Monthly Archives: August 2023

Behind the Story – Writing Through Imposter Syndrome

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On Sunday, I wrote about imposter syndrome in life (click here if you want to read it), about how no one knows everything or has their shit together 24/7. Today I want to talk about that in terms of writing.

First, there is not a single writer in the world who had a complete piece of writing in their head and wrote a completely perfect draft with no revisions needed. And if some asshole says they wrote something perfectly the first time, they’re lying through their ass and two, probably a very shitty writer because nothing comes out perfectly the first time. Yet… there are people in this world who think writing should be perfect every time and demand an explanation when they find out that’s not how it works.

No one has the right to make a demand of anyone, especially a writer, that they explain things perfectly or do things perfectly the first time out. Yet I have been paralyzed so many times by the thought of someone coming at me like that. Why? Because I was raised and adapted myself to be an appeaser, to go silent and try to get someone off my ass rather than just telling them to fuck off. And when I did attempt to tell someone to fuck off, they got all butt-hurt and more often than not I backed down. If someone decides to be a know-it-all demanding busybody, I will tell them to fuck off and take their butt-hurt bullshit with them. And this is something I believe any writer who has thought and felt like I have needs to practice saying out loud and writing it down because if you do that enough times, you’ll be able to do if and when the time comes.

In the forty years I’ve been writing, I’ve had people come to me and tell me how to write and or demanded to know why I haven’t written something or put something out… when they haven’t written a damn thing or published anything themselves. Why these ignorant, entitled jerk-wads feel like they have the right to be ignorant demanding pricks is a question I’ll never be able to answer. But in the past I caved into their bullshit more often than not and I did it for so long I thought that everyone in the world had their shit together and I didn’t. Now I know that’s not true at all and I will tell that to someone’s face if I’m ever given the opportunity.

Creativity is not easy. In fact, I would say it’s a ginormous pain in the ass sometimes. I would say it’s a lot of fits and starts, and banging out stuff till you find the riff you’re looking for. If you watch the recent documentary ‘Get Back’ about The Beatles sessions for their final album ‘Let It Be’, you’ll see a scene where Paul McCartney is playing his bass guitar humming along until he sings the line, “Get Back” and George Harrison and Ringo Starr look up and realize Paul is on to something. Within that day, they got the song ‘Get Back’. But it doesn’t always happen like this. For example, Brian Wilson took two months and twenty sessions to get ‘Good Vibrations’- one song over two months at a cost of ten thousand dollars, the most ever for a single song at that time. So creativity can go either way and that’s what I want to emphasize here more than anything.

And I want to say creativity, even in non-fiction form like I’ve been working in here and in my non-fiction book projects does involve pounding a bass guitar until the riff and the melody come to me and it might take two months or more to get things to come together. Tomorrow I’m going to talk about how it’s taken me seven years to get the self-help part of my ‘Breaking Radio Silence’ project and to find the link from the past to the present in my ‘Stand or Fall’ project. I’ve been reluctant to talk about both books simply because I was afraid of some busybody butthole coming at me demanding an explanation as to why it’s taken me so long. It’s taken me so long to get to where I’m at for two reasons:

One, I wasn’t having conversations with myself back then like I am now. And two, I was working on an idea and like I said earlier in this piece, NOTHING STARTS OUT WHOLE AND TOGETHER. I put that in caps because I want every writer reading this to understand that and accept that and tell anyone who doesn’t understand that and acts like a butthole about it to fuck off. Some things come together in a day, and some take a hell of a lot longer than that.

You’re not an imposter if you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re human if you don’t know what you’re doing all the time. And it’s more than okay to be human, flawed, and not have all the knowledge at one time. Most of all, it’s okay to stand up to some demanding, ignorant asshole, even if it’s just an echo in your mind, and say ‘fuck off’. The best piece of advice I can give here is work through this feeling of being an imposter to the truth of who you are and what you’re doing and learning how to do it. Most people never really attempt anything like writing a book or learn anything that can’t be spoon-fed to them.

And like my father used to say, most people need to be told what to do and how to do it. If you’re a creative person, that definitely doesn’t apply to you.

Stand or Fall – Accountability

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When I first came up with the idea that would become this book, ‘Stand or Fall’, I had one burning question in my mind: how in the hell did we get to this point in time? The point in time in question was the US Presidential Election in November 2016 when a racist demagogue was elected President and just a tad over four years later tried to engineer a coup and take over the country when his scheme to steal the election in 2020 failed (yes, I’m talking about Donald Trump but I hate saying that bastard’s name and typing it, too). In the seven years since he first landed in Washington DC like the giant turd he is and always will be, I’ve been trying to figure out why so damn many people willingly embraced his brand of shit.

A couple of weeks ago when Trump was indicted yet again (this time in Georgia for trying to organize a criminal enterprise to steal the election there), one word kept coming up: accountability. That word was coming up because it looked like he and his fellow thugs were being held accountable for their crimes. Word is more indictments are coming down and every attempt so far to delay the trials for what he’s been indicted for have failed. And although he’s still the front-runner for the Republican Presidential Nomination, he may be running from prison before he’s finished.

But the bigger question isn’t why it’s taken so long for him to be indicted, but why has it been such a battle to begin with?

The answer to that question for me goes back forty-nine years, to August of 1974 when President Gerald Ford pardoned former President Richard Nixon for his crimes and effectively let that bastard get away with what he did. This in turn empowered the right-wing Republican establishment to continue their backlash and fight against civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and to wreck our economy with forty years of trickle-down bullshit. It’s what gave us the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1980, Iran-Contra in the 80’s, the bullshit impeachment of Bill Clinton, then that was followed by George Bush, Junior and his war-mongers who brought us Iraq and Afghanistan, and in turn, after a brief respite under Obama, the right-wing American Nazi-monster and Russian ass-kisser that is Trump along with the Republican Party, the conservative political establishment, and the American Nazi movement now re-labeled as White Christian Nationalism.

It wasn’t just one event that changed history for the worst because prior to Nixon’s resignation the Republican Party was already making the turn to right-wing conservative fascist extremism with the ‘Southern Strategy’ followed by Reagan’s ‘welfare queens’, Roger Ailes ‘Willie Horton’ campaign, and of course, the conservative take-over of talk-radio and the rise of Fox News courtesy of Reagan taking the “Fairness Doctrine’ away from America. This culminated in the sale of a lie called the invasion of Iraq and twenty years in Afghanistan when a sitting US President (yes, I’m talking about Trump), wanted to negotiate with terrorists called the Taliban at Camp David here in the US and of course, Trump sucking up to a Russian dictator-monster. In addition to all this shit, let’s add Trump calling right-wing terrorists in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 ‘very fine people’, and then in 2020 telling right-wing terrorists like The Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by’.

My late father was an avowed hater of Richard Nixon and yes, I thought some of it was just rage-induced paranoia. But now I think a lot of it was because Nixon wasn’t held accountable for his crimes and that in turn led to even more shit. My rage against Trump and his fellow thugs is similar to my dad’s Nixon-rage but mine is worse because of what Trump and his thugs have done to this country. My only consolation is that with every indictment that comes down, and every attempt to delay or bullshit his way out fails miserably, I feel like he will be held accountable and maybe, just maybe, our country will begin to heal.

And to anyone reading this (and congratulations for making it this far) who voted for Trump and company, I just want to say yet again, ask yourself why and keep asking until you find all the answers you can. But as always I’ll warn you that you might not like the answers you find and sooner or later you’ll have to deal with them. To those of us who stand opposite you, we know we can’t back down ever again, and that there always has to be accountability.

I will freely admit here that in the last two years I was worried that there would be no accountability, that the calls to forgive and move on would be too damn loud. But then I learned how slowly the wheels of justice turn and how difficult and complex these cases are, and most of all, there is no margin for error in cases of high crimes. Most of all, I believe there are more people in this country who can see where the mistakes were made and aren’t going to let those mistakes be repeated.

My father always said democracy was a fragile thing, and he was right. But with enough determination and courage, it won’t be so fragile in the future.

Breaking Radio Silence – The Self-Help Part of the Book

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Seven years ago when I came up with the idea that would become ‘Breaking Radio Silence’, I labeled the original file “Untitled Self-Help/Memoire Hybrid”. At that time, I had a vague idea of using short anecdote-like stories, the memoire part if you will, followed by a brief summation of what I’d learned from those stories and that in turn would be the ‘self-help’ part. But even then I knew this wasn’t exactly what self-help is because to me, self-help is learning how to think through things and work to find solutions. Yet I didn’t know how to do that or even how to go about it, and that was simply because I didn’t know back then I needed to unpack a lot of crap and break the silence I had packed all that crap away in. Doing that involved asking questions or dealing with questions that kept coming up, working through answers no matter how painful or difficult to deal with, making changes and accepting the change in myself, and most of all, finding a way to heal my wounds and get on with my life.

A couple of weeks or so, I asked myself yet again why I hadn’t been able to get this book going. Right after I asked that question, four words came to me:

Questions, Answers, Changes, Healing

Yes, that was a lightbulb moment for me because there was the ‘self-help’ part of the book I was looking for. The ‘self-help’ part of the book is how I wanted to frame the memoire parts of the book to create a way to help people work through their own stuff instead of digging out of the avalanche like I’ve been doing for so long. I want people to be able to unpack things in an organized way instead of just dealing with whatever boxes fall on your head like I did. Yet as soon as I had this thought another slammed right into me: why didn’t I think of this before?

Seven years ago, the initial plan to use writing to figure out why I thought and felt the way I did in order to learn how to make better choices in life sounded very simple and easy to do. I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again here: I didn’t realize I needed to learn how to heal my own wounds. The ‘healing’ part of the quartet of words was missing seven years ago and therefore I didn’t have the key component of the ‘self-help’ part, which was healing.

Then when I wanted to write a blog post about this discovery and the fact that I feel like I can get into this book once and for all, I was paralyzed with fear and terror when an old wound reopened suddenly. The wound that reopened was when I had to deal with being put on the spot and expected to be perfect and all-knowing, then was treated like a complete failure and shit all over when I showed that I was human and not all-knowing. Because I can think pretty fast on my feet and that I learned very early on in life how to quickly assess a situation and deal with it, there have been people who just assumed I learned at an exponential rate and or that I should be able to rapidly recall what I need. Or more bluntly put, I felt like I was an asshole-magnet almost any time I opened mouth or attempted to do something without having all the tools and knowledge at hand.

For the last seven years, I’ve dealt with the thought of what if someone comes at me with that kind of on-the-spot demanding bullshit. First, no one has and I don’t know why and honestly don’t give a shit either. I’m grateful I haven’t had to deal with that kind of demanding, on-the-spot bullshit in years and I think me posting here multiple times that if someone did pull that crap I’d skip over every ‘are you kidding me’ response and go straight to ‘fuck off’. And if you’ve ever done that demanding on-the-spot bullshit, as I have in the past a few times to my everlasting regret, give yourself a hard kick in the ass to remind yourself never to do it again.

In the meantime, it’s okay to ask questions, even if you’re not exactly sure what to ask or how to ask. You can also come back to the questions that keep coming up because every question has an answer. The answers are the hard part because there are a lot of times when you won’t like what you find and once you find it, you can’t just put it back and erase it from your mind. But what you can do is make changes based on that knowledge with time and practice because the mind imprints stuff through repetition or an intense event. Finally, once you change the programming or imprinting so to speak, then healing can begin. Healing also happens when you remove razor-sharp talons from your mind, heart, and soul, burn them to ash, then clean and stitch your wounds close and put a bandage over it.

My father used to tell me wounds only heal over with scar tissue and from time to time that scar tissue thins out and sometimes it thins out completely and the wound reopens. But each time that happens you learn how to deal with it better. Each experience matters and it just adds to your store of knowledge. You’ll never have all the answers, but then no one has all the answers even if they lie and say they do.

Questions, Answers, Changes, Healing: the self-help part of this book

Sunday Thoughts and Inspiration – You’re Not An Imposter

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Imposter syndrome is when someone feels like they don’t really know what they’re doing even if they’re doing something right or being successful at something. I felt like an imposter so much that I couldn’t say that out loud or admit it to myself until now. But in reality, I’m not an imposter and if you know and freely admit that you don’t know everything and the price of it, you’re not an imposter either. You’re human, and you’re okay.

When I turned forty a little over nine years ago, I told myself back then, “You’re not doing so bad after all.” Back then I had a job I hadn’t learned how to hate, a nice little apartment, a paid-off car, pets, and I felt like I was smart, sensible, and most of all, a nice adult. But I was also denying myself so much and thought that was okay because as long as the surface looked good that denial didn’t matter. What I didn’t know was this: my mind decided that since I seemed to be in a good place it was time to start unpacking all the stuff I’d put away for so long.

Since then, I’ve been unpacking and dealing with things yet there has always been this persistent thought: why now and not back then? Because back then we weren’t having the conversations like we are now, and we didn’t have the knowledge and experiences we have to draw on now. And anyone who can’t accept this or understand it can fuck off and take your uptight, judgmental bullshit and shove it up your ass. For way too long, I’ve been afraid of dealing with that question of why now and not back then because I felt like I’d be accused of being an imposter, or that I was living a lie, both of which aren’t true for me, or for anyone else.

Ever since I started this journey as I call it and in the time I’ve gone public with it like I have here for example, I’ve been waiting for someone to come at me and spew all the bullshit I heard in my past. I was waiting for someone to come along and read me the riot act and demand to know why now instead of back then. I’ve said if that ever happened I wouldn’t give in to that demand and instead I’d just say, ‘fuck off’. In reality, I think those types of people have moved on from me and if so, I wish them all the best, and I don’t mean that sarcastically either. I honestly hope people have moved on from that kind of uptight, judgmental bullshit and are just trying to live their lives the best they can. In the meantime, I want to talk to my readers here who are unpacking things like I still am even after all these years.

First, you weren’t an imposter, or living a lie in the past. You were doing the best you could with what you had to work with and over time things changed, and in some worst cases, your world got kicked out from under you. You’re not an imposter if you admit that you don’t always know what you’re doing, or how to deal with something in a productive way.

I keep coming back to a phrase that came to me in April 2015: “Everyone else is just as full of shit as I am, but that doesn’t make me a bad person.” I’ve circled back to this phrase so many times because it’s a reminder that no one has their shit together all the time even if they say they do. Yet these shit-heads are often the loudest people in the room and the most demanding, and too many of us try to appease these bastards instead of telling them to ‘fuck off’ and walking away. You can walk away without a ‘fuck off’ and do just fine and get on with your life without them. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and it’s because I’ve been butting up against my version of imposter syndrome until I found the words to unpack it and work it out. It’s a piece of a puzzle I’ve been trying to fit together for a long time now and now that I have it, I’ve got a part of the map I’ve been missing.

This missing piece of the map as I call it here refers mainly to my writing projects and is the answer to why I haven’t been able to get any real traction on them. As you’ll find out in this week’s blog entries, I’ve been looking for key components for a long time and was silent about it simply because I was afraid of a demanding ignorant voice that either won’t come to me, or one that I can simply say ‘fuck off’ to. Because with writing, like a lot of things in life, nothing comes fully assembled or with all the parts and tools in the box. Sometimes you have to go out and look for things and sometimes, you might know exactly what you’re looking for until you find it.

But finally, you’re not an imposter or a liar if you still haven’t found what you’re looking for sometimes (yes, cue U2 here 😊) And you weren’t an imposter in the past when on the surface it looked like you had your shit together before it fell apart or if your world was kicked out from under you. And most of all, practice saying ‘fuck off’ as often as I have here because trust me, it helps beat back those thoughts of being an imposter, a liar, or that you’re not good enough, don’t know enough, or can’t figure things out. You will figure things out eventually, just not all at one time.

Conversations From the Road – Observations and Such: Work, Life, and Bosses

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Observations and Such is a new weekly feature in which I talk about something I’ve been reading about, talking about with my passengers, or just thinking about in general.

One time my father said to me: “Most people have to be told when to show up, what to do, and how to do it. You’re not one of them.” Looking back, I think he left off the last sentence, “And I’m curious to see how long you’re going to last in this corporate rat race you’re in.”

My answer to that last unspoken sentence would have been seventeen years, give or take. I left my last corporate call-center job at the end of May 2016 and I still have no regrets about doing that. Not just because I kept myself from blowing my back out, or getting ‘managed out the door’, but because I had the courage to walk away from something that wasn’t good for me anymore. And I’m sure some asshole would say I’m an idiot because I’ve been busted down to almost nothing but I will say what I’ve lost materially I’ve gained in knowledge that no one, not even the meanest asshole in the world, can ever take away from me.

In my former life in call-center Hell as I call it, the worst part wasn’t getting yelled at over the phone by people because that was just part of the job description, but dealing with management that would fight you with everything they had against any improvement, no matter how small or cheap, that would make life easier for you. Most managers or bosses that I had in call-center Hell were one of the following: competent and caring, incompetent and so entitled they honestly believed they weren’t incompetent, or incompetent and cruel. The first type was rare and special, and these are people I still owe favors to if they ever came to me for one. The other two, incompetent and entitled, and incompetent and cruel are ones I wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire.

The last two types of bosses are really starting to run scared these days because of two things: no one wants to come back to an office and work in a windowless cubicle with some moronic and or sadistic jerk micromanaging them all day long, and because people are standing up to them and calling out their bullshit, like the writers and actors in Hollywood on strike. Basically, these people have done nothing but sit on their lazy, good-for-nothing asses spouting bullshit, and watched people do their jobs while they seethe with envy that turns to sadism because they’re too damn stupid and entitled to do any real work themselves.

For the last seven years I’ve worked mostly for algorithms and frankly, I like those algorithms better than most of the humans I worked under simply because as long as I hit a set of basic metrics as high as I do, I’m left alone to do my job. Is the algorithm perfect? Hell, no but then nothing is and anyone who says otherwise is an idiot and a major asshole. But what I’ve learned most from working for an algorithm and myself is that I’m a lot better at what I do than I ever thought I was before. Before 2016, I used to think I was never good enough and that anytime I made a mistake it wiped out all the good I ever did. Now I know that’s complete and utter fucking bullshit and I will never believe that about myself ever again.

This incompetent, never-good-enough bullshit mentality from corporate management types as I’ll call them here gave us the huge fuck-up of trickle-down economics, conservative fake Christianity, graft and corruption at the highest levels of government (which culminated in the mugshot of the century of the former President), and worst of all, American Nazism. And since 2020, the rest of us have been cleaning up the messes these bastards have left us with and we’re just walking away from them. Because the reason they’re shitting their pants on a daily basis and acting like the dumb assholes they are is because people are leaving them on the sidelines and not listening to their bullshit, especially young people, God bless them all.

In the last six years I’ve said that of all the bosses I ever had that I’m my absolute favorite. I’m my favorite boss because I freely admit I don’t know everything all the time and that’s okay, that I am good enough even when shit happens and I have to deal with that. I’m also my favorite boss because if I do make a mistake, it’s not the end of the world. And because of this, and the fact that I’ve been out of the corporate rat race for so long, I’ll never go back to a nine-to-five gig even if it was offered to me one-hundred percent remotely.

Most of all, I know I can pull myself up to where I want to be. I’ve been treading water for so long I can do it without thinking about it. But I also know I can think, work things out for myself, and walk away and stay away from ignorant assholes because the biggest lesson I’ve learned in the last few years is this: I don’t need to manage people or their feelings, or manage their mental and emotional hemorrhoids. I can focus on taking care of myself and doing what I want to do and that it’s okay that I don’t have my shit together 24/7 or even screw up once in a while. And a lot of other people think and feel the same way so to all of us that do:

We got this.

Conversations From the Road – No Approval Needed (or required)

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I’m not writing this as an apology or an explanation either. I’m just writing it because I can and this is my blog and I’ll do whatever I want with it (in tribute to the late great Lesley Gore with that one).

I’ve always welcomed silence and quiet space and have never wanted to run from it. The problem has always been sooner or later anxious, busybody-asshole voices intrude loudly on that silence and I get knocked on my ass because of their incredibly-annoying noise. But now I realize I’m not feeling any fear from them anymore like I have for so long.

A couple of days ago I asked myself yet again why I let my blog here go silent and not just because of fatigue and being on the road as much as I have been (summer is actually a slow time for a lot of Uber drivers because of over-capacity on the driver-side and not enough rides to balance that out properly). The first answer that came to my mind was this: I was afraid of being accused of being holier-than-thou perfect in what I write here. Then I went: really? Honestly, I don’t give a shit if someone comes at me with that because I’m not perfect and I am very upfront with my flaws and stupidity.

This past week I made a breakthrough on something I’ve been dancing around since I started this whole crazy-ass writing project back in 2016: I’ve talked about how I denied myself a lot of things though I haven’t really disclosed the extent of those denials because I didn’t want to come off like I was blaming everyone else for them. I’m not blaming anyone for my decisions I made in the past, including denying myself so many things and experiences. I’ve had to work through a lot of shame and guilt, but also understand my mindset back then and that I made decisions based on what I had to work with back then, too. And yes, I’ve come to realize those denials may have been the right thing to do then because of various situations I was in.

I can’t go back and change the past but what I can do is this: move forward and create new experiences for myself. Most of all, I don’t need anyone’s approval to do so because I’m NOT going to go out and break the law, break shit, or break people or do anything bad. Because the biggest thing holding me back was thinking I’d get shit for not doing anything wrong like I did in the past. Now I know I don’t have to deny myself because I can stand up to anyone if they ever try to pull that shit on me again. I’ve put that ball firmly in their court for them to deal with and am moving on now and forever.

Sometimes you don’t realize you’re healing until you take a deep breath and realize there’s not a huge weight sitting on your chest, or that huge weight on your shoulders is gone. It’s also responding every time a stupid thought comes into your mind like, ‘what will someone think if I do this or that?’ with a head-tilt to the side followed by ‘Really?’. Then if someone wants to make a meal out of that I’ll stop them cold with: “What in the ever-loving fuck are you talking about? And why should I care when I’m not doing anything wrong here.” Now I know if I ever get the opportunity to get up in someone’s face like that I’m going to knock them on their ass. And I think a lot of busybody, thoughtless, careless morons are starting to realize that and are keeping their mouths shut, which is a damn good thing. For the rest of us, it means we can get on with our lives.

All this in turn led to me finally making a breakthrough on the self-help part of my ‘Breaking Radio Silence’ project. Since I started that project, I haven’t been able to figure out how to write the self-help part of the book’s subtitle and it was starting to frustrate me. Now I know I’ve got the basic structure: questions, answers, changes, healing.

Finally, a thought that really made me smile this past week was this: there are endless possibilities in this world. I won’t be able to find all of them or even achieve all the goals of any of those possibilities I reach but it’s enough to know they’re out there. There are no guarantees in life as I’ve known all along but you can seek out and explore and experience things yet again without asking for, or needing anyone’s bullshit-approval.

I still don’t have the amount of time I’d like to have to write but I’m going to make the most of what I do have. The blog is coming back online and the rest of the site is getting a slight clean-up in the meantime. Hope you like it and although I’ve enjoyed the silence, it’s time to get back on the road.