not the best actress, singer, or dancer, yet she did all of these things in her movies and was considered among the best of her time. Although My Fair Lady can’t count because Eliza Doolittle’s voice belonged to Marni Nixon, Hepburn’s breathy performance of “Moon River” moves me to this day, but I wouldn’t say the girl had pipes or anything.  What she offers is something else.  What she was and what she had to offer transcends how she did each thing individually.  Nobody can master all the things…unless you’re Beyoncé, but even she has her fair share of haters.  Perfection is a façade because it is an idea of which no two people share one definition.  

Perfectionism (at least, my idea of it) and the lack of one primary talent are two very conflicting and confusing personality traits.  The perfectionist in me wants to withhold anything that isn’t up to the highest standard, and because of that I took six years of French and translated a piece of French text at the graduate level yet still did not speak one word of it on my last trip to Paris for fear of being judged.  Imposter syndrome is no joke.  I have recently decided, however, to take the advice I was given years ago about graduate school and apply it to general life.  Thanks to a book by Barnet Bain titled The Book of Doing and Being I am learning how to tap into a creative side of myself that I’m still  unsure I possess.  I typed out a couple of children’s books that sit on the desktop of my computer and I read them to my children.  Last week my oldest daughter, now eight, asked me to guess her favorite writer.  If you have or have had young children you know that they don’t ever come right out and tell you anything, you inevitably must guess first.  After naming the writers of what I know to be her favorite books she shook her head, looked up at me and said, “No, mommy.  You are.”  I may not ever find that one thing that I really know how to do, but I do know that I must be doing something right.